Via Slashdot, I have learned this morning that the FBI raided the data centre of Core IP in Dallas. Rumours abound as to why, but that is not so important. Far more important is how.

First, some background. Core IP is a hosting company. Individuals and organizations that want to have a presence on the web will rent server space from them, and they will store the customer's data and presesent it to the world. They also will typically handle the customers' email, and may provide other services involving customer data, some of which may be confidential, some of which may be difficult to replace (even if you do backups: what happens to the customer orders that happened in the 23 hours since the last backup?) etc.

Some 50 organizations are, this morning, deprived of their email and have no web presence as a result of this raid. It is believed that Core IP was raided because of an organization that used to be one of their customers.

Make no mistake: If you make your money off the web, and your server is taken off because your hosting provider got raided, this costs you money.

In many ways, this reminds me of an older, badder federal government of days past.

I suggest that people read the Bruce Sterling book The Hacker Crackdown. You can read it online for free (legally), or, if you prefer the dead-tree edition, it should be possible to get from your favourite bookseller. It is, first and foremost, a history lesson. It is a history that I see, right now, repeating itself.

Especially, look into the case of Steve Jackson Games (SJG). SJG was a book publisher. They published role-playing games in book-form. They used computers to publish books. The ran a bulletin board system (BBS, a pre-Internet computer forum) where people could discuss these books, which, of course, ran on a computer. There was one user of this BBS who was a user of another BBS. Another user of that BBS had done some hacking. This fourth-degree separation got SJG's offices raided, and all their computers removed, including the ones that held the book that was to go to press the next week. It nearly bankrupted them.

This case is worse. It is not just affecting the business of Core IP. It is affecting the business of many innocent parties.

I wish I knew what to tell you about how to gird against this sort of thing, but, if nothing else, I strongly recommend making some noise, because this must not stand!