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h4x3r
"One officer was employed simply keeping her finger on the laptop's trackpad to make sure it didn't go to sleep. Later, police cyber-specialists would spend many hours examining exactly what was on the two computers."

... cyber-specialists that can't even disable sleep mode ...

cssmoo
If it was the met, this wouldn't surprise me. Unrelated anecdote but a company I worked for was burgled a few years ago but the three desktop PCs were recovered by them. When asked if we wanted the kit back or disposed of (insurance had covered it already) we asked for the systems back so we could dispose of the disks ourselves.

What turned up? Three monitors.

The PC were "disposed of by accident because they didn't know what they were". Hmmm.

mobiuscog
I read it as meaning the officer (non-cyber-specialist) kept it awake until the cyber-specialists arrived...

I wouldn't expect a raid party to know much about technology, other than just keep it 'on'.

DanBC
Or police who know enough to keep machines powered on and not sleeping until the specialists get there.

There are plenty of cases where machines have been powered down and evidence has been lost, so this is probably an improvement.

hga
Exactly. I first bare metaled a machine in 1981 (BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44), so I'm not exactly a noob. I too would keep my finger on the trackpad while reading a book or whatever to keep it alive until the computer forensics specialists arrived. What if that change was booby-trapped?
jquast
During the DrinkOrDie busts of 2001, agents used the computers of those busted to impersonate them to chat with and further identify other members for a 2nd wave of busts.
gwern
Same thing happened in the Ulbricht case - one of the FBI agents was assigned to keep jiggling it after the initial photographs were taken but before the forensics proper started. You'd think that computer crime officers would've developed some better solution than that by now.
acd
Will government arrest itself? As it hacks into computers and hacking is crime. Or does government have a different law than its citizens?
chatmasta
"Companies that provide hosting services to criminals"

...what does that mean exactly?

wongarsu
That could be any hosting service, but I would guess they mean hosting services with an emphasis on privacy, like cyberbunker.com or freedomhosting

Targeting service providers isn't without problems, but with so little information it's hard to judge.

spacemanmatt
Hosting companies that sound like their names might frighten someone who is very ignorant of technology.