🚨 Kolektiva.social SECURITY ALERT 🚨
This is an alert for Kolektiva.social users. Please read this post in its entirety!
In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social's admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an *unencrypted* state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.
The database is the heart of a Mastodon server. A database copy such as the one seized may include any of the following user data, in this case up to date as of early May 2023:
- User account information like the e-mail address associated with your account, your followers and follows, etc.
- All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, *and direct ("DMs")*.
- Possibly IP addresses associated with your account - IP addresses on Kolektiva.social are logged for 3 days and then deleted, so IP addresses from any logins in the 3 days prior to the database backup date would be included.
- A hashed ("encrypted") version of your password.
🚨 👉 As a precaution we highly recommend that all users on Kolektiva.social *change their password immediately* to a new, unique, and strong password.
We sincerely apologize to all our users and regret this breach. In hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to leave a copy of the database in an unencrypted state. Unfortunately, what would otherwise have been a small mistake happened to coincide with a raid, due to bad luck and spectacularly bad timing.
We understand that our users and other people on the Fediverse will have a lot of questions. We will try to answer them as best we can, but please be patient and bear in mind that we may be overwhelmed with messages, and may be delayed in responding or unable to provide answers to certain questions for legal or technical reasons. As a security culture reminder, it can be extremely harmful to the individuals charged and to our community to openly speculate on the Internet about alleged criminal activity or about what law enforcement may be able to do with seized data. Our present awareness is that the seized Kolektiva data is unrelated to the federal investigation and prosecution and we are exploring legal avenues to have the seized data returned and copies destroyed.
Thank you for your understanding and solidarity 
👇 Please see our replies to this post for additional information (1/?) 👇
@JoshuaACasey @admin have you been living under a rock? America has one of the worst track records of arresting protesters and putting its jackboot down on civil rights in the world. They raided an office of people in Atlanta *raising money for bail for protesters* and arrested them all on some bullshit money laundering charge.
The cops responded to protests against police brutality in 2020 with *even more police brutality*.
There is no such thing as the first amendment. There is no such thing as free speech. Not in America. It has all been criminalized. Just because you've been told your whole life that the Bill of Rights can't just be ignored and that the government can't use jackbooted thugs to stomp all over those rights doesn't mean it is true.
I suspect that over the next few years Democrats and Republicans - in the spirit of "bipartisanship" - are just gonna abolish the Bill of Rights since not a single one of them is actually granted to the people anyhow
@CosmicTrigger @JoshuaACasey @admin The fact that cops responded to "can ya not brutalise the very people you're sworn to protect?" by brutalising said people, then DARVOing and blaming those people for the brutality is just peak US.
@JoshuaACasey Please look up the 1971 May Day protests, in which 12,000 people were arrested for camping with a permit and planning a protest. It was the largest mass arrest in American history.
And when you do, keep in mind that anything a Nixon administration official said about it later was an attempt to downplay their full cooperation with it at the time.
@JoshuaACasey @admin confidently incorrect
@admin @JoshuaACasey See laws relating to unlawful assembly, critical infrastructure, and disturbing the peace. those are the ones *meant* to be used on protests.
Ofc they'll weaponize anything though. Some of the worst uses of the law can be seen in Minnesota w/ the Stop Line 3 protests.
State based laws: https://www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/?location=&status=enacted&issue=6&date=&type=legislative
Wrt the FBI, plenty of info in mainstream sources has come out about their anti-protest actions (both legally and extra-legally). Talk to anyone regularly involved in protest organizing, and they won't be shocked about arrests for using their "first amendment protections."
The FBI regularly arrests people for legal behavior. Do you not remember the black van snatches of legal protesters (and sometimes people just walking by protesters) under Trump's admin?
See also: the illegal arrests of international and non-white scholars on espionage charges that are eventually dropped, for First Amendment protected sharing of academic research not tied to, or protected by, National Security embargos on dissemination. Xiaoxing Xi comes to mind.
@JoshuaACasey @admin
> Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.
pretty clear that the protest itself wasn't the reason. They also asked not to discuss the detail as it's unrelated