Would you risk having your servers seized for someone you know committed a crime? If you do, you make it very easy for competitors to shut you down.
edit: I'm assuming they don't blindly trust the police, but can verify the transactions to the drug site themselves. If that's not the case, making the police get a warrant would be the right thing to do.
If they say "we'll get a warrant anyway", just response "okay, so get the warrant and come back and I'll give you the data". Then at least it's up to a judge to decide where giving out data is warranted, and not up to an oridinary policeman and sysadmin.
All the time? Really?
A warrant possibly means that they go out of business, because the servers are physically seized. If you tell me you'd risk that for a stranger who you can tell probably committed a crime, I don't believe you.
"Gives us the data on these 8 people, or we'll get a warrant for it."
vs.
"Gives us the data on these 8 people, or we'll get a warrant to confiscate all your servers, computers, laptops, and phones."
And getting a warrant is not as large a barrier as people like to believe: https://www.popehat.com/2014/07/15/warrants-bulwark-of-liber...
Is a bit over 20k drug related warrants over 10 years really that much for the country the size of USA with such a drug problem and such an axe to grind with drugs users (war on drugs, private prisons, blacks with crack and teens with weed being juicy targets to boost statistics, etc.)?
Or 1300 warrants and 600 extensions in one fiscal year for a 'black bag job search' across all circuits?
Once you start selectively give out user data, you are basically giving out warrants yourself and acting as a judge.
Do you actually know though? Or is it really just an educated guess?
> why not cooperate and make it easier for everyone?
Because violating privacy isn't supposed to be easy. Those laws exist for a reason.
If it's that easy to get a warrant, why didn't they just go ahead and get the warrant?
Which means bitcoin.de doesn't care about following the law in the first place.
Not a surprise for a company trying to make money off of a pyramid scheme currency.
Say my DigitalOcean VPS hosted in Germany provides a service X which can be subverted for illegal purposes. Will the police have to me to ask for data or can they go to DO and demand access to the data without my knowledge?
I assume that if you want to search/seize somebodies property then you have get a warrant made out the the legal owner of the property. (Obviously you don't have to get a warrant if the owner voluntarily hands out the data...) In your example DO is the legal owner of the server your VPS runs on. I can't see why DO would be required to tell you about it.
I don't know how the owners of data centers play into this. I guess if you have somebody else's property in your possession and the cops have a warrant then you have to hand it to them.
Keep in mind that the actual data on the VPS may be protected by all sorts of privacy laws if, e.g., you run a mail server on it.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the location of the server and the jurisdiction the legal owner is under also play a large role. Also don't forget which jurisdiction you're under. Nobody cares that you've rented a server from a russian company located on the dark side of the moon. In this case they'll probably make the warrant out to you rather than the legal owner. And you'll have to comply.
I'm just asking, not challenging what you're saying.
Is this meant to imply that the legal situation is very different in the Netherlands/France, or that you encrypt everything because it's the same as in Germany?
> The protection of our unscrupulous customers and their bitcoins is more important to us than the protection of the data of offenders.
Another interesseting thing:
> We only issue data from customers to investigating authorities if they can inquire in writing in specific cases and can demonstrate a legitimate interest in specific criminal offenses. This has always been the case from our point of view.
Big question here: So they've done it several times?
We've already seen local cops in Sweden and Denmark track drug dealers through bitcoin. They must have had the cooperation of exchanges and banks to make that happen.
So I expect exchanges to cooperate on the same level that banks cooperate with police.
