this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center (www.techdirt.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We don't know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.

The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.

Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That's why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not automatically the complete solution.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Probably because the government is still illegally spying on citizens and they don't want the specifics to leak out.