On 01/08/2019 16:05, Chris Green wrote:
Martin Brown wrote:
On 01/08/2019 11:36, newshound wrote:
Not answering the above, but on an associated topic there must be many
people, like myself, who do some consultancy work that is wholy
dependent on computers. There's a small but finite chance that innocent
people might get their systems seized and my understanding is that it
may take months or years to get the hardware and data back. In such a
case, they are instantly out of business *unless* they have all their
data backed up in the cloud, in which case it is just a case of buying a
new laptop and carrying on.

It is an interesting question. I would demand carbon copies of the
working drives seized since without them the job stops. I wish them luck
finding anything recognisable in my highly compressed chess databases.

The first thing they should do after seizure is bitwise clone the
original drives so if they make an extra copy at that point I'd be
happy. Annoying to have hardware taken away but not a show stopper.

What about virtual machines? How can the police (or anyone) sieze
them? The *physical* machine is owned by someone else and may even be
in a different country.

See Snowden / Glenn Greenwald. The transmissions are archived.