by Ed Caesar published in The New Yorker
Read original on The New Yorker's website
A group of eccentric technologists buy a bunker in...Show description
Posted 1574 days ago
This story seemed too outlandish to be true. But thinking about the trend in technologists towards an internet free of all government intervention (which isn't necessarily recent, just a common trend), it actually doesn't seem that far fetched.
I personally think that Xennt believed steadfast in his ideals. Did he know there was illicit content? It's likely, but I think that he chose to overlook it in the hope to make his ideals come true.
Towards the end, one of the officers comments made me think. He said "This is no bank heist. It's not like he's a millionaire." When seeing that the hosting only brought in hundreds is thousands of dollars a year, compared to the millions or even billions that are made by the illegal operations that the servers are hosting, it's weird that there would be such a large effort to take them down. It seems to me that maybe the effort would be better focused higher up the ladder.
Xennt, although clearly in the wrong (which he seems to acknowledge), isn't necessarily the root of these things, and it seems like a really small win for enforcement to take it down, compared to what it could do to taking out the roots.