The authorities apparently got tired of asking and just went in themselves.
Canada-based Windscribe, a VPN provider, just said that one of its European servers has been allegedly seized by Dutch authorities without a warrant. According to the company’s post on X, law enforcement said that they will return it to the service provider after they “fully analyze it.” It’s unclear why law enforcement impounded just a single rack from Windscribe’s cabinet, but the VPN provider said that it only uses RAM disk servers, meaning anyone who would look through the installed SSDs would only find a stock Ubuntu install on it, so the servers shouldn’t hold any trackable data.
Yes but that doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s an accepted practice in the EU. I’m also not so sure it isn’t somehow codified into law, in the US there’s precedents supporting it but IDK about other countries.
The point is that it skirts the law. You can’t really make it illegal because it is a way of subverting legality. If they legally obtain the evidence then it’s legally obtained. If they happened to get to that point through extra-legal means that doesn’t really matter, as long as the end result is legal. Maybe you could argue in court that they only got there because of extra-legal actions, but they can argue the opposite. If this helps them look in the right spot for illegal actions, who’s to say that them looking there couldn’t have happened purely by chance?
You really can make it illegal if there’s the political will to do so, but it’s a hot potato, so the likelihood of of the practice being formally reigned in is unlikely. You make fruit of the poisonous tree absolute and create laws that make illegal search or seizure kill investigations without the possibility of future charges for a given criminal act.
Obviously that would also have practical drawbacks as well, but it is certainly legally possible.