Heavy Handed

Can the FBI bring finesse to a solve a minor situation? Apparently not.

A doctorate student who is studying computer security read about a long known flaw in airport security. It has long been known that people can make fake boarding passes. So what does the guy do? He proves the theory and sets up a web page with script so that anyone can use it.

He puts a link to it on his blog and gets all sorts of publicity. The FBI came by and ordered him to take it down. By the time he could get somewhere to do it the government had already killed the site.

Okay, up to this point the reaction is proportionate.

The next thing the FBI did was raid the student's house in the middle of the night. The student was spending the night elsewhere so he doesn't know when it happened exactly (the FBI broke in), but the warrant was signed at 2 am. They took all the computers in the apartment and tossed the apartment.

Why? Is this guy such a terrible threat that the FBI needed to hit his house at night? Aren't there drug dealers or others (ooh, say real terrorists) for which they could reserve that tactic? Granted, the kid could have destroyed "evidence" (it's not like he denied doing this) but if he were going to do that he could have easily destroyed all his hard drives between the 7 pm when they let him go and the post 2 am raid. If there was going to be evidence it would have been there when they dropped by the next afternoon.