The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.
“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.
I'm actually thinking of cloud storage for this reason. Anyone know a good reliable and affordable cloud provider that's not US-based, and I can pay for like a year in advance? (End to End Encryption doesn't matter since I can just do local encryption.)
Don't store data on other people's computers. Use encryption locally and store an encrypted backup at a friend's house, or in a bank safe if you must.
Friend and Bank safes would be in the US, subject to the US's ICE/Gestspo "civil asset forfeiture". Only foreign cloud storage is safe.
I don't see why "other people's computers" is a problem. Encrypt, then upload.
I understood the worry to be about storage devices being stolen from home. In which case it would be safe at a friend's house. Putting an encryptes backup anywhere online is partially okay, but most people trust their cloud solution software for encryption, which is about as good as sensing your unencrypted data to that company.
Even with encrypted backups the risk is that totalitarian regimes / corporations store data forever. And if your encyption keys ever leak, or the algorithm is broken, you're fucked in retrospect.
That part is true regardless of where you're storing your data.
Nah, if you store them offline, you should ideally know when one of your backups has been stolen. Anything ever stored online is forever in limbo.