That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.
It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.
And my experience was in Australia, so the "decline of policing" has well and truly reached out shores as well.
To possibly make this even more frustrating, when I was told I could pick up my gear, the detective in charge said that a few things they found flagged as suspicious:
1. I had / used virtual machines
2. I had "Tor" on my computer(s)
3. I had downloaded stuff from Megaupload
Now I'm not entirely sure whether these comments were based on what they found on my seized gear, or whether these were actually sufficient 'red flags' to make them think the warrant was justified initially, but, my god, how completely out of their depth, and therefore totally unqualified, they are to make life-changing adjudications about these things - and that their access to metadata only makes it more likely that they'll make false positive mistakes (which is just terrible for society overall).
I'm literally not sure what they meant by saying "you have tor on your computer", whether there's evidence of my having visited the dark web, or just having a (way outdated) copy of the tor browser saved somewhere.
And I think the only things I'd ever downloaded from Megaupload were Android ROMs.
Regarding Virtual Machines: I can't even... they're obviously non-technical so couldn't possibly understand, and yet... gah, I can't even...
This is extremely concerning. I was reading this thread thinking thank god this could only happen in the US.
My concern is around the sequence of events that needed to take place for this to happen to you. Also as a former network operator I want to know how laws like the data retention act, identify and disrupt, etc play a role in these situations - ie who triggered what. I think I’ll review your comment history.
Sounds like you have handled it in about as healthy manner as one could hope. I saw that as a compliment.
My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.