Law enforcement conducted an extensive raid this morning at the Philadelphia offices of National A-1 (National A-1 is the owner of escorts.com) and local media is reporting that it was conducted in connection to an investigation into a prostitution ring. Additionally, these actions targeted the offices of "help1234.com" (the transaction payment processor for escorts.com) and it was raided simultaneously.
Law enforcement went so far to protect their access to data that they enlisted the assistance of the local fire department and public utilities to cut power to the building and as a result the raid "blacked out" a three city block area for a time - fire safety personnel were on hand to provide assistance to any persons trapped in elevators as a result of the raid and to monitor both public health and fire safety and suppression systems that may have failed during an extended power outage. The ISP (Internet service provider) responsible for providing port (bandwidth) to National A-1 severed all connections (physically, by hand) to National A-1 and their servers prior to the raid at the federal government's (FBI's) request.
The "off the record" comment made by the FBI was that "we did everything we could to protect our ability to mine all of the data from the company's electronic infrastructure [ . . . ] and although their servers were on back-up power, not all of their computers used UPS [uninterrupted power supply] systems and the Internet connection was severed, so they could not delete data prior to the raid without power or Internet access [ . . . ] we physically copied hard drives".
As of approximately 5:30 pm CDT, escorts.com was back online, as were the other sites operated by National A-1 that were taken offline (such as HotMovies.com) as a result of today's raid by federal, state and local law enforcement.
There is a lot of speculation that the Feds are now "running" escorts.com . . . I think it is safe to say that no matter who is in control, the Justice Department is now in possession of every electronic "record" their computers may have held (or may be recoverable from any physical media they may have seized).