The FBI is just another in the list of bad things that can happen to your servers. Flood, fire, theft, law-enforcement... its all the same thing to a hosted service.
Off site backups, executed masterfully here saves the day.
There are a few services that I run on servers in separate countries. Failure of reasonable rule of law within a single country is a failure mode we consider.
Why not spin up some EC2 instances if your main datacenter fails? You can pay minimal costs to send a diff of your database a couple times a day in order to keep the backup current, and only pay for real bandwidth if your main server goes down. Seems to be a pretty decent backup plan.
Is it possible to insure / sue for careless seizures by government agencies? Pinboard is (probably?) not the one they are after. What recourse do they have?
I believe the current status is: no definitive resolution of whether there should be any compensation required, but, paying compensation is not typically done currently, and no strong precedent requires it, while some precedent holds that it isn't required.
A 2008 post by a libertarian law professor (http://volokh.com/posts/1209706276.shtml) argued that the Takings Clause (which requires compensation if e.g. land is taken to build a highway or military base) should also require the government to pay compensation to innocent third parties inconvenienced or harmed during the course of a criminal investigation. But, that post noted that no high courts had actually held that, and at least one appeals court had just held to the contrary.
This is in the normal case, at least; things would probably be different if it were deemed to be some sort of overt act, e.g. if a police chief orders a raid designed to intentionally damage an innocent third party's interests (and you have evidence to show that).
Even if it were, consider the costs of doing so. You'd have to do a lot of due diligence to acquire the insurance and prove to the insurer you're not high-risk. Then there's the premiums to pay for the policy, plus your legal fees and engineering costs to attempt to prove to your insurance company that an incident was the result of carelessness by law enforcement so that you could collect on your policy. Not to mention the opportunity cost (both short- and long-term) you're hit with from the downtime as well as from all the employee time that is sucked up in an attempt to seek restitution and eventually bring your business back online once things get sorted out.
All those costs would dwarf the cost of building a fault tolerant architecture from the start. Having a distributed architecture protects you from random law enforcement activities, power/communications outages, or even just glitchy hardware. Not only that, but it offers the advantage of built-in scalability should your business exceed your current capacity. Unless you have massive amounts of legacy infrastructure, data, and code which makes it cost prohibitive to migrate, it's really cheap these days to have a proper distributed architecture from the start.
If you can apply the concept of hot pursuit here, they exceeded their reasonable expectations. It'd be the equivalent to running though a block of homes to chase a man through one home. That said even applying hot pursuit is silly, but illustrates how this can be viewed.
Off site backups, executed masterfully here saves the day.
There are a few services that I run on servers in separate countries. Failure of reasonable rule of law within a single country is a failure mode we consider.