From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tells his story
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That's scary. I'm supposed to police my employers actions? To some extent I can understand, but that puts a lot of IT people in awkward positions. Do Dropbox employees need to worry that infringing content is being taken down fast enough, lest the face prosecution?
I didn't follow Megaupload too closely, so I hope I'm blowing this out of proportion...
Not as long a Dropbox doesn't offend the wrong people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
Not that I disagree with what Megaupload was, but "they paid me to help, and I didn't ask any questions" is about the worst excuse in the world.
edit: to be super-clear, if you're participating in Megaupload, you're participating in Megaupload. It isn't just the CEO who is taking a stand against copyright (or for private communication, or whatever), you are too. Also, you should be prepared that people generally aren't sympathetic to moral stances that are personally lucrative, especially at the expense of others. This is because people lie for money.
But there are lots of companies that break the law so blatantly that their employees cannot claim to be ignorant. For instance, if I were an employee of Uber, I would be very careful traveling and would take every opportunity to hide the identity of my employer, especially if I were going some place where Uber was particularly irreverent of the local laws when trying to enter the market.
And then, when things do work out, these 'entrepreneurs' are the ones who boast about how they overcame adversity in the face of impossible odds.
Now I understand why Donald Trump is so popular in the US. People just lost all faith in the system; so they might as well get some entertainment out of it.
"Like Dotcom, Nõmm next spent a significant amount of time fighting extradition. But eventually in 2015, he voluntarily traveled to the US and was arrested in Virginia."
That's my theory too, and US is not the only Western country where this seems to be happening. Voter turnout is falling across the whole Western world, and a big part of it is probably people realizing politics is a circus, and not wanting to touch it with a ten-foot pole. When every choice is equally bad, and you'll have to find your way around the problems by yourself anyway, what's the point of even caring about the political scene? Getting some laugh at its expense is about the best use one can find.
go check out 8chan or /r/the_donald on reddit sometime if you think I'm joking.
https://mopo24.de/nachrichten/razzia-grossaufgebot-polizei-s...
http://www.heise.de/forum/c-t/Kommentare-zu-c-t-Artikeln/Int...
http://onlinedatingsoundbarrier.blogspot.de/2016/06/fraud-wi...
What's the thought process behind documenting the illegal activities in email threads? It makes you wonder if they honestly thought they were just developing test bots for QA purposes.
Any country can charge anyone as long as its laws say it has standing to do so. Having your citizens harmed is a common reason.
Yes, there are international agreements regarding copyright infringement and regarding extraditions in general. In general (and again, IANAL) I think it's common for a country to accept to extradite someone if the alleged crime is also considered a crime locally.
I have no idea regarding the latter question :)
This Australian never been to USA. After doing a similar piracy outfit, they got extradited to USA and prosecuted, jailed. Then when released they got jailed again for being an illegal alien, then deported and banned from USA. I wish I was kidding.
The extradition is legal for a few reasons:
+ Must be a crime in both countries
+ Must be a large jail sentence (Due to the excessive copyright penalties, this one is easy)
+ Must be authorised by the attorney general. The Australian government has the choice not to give up one of their citizens, but in this case they chose to do so.
I've never understood why people say things like this.
The USA is supposed to be a developed country, and supposed to be at or near the very best.
What do you have to gain by comparing it to undeveloped countries that are clearly not in the same league?
For example, you just said: Sure, my pro baseball team finishes bottom of the ladder every year, but it's clearly better than all the highschool teams out there. - I sure as hell hope so!
Compare the USA to all the developed countries, aspire for better, and work towards improvement.
I realized a massive high school being built in my (then) home town had an architecture based on prison design. Not only were prisons a political innovation, but they had a lot to do with how architecture developed.
Why do you think that?
You'd be surprised. Most western countries, for example, are far better.
And for all countries in general, including the most backwards ones, the overall system is quite better for their citizens, in the sense that the US is (by a large margin) the king of incarcerations. 4% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's inmates.
Then there's those medieval ideas like the "death penalty" which almost all the modern world has abandoned.
And going after the IT staff is pretty awful. Generally speaking, we're just there to make it work. While I make a point to work jobs and clients I think do good work and are moral entities, the reality is, IT doesn't generally decide what a company does or what messes they get themselves involved with.
You and many Americans. Helpfully aided in that belief by TV programs like Beyond Borders where US authorities act as the World Police jumping into other countries and taking over investigations and rescuing US citizens from any and every scrape they get themselves into.
Outside your own country, your local authorities have very little ability to do much and certainly won't help you in any relatively minor scrapes (nor in most major ones either). Although the US exerts more external influence than it really should, that's limited to guarding US interests (like copyright protection or drug related things).
Unless you happen to be key to US national interest, you'll be on your own, apart from a visit in prison from the embassy staff to let you know that they know you're there - just like the citizens of every other country, as Andrew Nõmm found out.
Oh, they have the ability, c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Perdicaris#Perdicaris_inci... (threat of war if an American citizen were not released) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins'_Ear (war over abuse of an English subject) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars (wars to prevent enslavement of American sailors).
'Release our citizen or we start shelling' can be a very effective diplomatic tool. It's just that they normally don't bother.
And there were still "national interest"/"political" reasons in most of them.
But IT helps the company do what it decided to do (not that I think Megaupload did something bad).
Stewart BrandNitpick: The FBI confirmed that according to their opinion one piece of evidence was a fake.
Throughout three decades of US hearings, an extradition, a death sentence followed by acquittal in Israel, a deportation and now a trial in Munich, the arguments have relied heavily on the photo ID from an SS training camp that indicates Demjanjuk was sent to Sobibor.
Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by Demjanjuk's defense attorneys. However, the FBI report provides the first known confirmation that American investigators had similar doubts.
Where did the FBI confirm his innocence?
In 2011 the Associated Press had uncovered a secret 1985 FBI report which indicated that a Nazi ID card showing that Demjanjuk had served as a death camp guard was a Soviet-made fake.
He survived the ordeal, and volunteered to be sent to the Trawniki concentration camp division utilized for the training Hiwi guards recruited from Soviet POWs
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/04/fbi_secret_repor...
https://www.google.com/search?q=FBI+thought+Demjanjuk+eviden...
The terrible part is that Kim Dotcom has been able to avoid jail for the same crime this guy committed just because he has the money to fight.
If someone told me to build some filesharing software and give it to them, making me responsible for the content is absurd. Its basically the legal equivalent of holding Dropbox developers responsible for piracy.
The only difference is Megaupload was public and blatant enough in English-speaking media (of which the programmer was not a native speaker) for Americans to say "Yes, he should have known what it is for."
> I also had to sign my name to all of the evidence that had already been collected—for example, to the fact that Megaupload ignored complaints from time to time and did not remove illegal content fast enough. If anyone had any doubts about a file, Kim always calmed them down and said there was nothing to worry about.
Do we know it was actually illegal in the country he resided?
As far as I'm aware, the reason he had to be brought to the US was he was within the law in his home country.
They will send a consular to make sure you aren't being mistreated while being detained. They will give you a list of english speaking attorneys you can retain for your trial. They may even call your family back home to wire money to your english speaking trial lawyer.
That is about all the help you will get. For this "service" you are expected to file taxes to the US no matter where you work.
During the Yemen civil war while every other country was frantically evacuating their citizens the US did nothing. They did issue a warning saying you should probably leave. A lot of US Citizens, working in foreign aid, found out exactly how far the US was willing to go, not very far at all. Not like how the movies portrays it at all.
So, in the USA, it can be (incorrectly) argued - by very, very high powered RIAA legal team - that this was aiding and abetting.[1] It's absolutely wrong, but this is the legal world we live in as developers.
yeah the little guy was screwed. we got that from the tittle.
No. No we have not, and it is to our shame.
In sum, he's a total scumbag. I thought he was a cool guy, but now I think otherwise.
What exactly was the claim against this software eng? By this article it almost sounds like the FBI (guided by the copyright mafia) fabricated a case against some defenseless software dev just to gain more leverage on dotcom.
It's really worth studying the history of the FBI. Hoover basically blackmailed people who got in his way long enough for the general culture to get used to the idea - it was stridently opposed for a very long time.
It's a game. Hate the game, not the player.