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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Look what happened to Kim Dotcom over US copyright at the behest of the corporate content owners: swat team, extradition hearings, the works. The US penalties are greater than murder.

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Yeah, it's insanity. That guy somehow got worse treatment than violent drug traffickers.

As far as I can tell he didn’t do anything illegal either? Same business model as YouTube, which didn’t have any SWAT teams on it.

He wasn't in Russia though, Snowden is in Russia.

Note to self: if I find myself in the crosshairs of the US government, move to Russia.

Not that Snowden leads an open and tremendously free live in Russia. At least that's not what it sounded like in his autobiography.

surprisingly his life is a lot more free and open, than you would imagine, so much that russian politically involved people suspect he has some kind of a deal with KGB(FSB, etc) that he can't talk about.

He wrote that he‘s changing apartments every few months and that he’s always wrapping his face in a scarf as much as possible when going outside. Didn’t sound like a tremendously free and relaxed life. Plus he’s in exile.

Is that different than many celebrities?

I don't understand one thing. Why Germany didn't interfere extradiction? (I assume that he held Germany citizenship)

Because Schmitz was in New Zealand at the time. Not much Germany can do to overturn NZ law. Germany is not the US after all…

Germany could interfere if they wanted to, Kimble just isn’t worth the trouble (few people would be).

There are things you can do, see how Russia is handling these things when their VIPs are targeted for extradition.

Ordinary citizens with no high up political or IC connections never receive any significant state aid in extradition cases no matter what passport they hold. At best your embassy might refer you to a lawyer or help you arrange money transfer from your home country.

Why would they?

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