Kim Dotcom wins right to FBI files | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom wins right to FBI files

stuff.co.nz

157 points69_years_and57 comments

It's shocking to think about the US Government's casual disregard for all the people that used megaupload legitimately, and indeed the FBI's disregard for the provision of documents that would be expected to be pretty much standard in most court cases. After all, the ability to see the evidence being put against you is a basic tenet of the justice system.

It's a stated tenet of most justice systems, but in the US even the justice system is politicized (elected public prosecutors?!), and everything politics touches becomes politics.

US Attorneys (Federal prosecutors) are appointed by the President for 4 year terms. Local State's Attorneys or District Attorneys are usually elected.

If a case is primarily being handled by the FBI, it's generally a Federal case being handled by a US Attorney.

And the President is elected every 4 years, and he is right at the center of political life in US. If the presidents wants to be elected again, we shouldn't be surprised if FBI and other parts of the executive branch are used to improve such odds. I would be more surprised perhaps if they are not used.

Is like some anthropological form of ice-9, but constructed out of flags, money and distilled stupidity.

He could try the 'photocopying defense'.

In certain countries the prosecution has a legally responsibility to provide copies of the evidence to the defendant's legal team within a given time frame and bring the case to court within a second time frame. Individual copies of the evidence for the various interested parties must be provided by the prosecution to the defense team (defendant, legal counsel, barrister, etc).

In cases such as these with overwhelming amounts of 'evidence', a surprisingly effective defensive legal tactic, is for the defendant to request as many copies of all of the evidence as viably and legally possible.

It is then almost impossible for the prosecution to both copy the vast amount of evidence (imagine pages and pages of server logs) in triplicate, and bring the case to court within the allotted time. The copying alone is unfeasible.

If anything this tactic can be used to force a plea bargain (lesser charge etc).

A lawyer would have to confirm whether this would work in NZ.

I imagine the US government could find the people & money to make as many photocopies as necessary. The government runs on paper.

Megaupload has 25 petabytes of data, according to the company complaining about having to host it. There was a company at one time who could put 50KB of binary data on a fax page [1]. 25 petabytes / 50 KB =~ 550 trillion sheets of paper. Heck, let's let them double-side it, so it's only 225 trillion sheets of paper.

Even the United States Federal Government would choke on trying to produce that.

[1]: http://faxauthority.com/3d-fax/

I don't want to go into specific details, but I am aware of this defence being used for real about 10 years ago in a similar kind of case.

Finally we may learn how it's possible what tiny fraction of those tens of petabytes of data (25? I forget) held hostage actually consists of content that the RIAA/MPAA holds rights to (back of the envelope calcs in another thread showed that there's simply not enough Hollywood movies been made to get to 5% of that amount, even if they were all encoded as 10GB BluRay rips--which the majority of movies produced is not available as).

It's the Porn Industry that should be suing for infringement, if anyone.

Even then, given the sheer amount of data stored on MegaUpload, IMO there's actually a fair possibility (though not a given) that at least a significant part of that data does not infringe anything. Copyright-infringing data is a finite resource, There's a huge amount of it, sure, but on the scale of petabytes it's finite and very non-trivial to get such amounts of it. Non-infringing but useful data, however, is still pretty much infinite at that level. There's logs, generated stuff, calculations, measurements, renderings, database backups.

It's guesswork, but I don't think it's improbable either. I'd really love to see a rundown of it, one day. And if it really turns out that a significant part of MegaUpload's data is indeed infringing content owned by the MPAA/RIAA, I'd be really curious to find out what part of my estimates were so wrong.

If I am ever arrested for anything, I hope to make it in to the British, Australian, NZ, or Canadian legal systems.

Britain? Our 'justice' system will extradite anyone (to the US) without blinking an eyelid. To our legal system & government staying on good terms with the US is FAR more important than the rights of the people. The tvshack case is a perfect example of this, and it's terribly sad.

Hurrah for NZ though - excellent comments from the judge regarding the flakey-ness of the FBI's case. I expect this might me a major turning point if, as Dotcom has previously stated, the FBI do in fact have very little evidence (and, as I expect, are simply working for their hollywood based overlords).

You can always find cases of stupid judicial decisions in the UK, like someone convicted for a tweet, or the very harsh punitative sentances given out after the recent riots.

Harsh sentences for rioters is stupid? I know people who live and work in those areas.

I'd argue for the tweeting conviction too. It sent a valuable message about personal responsibility. With the advent of cyber-bullying (awful term) it's a lesson people need to learn.

Harsh sentences for rioters is stupid? I know people who live and work in those areas.

• 4 years conviction for (while drunk) creating a Facebook group calling for a riot in your home town, and then no-body turning up and no riot happening ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/16/facebook-riot-calls... ) is stupid (2 different people were convicted of this).

• 6 months for stealing £3.50 worth of water ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8695988/London-... ) is stupid.

• Several months conviction (later overturned) for accepting a pair of shorts your housemate looted when you were asleep ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/19/riots-mother-looted... ) is stupid.

I'd argue for the tweeting conviction too

I'm talking about the Twitter Joke Trial ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Paul_Chambers ) where Paul Chambers tweeted "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!". He has a criminal conviction and had to pay £1,000. That's silly.

I'm not saying it's all bad, but neither is it all good. As I said, "You can always find cases of stupid judicial decisions in the UK"

An alternative view on sentence stupidity (non riots). Compare to above...

A chapter from my family's life:

£300 fine (no custodial sentence) for a piece of shit punching the shit out of my 25 week pregnant wife and leaving her in hospital for a month, all for a £30 Nokia phone...

It's not sentencing that's the problem with the response to the riots. It's people being punished (e.g. losing council houses) who were not convicted of anything.

Some of the sentencing was also a problem, like the guy who was jailed for the crime of stealing Argos catalogues. (for those who are unaware, like the judge apparently was in that case, Argos catalogues are freely given away)

Disagree wholeheartedly. Anyone who is bothered by a tweet has the option of blocking that person and never hearing from them on that medium ever again.

That right there is why I'm mostly convinced that the entire concept of "cyber bullying" is silly. When you have complete control over who you do and don't have interaction with, if someone says something untoward and disturbing to you, and you just continue to let it happen, the blame is at least partially on you.

In the Twitter case, there's nothing stopping the bully starting a new account and tweeting from that instead, post block. You might have complete control, but a lot of the time it's only after the fact.

There's no way for someone to know if they're blocked or not, though. It's not like Facebook where if you block someone, you are prohibited from interacting with them in any way. You can still send @messages, but the target won't see them. DMs can't be sent unless you're friends.

In Canada, a number of illiberal statues, legal precedents and common-law practices have been struck down over the past 30 years, thanks to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Britain has no such fundamental touchstone of liberty, so your legal rights there are rather murkier.

If you do end up having to wrestle with the law I think you're still better off having it happen in the states. For as many horror stories as you hear there is far more fairly doled out justice. This kind of stuff is shocking to hear about because it's not the norm.

With that line of argument you could only establish that the US has a decent legal system. But how do you go from there to say that the US system is a better deal than those other countries, who might be even better for you?

LOL not Britain.

The legal system here is corrupt as anything.

Berlusconi looks like Jesus compared to most of our political and legal elite.

I don't think so. Just look at the Leveson enquiry holding everyone's feet to the fire.

Leveson is just a rare occasion for political lightweights to get back at the real wheelers & dealers who actually run the country. A few scapegoats will pay (Brooks, Coulson), but the Big Beasts (Murdoch, Cameron's chums and Blair's friends) will remain firmly in charge. It's all a self-serving show for media hacks, the masses don't care one bit -- LibDems, who were less friendly to Murdoch and come out from the enquiry as quite a honest bunch, are being routed at the polls anyway (as they should be, but let's not digress).

That's a farce. Cameron would be locked up by now if they were being I...

You will back transferred to U.S. anyway, many countries has extradition agreement with the states.

Unless it's a racist tweet.

On the flipside, the US isn't too fond of tweets about digging up Madonna and partying in LA. ;)

GOD BLESS THE QUEEN

Our germanic aristocratic overlord has done nothing but agree with the government and watch our rights get removed piecemeal over the last 20 years. I know she's a constitutional monarch but that takes the piss.

I could almost see the glee in here eyes as she ushered in the CCDP at the last speech.

Let's not forget that she is a traitor herself [1].

Edit: if you're going to downvote, tell me why.

[1] She has committed five acts of treason by signing EU treaties that abolish autonomous control of the UK. She is also the only monarch to have broken her Coronation oath for doing so, the irony is that we're now bound to celebrate the Jubillee of a lying monarch.

The queen is not the overlord of the UK, Parliament which is elected by the people, has supreme power, and has the ability to depose the monarch (cf. Glorious Revolution).

Although she "signs laws", it's a rubberstamp approval at that point. The monarch has to sign any law that Parliament makes (there have been wars over this).

The UK/England has been party to international treaties for thousands of years. The EU is not something new and different and there is no reason to call it "treasonous" or "breaking the coronation oath", unless you just don't like the EU and you want to pretend the whole thing doesn't apply.

It was a slightly sarcastic point.

I'd have more respect for her if she was disposed of after standing up for people of her country.

The CCDP is the sort of thing she should have said "screw you hippies" to:

http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Communications_Capabili...

The EU is falling to bits and was destined to from the start. The populous didn't vote it in either, despite the referrendum results. The referrendum was as unfair and biased as every election is.

I'd have more respect for her if she was disposed of after standing up for people of her country.

The Monarch of the UK does not take an oath to defend the people of the UK per se. They only swear to govern the people.

However the monarch must swear to maintain the offical state religion, the Church of England. Would you like if the Queen, upon reading her coronation oath again, were to be strict about that? Goodbye equality law, all other religions are now banned (this used to be the case), no Catholics or Jews allowed to be MPs (this used to be the case), etc. No sane person wants that. Forget about the Queen, she has no power.

Well lets get rid of her then!

I live in a country that did just that (Ireland). :)

There are groups in the UK campaigning for a republic ( http://www.republic.org.uk/)

Good for you :) Thanks for the link!

I find it interesting that people have files hosted in Megaupload that they have no backups for. Really?

There were also files put out by independent software developers, phone modders, etc. that were distributed only via Megaupload. Tons of digital history went down with MU, not just pirated streams of The Sopranos.

I have files in my dropbox for which there are no backups. What's the difference?

Are the copies of the files on your computer in your Dropbox folder not defacto backups?

Actually, I find myself in a position right now where they aren't on my computer. My MBP died, and I left my old job so my comp there was reformatted. I'm using a backup laptop that DB isn't installed on. So, were DB to get shuttered tomorrow, I'd lose everything.

Although yes, that's far from the average case.

I had briefly considered creating a service that would backup your Dropbox, GDrive, and SkyDrive but it seemed to me that because most of the users had the files on their computers locally anyway the idea didn't have a lot of value. That is why I ask.

I wonder if there is a service that will sync a local folder on my PC with more than one cloud service. For example, all my files in a folders are synced with Dropbox, GDrive AND SkyDrive.

I had a backup drive die after the main drive failed in a small enough window that I hadn't moved everything over yet. Very bad day.

Is it just the judge that is so awesome, or the New Zeland justice system in general?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

You should probably take this with a grain of salt, but at least the perception of corruption is very low in NZ.

This isn't the same thing as having a good justice system, but I think it's probably related.

FYI: Judge David Harvey is the author of internet.law.nz and teaches Law & IT at the University of Auckland's Law School.

Note that internet.law.nz is a book, not a website.

http://lawshop.com.au/products/internet_law_nz_3rd_edition-8...

I would like to say NZ system in general, but there are exceptions. Generally though the judiciary is pretty fair and uphold the rights of ordinary folk and are not swayed by 'bigger interests'.

Very few people dispute he was profiting from copyrighted material.

Very few people would make a better villain.

The best way to help the RIAA is to have a Kim Dotcom as your poster boy.

We aim to be civilised. The fact that someone broke the law, whether officially proven or not does not strip them of any protection or rights (well - it does to some extent if they're jailed, but you know what I mean). He has the right to fair justice whether he was profiting from distributing copyrighted material, or not.

No, the best way to help the MafiAA and their ilk is to ignore Dotcom's rights just because he may be a bit sketchy. You're right that nobody will dispute he was profiting from copyright infringement. The emails alone make that case. However, that doesn't mean that the circumstances surrounding his arrest were not incredibly off-putting.

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Miranda was a criminal, and guilty of rape.

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