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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that the megaupload servers weren't paid for after Kim's assets got frozen. Leaseweb was forced to keep the data for the duration of the investigation, and had to eat the losses. My guess is that Leaseweb reached the point where they just want to cut their losses and move on. I highly doubt Leaseweb wiped the Megaupload servers "just because".

This looks like an attempt by Kim to create outrage and bad PR for Leaseweb.

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Disagree.

Let's say you are accused of robbing a convenience store. The police take the security footage, review it, and then erase it. According to everyone that saw the tape, you did it, and perhaps they even retain a few seconds of footage that shows something like a coat that you own.

Would you think it fair that one party gets to use evidence to convict you, that you yourself are not allowed to see, or use for your own defense?

In this case, the videotape also contains a lot of peoples' personal files that they were hoping to get back one day, maybe.

(Pre-emptive edit: I'm not saying the host should have to take losses for this; the investigators should have been responsible for paying for/backing up the 3rd party data.)

More analogy, what if it was one of those storage space services and one customer rented half the storage units to store other people's stuff, then got arrested and no longer paid for the storage units. And the storage units were gold-plated and cooled and cost a fixed amount a minute they're used.

What if the police had to keep the convenience store closed until the trial? I believe that's a more accurate analogy.

The convenience store owner would be furious about the lost business from having to shutter the store for months or years, watching as formerly faithful customers just walk on by.

Leaseweb isn't closed. They just had to store some servers. They could just turn them off, put them in storage, then sue law enforcement or the DOJ equivalent for the opportunity cost and storage costs. That's not an accurate analogy at all.

Turning them off might not be an option. Disks that are encrypted would them become unreadable when turned off.

With which encryption software?

GMemcachePG

Disks that become unreadable when they lose power aren't called disks, they're called RAM.

> then sue law enforcement or the DOJ equivalent for the opportunity cost and storage costs

Does suing the government ever actually work?

(Honest question, I'm not an American and I've only seen people try to sue in high-profile cases like PRISM, which never seems to get them anywhere)

Yes this is done all the time.

Yes, Henry Ford did it in the 1950's to recoup the losses after the Allies bombed his tank making factories in Nazi Germany and Axis controlled territory.

There are certain laws in place to keep people from willy-nilly suing the government, but there are situations where it is possible to sue them and sometimes even win. (not sure about this case in particular, anyone want to weigh in?)

Do you have any source for this trial? I can't seem to find any trace of it when googling. Also Henry Ford died in 1947 and had cerebral issues before that, so if the trial did happen in the 50s it was either brought by his successors or Ford Motor Company.

My mistake, I contributed factually inaccurate information. Thanks for the help!

"1946: Ford sues the allies for damages done to his factories in Dresden during the infamous bombing, and wins compensation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ford_Motor_Company </br> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...

How many servers? How many HDDs? How much of Leaseweb's "digital floorspace" were they unable to use because of this case?

According to this it was 630 servers with pentabytes of data. I'm sure keeping those idle was a significant loss for Leaseweb.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240179/LeaseWeb_wipe...

Not even the servers, just the hard drives. No reason to store anything else, right?

A better (but still not perfect) analogy would have been that the police cordoned off a section of the store and no one was allowed to take anything from or put anything on the shelves. The store is still open and people can shop but can't buy any of the items in the 'special' area.

Without a court order to keep the servers accessible and running they had every right to delete them (since they own the machines). One would think the prosecution would have had that order in place just so the defendant couldn't say there was no way to prove his innocence

Your analogy still does not resolve why only one party in the trial gets to see the evidence in its entirety before it is destroyed.

Why would the defense (i.e. the owner of the data) not have the same opportunity as the prosecution to review their own material?

The only counter-argument that I can see is that Mega should continue paying their hosting bills for as long as the government wants to drag the trial on for. Which very well was a possible intent from the start. In which case, the entire thing seems like a government strong-arm, of which I am not in favor.

My point was to translate the lost opportunity costs of the data storage into more concrete terms. Im not trying to make any legal commentary.

There shouldn't need to be any bad PR for leaseweb.. they need to do what they must do. The bad PR should be for the american operation to shut this down.. now evidence is lost in the case. Of course there doesn't seem to be a real case going, I think they are satisfied with the destruction caused already.

I doubt it. They could've at least give a warning "hey if you don't way us within the next 10 days we're going to delete everything".

I'm sure they expected the backlash, too, if they were going to do it without warning. So this looks like they were forced to do it in some way.

What losses? We talk about data here. The disks used were not available for future business, that are only potential losses, not a further and further amount of high costs piling up. Besides, in which state is it legal to destroy evidence, especially before the trial?

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