New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key announced on September 24 that he has requested an inquiry into illegal spying on Kim Dotcom and other employees of Megaupload by New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, the country's counterpart to the US National Security Agency.
In the third day of a judicial review of the legality of the search of Kim Dotcom's Coatesville mansion earlier this year, Auckland High Court has heard evidence from a member of the Police's Electronic Crime Laboratory (ECL) on Dotcom's ability to destroy digital evidence on his property.
This is crucial to determining the legality of the raid on Dotcom's house, as the Police earlier testified that Dotcom's ability to tamper with potentially incriminating data in part led to the use of helicopters, the Special Tactics Group and Armed Offenders Squad.
With New Zealand authorities trying to overturn a ruling that a raid of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's mansion was illegal, new footage has surfaced showing police storming the home with helicopters, semiautomatic weapons, and attack dogs, despite the fact that police admitted Dotcom posed a "low risk."
Megaupload founder and Hollywood’s most wanted, Kim Dotcom has taken his fight against the US authorities to new social and viral levels launching an anti-Obama campaign on his personal website.
In a call to clicks, kim.com , declares that “the US government has declared war on the internet, millions of Mega users want their files back. If Megaupload.com is not back online by November 1, will you vote for Obama?” and features a poll and sign-up to join 'the movement.'
The United States government has told a Virginia judge that a long list of American connections makes Megaupload subject to US criminal law. The Friday court filing was a response to the company's argument that its lack of a US mailing address makes it immune to criminal prosecution in the United States.
Megaupload points to federal law requiring that notice of a corporate indictment be served on an officer of the corporation and sent to the corporation's last known US address. It has argued that since it doesn't have a US address, it cannot be indicted.
Even though he has been busy accusing Vice President Joe Biden of orchestrating the raid on his home (a charge since denied), having pool parties, and producing ridiculous rap videos, Kim Dotcom now says he’s ready to come to the United States, rather than be extradited, as a way of speeding up the entire judicial process in his international copyright case.
The United States’ court case against Megaupload founders Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk for alleged copyright infringement was dealt another setback Tuesday, after the New Zealand extradition hearing for the four was moved to March 2013.
Originally, the hearing was scheduled for August 6 this year, about six months after Dotcom’s home was raided in January, but a series of legal complications have pushed that date forward.
Kim Dotcom says the shutdown of his Megaupload filesharing service was ordered by the White House after Hollywood studio executives met with US Vice President Joe Biden.
The meetings are revealed in publicly released White House logs which show some of the most powerful figures in Hollywood met with studio bosses about six months before the January raids which led to the arrest of Dotcom and three of his Megaupload colleagues.
The criminal charges against Kim Dotcom in the United States may never get to trial, the judge overseeing the case has told the FBI.
United States district court judge Liam O'Grady said he didn't know if "we are ever going to have a trial in this matter" after being told Dotcom's file-sharing company had never been formally served with criminal papers by the US.
The MPAA petitioned the court yesterday to block MegaUpload's efforts to purchase its servers back from the cash-strapped hosting company, Carpathia on fears that the file sharing service would restart off-shore.
Carpathia is losing about $9000 a day holding MegaUpload's data and has petitioned the court for financial relief. Specifically Carpathia has asked to be allowed to sell the servers back to MegaUpload—not just the 25 Petabytes of data, the physical servers themselves.
