SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and internet censorship laws.

[Magda Hassan]

Court returns MegaUpload founder's cash, cars

By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, April 30, 2012 16:48 EDT

Kim Dotcom, the eccentric founder of cyber-locker website MegaUpload, will have more than $800,000 in assets returned to him thanks to a decision Monday by the High Court of New Zealand, according to Radio New Zealand.The decision comes on the wake of a fresh political scandal set off by Dotcom, who toldThe New Zealand Herald that he donated NZ$50,000 to ACT Party leader John Banks, currently a key government figure. He, along with prime Minister John Key, serve as leaders of the ruling coalition government, but that could all change if he's toppled.Dotcom claimed that Banks had even thanked him for the donations, which were split up into two installments to help conceal the tech entrepreneur's name. Banks claimed Monday that he was not aware of any donations from Dotcom, and that he never called to thank him. Police said they were investigating the claims.Meanwhile, police who staged a raid on Dotcom's home are sure to be seething at Monday's High Court decision, which hinged upon a faulty warrant that police later tried to amend. New Zealand Justice Judith Potternoted last month that it wasn't until hours after the raid that police realized their mistakes and actually applied for the proper court order, seeking to make it retroactive by listing targeted assets that had already been seized.Dotcom, who legally changed his name from Kim Schmitz, has denied all wrongdoing and called the case against him "malicious" and "political." He even claimed earlier this month that once his company's files are returned to him, they would reveal names of U.S. government officials who allegedly used MegaUpload. Dotcom said they include Department of Justice and U.S. Senate employees.To make matters more complicated for the prosecution, police were recently said to have "lost" a video of the raid on Dotcom's mansion, and Dotcom has claimed that several key pieces of evidence against him were actually files he legally owned.He's since been granted bail and remains on house arrest in New Zealand, pending an extradition request from the U.S. which becomes more difficult thanks to Monday's ruling. Dotcom was previously only allowed a small monthly allowance in interest from New Zealand government bonds he owns, whereas the assets that will be returned to him, some $614,000 in cash and two vehicles worth over $250,000, will significantly bolster his legal defense.Dotcom further claims that MegaUpload, which had more than 50 million users when it was shut down, was preparing for a "multi-billion dollar" public offering on Wall Street, and was waiting in line to have its internals thoroughly examined by one of the major accounting firms that helps companies go public. Those efforts were reportedly still ongoing in January, when U.S. and New Zealand officials shut the site down based upon damage claims from U.S. movie and music studios.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/30/co...cash-cars/

[Peter Lemkin]

FBI Pushes National Electronic Surveillance Strategy[url=http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/7/headlines#][/url]

The website CNET is reporting the FBI is asking internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. The FBI has drafted a proposed law that would requiring social-networking websites and providers of instant messaging and web email alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly. The legislation is reportedly one component of what the FBI has internally called the "National Electronic Surveillance Strategy."

[Magda Hassan]

Mega-victory: Kim Dotcom search warrants "invalid," mansion raid "illegal"

A New Zealand judge savages the process used to target Megaupload's Kim Dotcom.

by Nate Anderson - June 28 2012, 7:57pm AUSEST1

MEGAUPLOAD

• Updated: Kim Dotcom meets with Woz, restarts launch of MegaBox music sharing
  
• US argues it shouldn't have to give Megaupload user his legit files
  
• The MPAA would be OK seeing legit Megaupload files restored
  
• Kim Dotcom lampoons New Zealand MP in his new rap song
  
• Government trying to deny Megaupload fair legal representation
  

On January 20, New Zealand police showed up in style at the mansion of flamboyant Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, swarming over the property and bringing along two police helicopters. They cut their way through locks and into the home's "panic room," where Dotcom was hiding in apparent fear of a kidnapping or robbery. They seized 18 luxury vehicles. They secured NZ$11 million in cash from bank accounts. And they grabbed a whopping 150TB of data from Dotcom's many digital devices.
"It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door," said Detective Inspector Grant Wormald in apolice press release at the time.
It was also totally illegal. That's the ruling of New Zealand High Court judge Helen Winkelmann, who today ripped the "invalid" warrant and the subsequent search and seizure in a 56-page decision.
The ruling marks a major win for the Kim Dotcom defense, which is trying to prevent their client from being extradited to the US on a host of copyright and money laundering charges. Still, it's not yet clear if Dotcom will actually get his data back; the FBI already flew to New Zealand, imaged much of the data in March, and FedExed it back to the US.

"The search and seizure was therefore illegal"

At the instigation of groups like the MPAA, the FBI opened an investigation two years ago into Megaupload's activities. The online file locker had become a popular place to store and share large files online, some which were copyrighted and shared without authorization.
By January, the FBI had elevated its informal contacts about the case with New Zealand officials into an official "government to government" request for legal assistance under an extradition treaty between the two countries. The US would prosecute the case in Virginia, where a grand jury had been convened, but it needed New Zealand cops to actually arrest Dotcom and search his property.
The goal was to swoop in during Dotcom's birthday in mid-January, since several of his Megaupload co-defendants were going to be at his mansion outside of Auckland. On January 17, the New Zealand Deputy Solicitor-General issued an authorization for local police to apply for warrants. They did so the next day, showing up with affidavits at the North Shore District Courtbut the duty judge didn't have time to deal with the request. The matter was held over until January 19, when the warrants to search Dotcom's house and two other properties were approved; police had 14 days in which to execute them.
They needed only a day; on January 20, they arrived at the house. Dotcom later told the court he had no idea that the people he saw flooding into his property were police, so he fled to his home's secure room. After realizing they were cops, he says he decided to stay put rather than take the risk of popping out and perhaps getting shot.
"Not once did they say they were police," he testified. "They had civilian clothes on. The only things that I saw were flack jackets with a lot of pistols and automatic weapons."
Once they arrived at the panic room, Dotcom said, "I was punched in the face. I was kicked down on the floor. One guy was standing on my hand so my nail was ruptured and my hand was bleeding. It was quite aggressive."
In the police view, however, Dotcom was hiding from themand had retreated to a room with a weapon "which had the appearance of a shortened shotgun." CCTV footage from the house, which might show more of what really happened, has been seized by police and not yet returned.
In any event, with the initial unpleasantness of the raid behind them, New Zealand investigators pored over the house and began packing up evidence. They showed Dotcom the judicial warrant, as required, but it was a confusing document. The warrant didn't make clear, for instance, very basic facts like: under which country's laws was he being targeted? The actual warrant application didn't even make clear that the US was involved. As Judge Winkelmann put it:

The failure to refer to the laws of the United States on the face of the warrants, would no doubt cause confusion to the subjects of the searches. They would likely read the warrants as authorizing a search for evidence of offenses as defined by New Zealand's law. The only clue that they are not is that each one is headed "the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act 1992." That is not much of a clue.

And what were the cops looking for? They didn't know, exactly. Because they were not investigating the casethe FBI was doing thatthe police executing the search had limited knowledge of what was truly useful and necessary. As the judge put it, the people executing the warrant "were not the investigating officers and had limited knowledge of the operation," despite being briefed before the raid went down.
They had the warrant document to guide them, of coursebut it was a remarkably open-ended piece of work. Dotcom was accused of "breach of copyright," but in what way? The warrant didn't say.
"Copyright can exist in many things," wrote the judge. "A breach of copyright can be affected in many ways."
Warrants need to allege specific crimes for which evidence is being gathered; it's the difference between rummaging through a home looking for evidence of "murder" and rummaging through a home looking for evidence about "the murder of such-and-such, killed on such-and-such a date, by such-and-such a weapon."

The requirement imposed by [New Zealand law] is not to describe the type of offense, but rather the offense or offenses in respect of which the warrant was sought and obtained.

Without the specific allegation of a crime, a warrant might veer into over-broad territory, becoming a "general warrant" so vague as to be illegal. According to Judge Winkelmann, that's exactly what happened here. "These were general warrants both in form and reality," she wrote. Proper warrants must be "framed with as much specificity as the relevant context permits."

Local laws apply

In this case, the broad nature of the alleged crimes was combined with a broad list of things to grab. For instance, the warrant targeted "all digital devices, including electronic devices capable of storing and/or processing data in digital form."
This was pretty indiscriminate. Everyone involved admits that police must be allowed to grab some information that turns out later to be irrelevant to their case; otherwise, the standard for searches would be so high that much useful material would never be found. But the key point is that the cops need to quickly triage the material taken and return everything not relevant to the investigation.
In this case, the cops had a problem doing so. Because the actual investigators were the FBI, local New Zealand police had no idea which data was relevant. Besides, they had grabbed 150TB of material, and analysts admitted to the court that they couldn't process such a volume without spending a substantial sum of money for more workers and equipment. So the idea was: we'll just ship it all to America and let the FBI do the minimization there.
But that's not an option. The warrant was executed in New Zealand under New Zealand law against a New Zealand resident, and cops can't simply act as agents for another country and then tell aggrieved parties that they have to go deal with that country if they want their irrelevant data back.
"In this day and age computers (and even phones) are used by individuals and families to store a wide range of material information, family photos and films; personal correspondence (e-mails) and generally information of a private and purely personal nature," wrote the judge. Such information must be promptly returned.
Instead, the police "exceeded what they could lawfully be authorized to do. This is because they continue to hold, along with the relevant, material they concede will be irrelevant. They've taken few steps to identify the material, and no steps where the material resides on the computer hard drives... They intend to allow the FBI to do that in the United States. That is an approach that is not available to them."
Instead, the judge noted that the police could have invited FBI officials to come to New Zealand and assist with the initial data triage. Simply offloading their legal responsibility for "minimization" to the FBI won't wash, however.

The rule of law

To sum up the ruling: the warrants were "general warrants, and as such, are invalid." Because the police relied on invalid warrants, "The search and seizure was therefore illegal." And the data should not have been imaged wholesale by the FBI without Dotcom's consent, which the judge found no evidence of.
New Zealand's government took one last stab at keeping Judge Winkelmann away from the whole issue of the warrant's validity and argued that local courts should not review the warrant; only the trial courtin this case, the Virginia District Court in the UShad that power. Winkelmann was having no truck with this, for reasons much like those surrounding data minimization.
"It would not be consistent with the object of promoting the rule of law internationally, were the domestic courts to refuse to review the lawfulness of warrants" obtained in this manner, she noted.
"If having conducted a review, it is determined that there was a fundamental defect in the warrant, it is difficult to see why a Court should decline to declare as much, even where trial processes are engaged in another jurisdiction."

What comes next

Winkelmann is proceeding cautiously, given the complexity of the case. Today's ruling does make clear both that the warrants were illegal and that removing the cloned data to the US was "unlawful."
But how to proceed? The FBI already has the data it wants; is Winkelmann going to ask US law enforcement to return all cloned copies to New Zealand, as Dotcom's lawyers would like? Will she set up a New Zealand-based process to vet all the data and only then release relevant information to the US?
Tricky questions, and all potentially expensive. Winkelmann will hear further arguments on how to proceed on July 4. Until then, though, Dotcom can celebrate an important early victory in the case. Perhaps he can even look forward to getting his home's CCTV footage back from policeand we can get a better picture of what went down on January 20.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/...d-illegal/

[Seamus Coogan]

Well its pretty humbling when an Aussie knows more about current events in you're country than you do. I heard about this last night but I have been following Magda's posts on the topic. Yes, I have to commend the NZ courts for not bowing to the FBI. Its a crazy story WTF do you need helicopters for? The Kim.Dotcom guy is a goddamn blimp of a man lol. Totally over the top. Good post and great links Mags!

[Magda Hassan]

ACTA killed: MEPs destroy treaty in final vote

Published: 04 July, 2012, 15:00




Members of the European Parliament hold placard reading "Hello democracy goodbye ACTA" as they take part in a vote on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on July 04, 2012. (AFP Photo/Frederick Florin)

The European Parliament has rejected ACTA, a controversial trade agreement, which was widely criticized over its likely assault on internet freedoms.
Supporters of the treaty suggested postponing the crucial voting at the Parliament plenary on Wednesday, but members of the parliament decided not to delay the decision any further.
MEPs voted overwhelmingly against ACTA, with 478 votes against and only 39 in favor of it. There were 146 abstentions.
Many members of parliament held anti-ACTA banners or wore anti-ACTA T-shirts during the session.

Earlier all five parliament committees reviewing ACTA voted in favor of rejecting the international treaty.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is aimed at protecting copyright over a wide range of industries. The main focus of criticism was targeting the impact it would cause to internet freedom.
ACTA would require signatory states to impose draconian restrictions on online privacy in the drive to eradicate content piracy and the sale of counterfeit branded goods through the internet.
ACTA was developed with the participation of a number of countries, including the US, Japan, European counties, Australia, South Korea and others since 2007. When the ramifications of the agreement came to wider public knowledge this year, a wave of protests hit several countries. The EU suspended the ratification of ACTA in February to reconsider it.

AFP Photo/Frederick Florin

Image from Twitter/@judithineuropa

AFP Photo/Frederick Florin

http://www.rt.com/news/acta-eu-parliament-vote-400/

[Magda Hassan]

MegaVeep: Biden behind MegaUpload shutdown Kim Dotcom

Published: [COLOR=#999999 !important]05 July, 2012, 05:50
[/COLOR]
TAGS: Biden, Politics, Law, Internet,Information Technology, USA, Oceania
MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom says that a "credible source" has indicated that US Vice President Joe Biden ordered the cloud-sharing website to be taken down in January.
"I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney Neil MacBride to take Mega down," Kim Dotcom told weblog Torrentfreak.

MacBride, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is the lead prosecutor in the case against Dotcom and his associates.

Dotcom believes that the White House discussed the MegaUpload case with major studio bosses, as well as the CEO of the MPAA Chris Dodd, as early as last summer.

"After we received information from an insider we scanned the White House visitor logs for all meetings of Chris Dodd and studio bosses with Joe Biden and Obama," Dotcom stated. "It is interesting that a man by the name of Mike Ellis of MPA Asia, an extradition expert and former superintendent of the Hong Kong police, was also at a meeting with Dodd, all studio bosses and Joe Biden. The same Mike Ellis met with the Minister of Justice Simon Power in New Zealand."

These visitor logs are publicly available on the White House website.

The names in the list include Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer, Paramount Pictures CEO Brad Grey, as well as Jeff Blake, the Vice President of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The MPAA, an abbreviation for the Motion Picture Association of America, is a trade association made up of six mammoth Hollywood studios Walt Disney, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. Eager to curb what they claim is copyright infringement that costs them a hefty sum, the MPAA is known to target peer-to-peer file sharing websites, as well as hosting services such as MegaUpload.

Biden's close relationship with MPAA boss and former fellow Senator Chris Dodd, as well as his relentless stance against piracy may have played a role in his involvement in the MegaUpload case. The MPAA is also known to have spent $400,000 lobbying influential government departments, including the Office of the Vice President, who in 2010 stated that "Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple."

Kim Dotcom, along with five of his associates, was arrested by police in New Zealand in January. The arrests followed an indictment of Dotcom on charges of criminal copyright infringement filed by the United States. MegaUpload was taken offline, and authorities raided its offices and Dotcom's mansion, seizing hard drivers from computers as evidence. The United States later took hold of copies of that evidence, despite an agreement between the prosecution and the defense in New Zealand that the evidence was to remain in the country.

The prosecution still needs to prove that Dotcom and his associates personally facilitated and profited from the piracy that took place on the website.

Last week, the plaintiff received a major blow after New Zealand's High Court ruled that the raid on Kim Dotcom's house was illegal, along with the seizure of computer data that was later cloned and taken to the United States by the FBI.
http://www.rt.com/news/biden-megaupload-...otcom-442/

[Magda Hassan]

[URL="https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/220552354108411904"]https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/220552354108411904

SOPA is dead. PIPA is dead. ACTA is dead. MEGA will return. Bigger. Better. Faster. Free of charge & shielded from attacks. Evolution![/URL]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Magda Hassan]

What part of 'No' don't they understand?

[Peter Lemkin]

What part of 'No' don't they understand?

...ALL OF IT!angryfire