background preloader

2013

Facebook Twitter

Kim Dotcom sues New Zealand for $7 million over illegal spying, raid. It was bound to happen sooner or later: Kim Dotcom has finally sued the New Zealand government over its admittedly illegal spying against him and the subsequent raid on his house. (A New Zealand Court granted him the right to sue earlier this year.) In court documents published for the first time this week by the New Zealand Herald, Dotcom lays out his case with many new details. In the unsealed filing, Dotcom and his fellow plaintiffs are seeking NZ$8.55 million ($6.9 million) in damages. Last month, Dotcom alleged that the Five Eyes spy network—comprising signals intelligence spy agencies from New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and most notably, the United States—was used against him. “The Prime Minister of New Zealand declined an independent inquiry into illegal spying,” Dotcom told Ars on Friday morning. Dotcom says he did not resist Further, there were two other clever tactics that the NZ authorities used to observe Dotcom.

Kim Dotcom Wins Case, Police Have to Return Seized Materials. New Zealand judge orders the police to return any irrelevant data to Kim Dotcom and destroy any cloned hard drives containing personal information. Since January 2012, Kim Dotcom has been no stranger to courts. He has been embroiled in legal battles even before his notorious one-click hosting site, Megaupload, was forced to shut down. Since that time, Kim Dotcom has successfully started up another file-storage service Mega and won several lawsuits against him for copyright infringement.

This latest victory is actually a follow up to the same judgement that High Court justice Helen Winkelmann passed last year that the FBI refused to follow . According to the judgement, the warrant that the FBI used to seize Kim Dotcom’s digital materials and hard drives was invalid and unlawful. Winkelmann has ordered the New Zealand police to sift through all of the seized digital material and return anything irrelevant back to Kim Dotcom, at their own cost. Jasmine@zeropaid.com | @nardionet. Dotcom Case Reveals GCSB Illegally Spied on 80+ People. While Kim Dotcom’s pre-extradition trial legal battles have highlighted a lot of things: the need to revamp intellectual property rights, the over the top methods that studios use to combat change in the distribution of content, but perhaps most crucially, that the New Zealand authorities have conducted a lot of morally questionable and illegal activities throughout the past few years. The GCSB is New Zealand’s premier intelligence agency and after it was found to have conducted illegal surveillance on Kim Dotcom and his business partners, a government report was commissioned to investigate if this was the only instance.

That report has now been made public, with the results suggesting that as many as 88 individuals had their rights infringed upon by the organisation. Yea they sure do sound like the masters of Cyberspace. Canadian Court Refuses to Ship Megaupload Servers. Kim Dotcom Another interesting revelation in the saga that is now the Megaupload trial is that of the Canadian Courts ruling NOT to ship 32 Megaupload servers to the US as they may contain personal information that would identify Megaupload users and in addition Kim Dotcom says they contain no information that is useful to the case. For those who don’t know 1,103 servers were seized by the US courts last year when Megaupload was raided and taken offline, however those weren’t the only servers used to host content used by the file sharing site Megaupload.com. There were an additional 32 servers in a Canadian based datacentre. The US courts claim that the servers will be useful in the case they’re building against Megaupload due to an e-mail from Megaupload staff which states that the servers “will serve as a database / number crunching machines.”

Megaupload: U.S. Deliberately Misled the Court with Unlawful Search Warrants. In a filing just submitted to court Megaupload is looking to declare the search warrants executed by the U.S. Government unlawful. Kim Dotcom's legal team argues that the Government. deliberately misled the court by withholding information that showed how the authorities had "planted" key evidence.

Dotcom is furious about the alleged misconduct that led to the destruction of 220 jobs and the seizure of the personal files of millions of users. When the U.S. Government applied for the search warrants against Megaupload last year, it told the court that they had warned Megaupload in 2010 that it was hosting infringing files. Through its hosting company, Megaupload was informed about a criminal search warrant in an unrelated case where the Government requested information on 39 infringing files stored by the file-hosting service.

At the time Megaupload cooperated with this request and handed over details on the uploaders. Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak that he is furious about the U.S.