Is the United States Government Spying on U.S. Citizens for Domestic Law Enforcement?
The case of Megaupload, the file storage and sharing service started by the very strange self-named Kim Dotcom may reveal that cold war spy technology is being used to pursue commercial cases of copyright infringement on behalf of the Hollywood content creator/distributors.
If this is literally true, the spy agency that runs the greatest listening service in the world, the National Security Agency, may have its activities placed under further scrutiny by hyper-partisan anti-America politicians – thus compromising one of our nation’s most effective intelligence weapons against terrorism.
Unfortunately for the United States, the FBI may have improperly interfered with the Megaupload case in Australia – including causing a false and misleading search warrant to be issued, an illegal raid and premises search to be performed, an unwarranted physical assault on Kim Dotcom for intimidation purposes, illegal removal of property from the premises – and the illegal transfer of certain materials to the United States. The legality and appropriateness to be determined by the Australian high court which has already found improper police behavior.
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 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. <Source>
What makes part of the story nonsensical is that the authorities were concerned that Kim Dotcom had a “magic switch” which would allow him to erase all of the computers instantaneously. Ludicrous, because the authorities had actually seized his servers, located in the United States under U.S. jurisdiction prior to the raid on the mansion. And, anyone familiar with the length of time it actually takes to securely destroy data on disks knows that short of instantaneous physical destruction, there is no instantaneous method of destroying disk data short of explosive or nuclear devices.
The FBI is involved up to its ears …
The warrant was executed in New Zealand under New Zealand law against a New Zealand resident, and [New Zealand] 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. <Source>
The NSA appears to be at risk …
The court appears to be seeking information on NSA capabilities that may have been used by the Australian GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau ) known to have a collaborative arrangement with the NSA with respect to listening technologies known as ECHELON.
Judge orders GCSB to 'confirm all entities' to which it gave information from illegally obtained interceptions.
Kim Dotcom can now sue the police and GCSB for damages after a judgment handed down yesterday. The top-secret international spy ring known as Echelon will have to reveal whether it received details of illegal spying on Kim Dotcom. The order for the intelligence network to reveal its secrets comes after a new judgment into the bungled handling of the case against the alleged internet pirate. The High Court at Auckland ordered the police to produce details either proving or discounting the existence of a live video feed of the raid after contradictory evidence from a senior police officer. The case is now aimed at the heart of New Zealand's intelligence arrangements with the United States and the other Echelon partners - Australia, Canada and Britain. <Source>
Bottom line …
It appears that the FBI spent more time, effort and money investigating copyright theft than they did the Benghazi affair which cost the lives of our Ambassador to Libya and three other American citizens. Since many of the content creator/distributors employ former FBI and other law enforcement personnel, perhaps it is time to investigate collusion between the various federal agencies and groups purportedly fighting commercial copyright infringement.
As a content creator/distributor myself, I believe that their should be rules concerning copyright infringement. But not to the extent they violate the U.S. Constitution, our laws and our national defense.
It is about time that the Hollywood content creators/distributors and their investigative agencies be investigated for collusion, corruption, entrapment and a host of illegal activities. It should be noted that it was these very same groups that resulted in corrupting politicians to introduce legislation which demanded that every computer, every electronic device and every file produced by certain programs contain Globally Unique IDentifiers so as to track files back to source equipment and then to specific individuals. These are the people who created the atmosphere that allowed law enforcement to legally – and illegally spy on American citizens. And now it appears that the Americans attacked a foreign citizen with the same techniques – specious warrants based on false. misleading or vague information.
As I have noted in my series about Americans losing their privacy one device at a time, there are certain commercial forces within the United States that want to control content creation and distribution, acting as toll-collectors in perpetuity for material which should have been placed in the public domain. Our entire copyright process has been subverted by the Walt Disney Company and their co-conspirators who continue to violate the intent of the Constitution to provide a limited monopoly timeframe for content creators and inventors to have monopoly control over their creations in return for ceding them into the public domain for the benefit of society. Now we find that time period to be longer than one’s normal lifetime.
Should any of this concern you, perhaps you should join the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) whose activities are seeking to bring the law into compliance with the digital age,.
-- steve
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