Kim Dotcom Megaupload case falters over sharing Canadian data | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom Megaupload case falters over sharing Canadian data

cbc.ca

49 pointsfraqed56 comments

Hiring one Canadian is prohibitively expensive, so instead they fight a legal battle to be able to send a team of Americans? That seems like a red flag to me. Even computer forensic professionals can't be that much more expensive than police officers and lawyers.

Yeah, it is pretty clear they intend to bend/break rules the Canadians would hold them too and say "Oops".

And in the meantime, Megaupload is caught in regulatory limbo, shut down in favor of its competitors' exponential growth.

Guilty until proven innocent.

That's why many companies try to avoid getting there, by lobbying for OPPOSING major parties, for instance.

https://mega.co.nz/ seems to be perfectly fine.

> On Jan. 18, 2012, an Ontario judge granted a search warrant to seize 32 servers in Canada — equivalent to the amount of data stored on 100 laptops, according to Megaupload lawyers.

Wait what??? Neither servers nor laptops have any sort of "average HD size". This comparison seems quite stupid. It's not only apples and oranges to compare the two but provides no meaningful data at all....

Pedantry is the top-voted comment yet again. Welcome to Hacker News.

Calling something pedantic typically comes with a negative connotation. The above comment raises a fairly reasonable point, pedantic or otherwise.

Thats because its one of the few things we all actually agree with. Otherwise were all always arguing different points :-)

This is lawyer math. It is intended to be persuasive rhetoric, not rational argumentation.

The comparison is entirely for the purpose of converting the numbers to a scale familiar (and shocking) to the median member of the jury pool.

If that were the case the number of PEOPLE's personal data would be a far more compelling number. 100 laptops worth of data may be equivalent to the servers but they still don't represent the only thing that should matter: innocent's people data being unlawfully searches/seized.

Lawyers are constrained, in that they cannot knowingly tell outright lies, and any intentional misrepresentations they may make are limited by the forbearance of the judge.

I'm quite certain that lawyers for the defense would have preferred to say that the seizure and search of the servers was the equivalent of kicking down the doors of 100 homes in your neighborhood, and taking 100 of your neighbors' laptops, merely on the suspicion that they might have unlicensed copies of movies and music on them. And your neighbors are good, hardworking people who already have piles of legitimately purchased CDs and DVDs next to their laptops. They care for their cute babies, and refrain from kicking puppies and kittens at all times. The smell of fresh-baked apple pies frequently wafts across your lawn from their windowsills, along with the sounds of the neighborhood kids playing sandlot baseball. But why would a wookiee live on Endor? It makes no sense!

At that time, the judge reminds the defense that Kim Dotcom is the accused, and you stop that crap right now, or you'll get sanctioned.

> Lawyers are constrained, in that they cannot knowingly tell outright lies

Lawyers may have greater professional consequences if they are caught knowingly telling outright lies in certain contexts, but it is absolutely not the case that they cannot knowingly tell outright lies.

Let's just say that they cannot expect to win a case if it depends upon contradicting established facts. Much of a lawyer's work is therefore preventing the inconvenient facts from being established in their case.

The article states quite clearly (in the fourth paragraph) that the amount of data in question is 25TB. It later mentions that the data was spread across 32 servers and that lawyers compared it to the amount of data in 100 laptops - which would fix the lawyers' estimate for the average amount of data in a laptop at around 250GB. I haven't bought a laptop recently, but that sounds like an entirely reasonable guesstimate to me. The comparison seems like an appropriate way of conveying the order of magnitude of the amount of data that needs to be searched to a non-technical audience.

This thread adds nothing interesting to the conversation. Please just stop.

Just imagine all the tax dollars wasted ruining this guy's business.

All those tax dollars, bought for around $100M/year[1]. I wonder if they are seeing exponential returns on their lobbying investment, and that's why it went from $25M to $100M in less than a decade, or if it is an attempt to staunch the losses brought about by file sharing. I'm guessing the latter.

1. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=B02

His "business" that made about $200,000,000 off obviously copyright infringing material. Kim Dotcom is as sleazy as they come. I think he deserves to sit in a prison cell. Other folk may disagree with me, and that's fine, but he very much deserves to face a jury so that they can decide.

Personally, I agree with you but how Dotcom gets there is very important. We cannot tolerate methods that are not only illegal but violate the basic of principals of our legal code and society. Kim Dotcom is as sleazy as it comes but he does have rights and if he loses his, we will lose ours.

I know plenty of people who host non-infringing copyright items at Megaupload. What I mean is that they share personal files, which themselves have the copyright to. So I'm pretty sure not all of that money comes from hosting Big Corporates copyrighted material.

I don't understand why you put "business" within quotation marks, as a business is a business if it generates money - regardless of the legality of the business.

Its before my morning coffee so maybe I am missing the reason but why can't it be indexed by Canadians? Is it because its an American case and they are only permitted to hold potential evidence, not assist in the investigation?

I'd also like to know more on this.

I don't think you'll find many Canadians that will gratuitously invade the privacy of others for the benefit for the US government.

Don't worry, we're just as crooked as Americans.

The US government is willing to pay for the US clean team (maybe they are already on the payroll). They aren't willing to pay for Canadian experts.

Maybe they want to grab more data than they are allowed.

Customs won't clear the large quantity of Tim Horton's products required to do the job. :P

More to the point, why didn't the original warrant specify what data they were looking for? Finding out what files exist on a server is technically easy.

If the authorities don't know what constitutes incriminating evidence it raises serious questions about why the warrant was issued in the first place.

So in many ways, this may be more of a 'fishing trip' thru the data than an actual indexing.

Note the journalistic bias - describing Kim Dotcom as "notorious".

That sounds like a fair description to me, and I want him to win this case.

Notorious implies he did something bad. In this case, the definition of bad means different things to different people.

He's already been previously convicted of doing bad things, so the description is just fine.

"youthful foolishness".

Hardly.

I've interviewed with him once for a job in his Munich based company DataProtect back in 2000 when his name was still Kim Schmitz. Back then it was unclear where his money came from (insider trading and before that credit card fraud) and the engineering community thought he was just that much of a successful and technically knowledgeable guy. I don't hold a grudge for not getting the job as a security engineer because the personal impression I got was more than shady and the following years proved that it good that I didn't.

So "notorious" sounded right to me too.

huh? what's with the downvote guys?

A single downvote can be an anomaly (accidental tap, for example), best not to worry about.

You're downvoted because your comment implies that "just following orders" at companies with morally questionable business models might reflect back on the one taking orders.

For more downvotes, try suggesting that working for an adware and spyware based company could (and should!) lower your social status, even if not yet in the eyes of other people working for adware and spyware giants. But with growing awareness in the wider population, the outcome is inevitable.

Interesting, so I could work for the NSA or CIA and still get all the street-cred with you guys? Sorry but this is exactly the reason why I'm running my own business since 18+ years and never looked back since. If being "sheep" is what this job is now all about please kill me now.

EDIT: actually your comment is exactly what I despise because thinking like this makes you a non-free person. I'm sure people who worked for the Stasi or currently justify the actions of their employers (Google, Facebook and other FVEY collaborators) would exactly justify their existence with similar reasoning. Point being, if you feel that your employer does something shady it's up to you to change it. If this process makes you unemployable or an outcast in your current environment then I'd still have more respect for you serving me at McDonalds than doing what you do.

The site is shut down so the people involved have achieved their goal. I doubt that the defence is claiming that there was no copyrighted material in the users data stores. The case is really about refusal to pursue copyright enforcement. All the prosecution needs to do is drag this out to win.

So if you don't toe the line all your equipment gets seized. If you ever get it back it will be obsolete. You will also be tied up with legal stuff for a long time. That is the real message being sent here. The facts of the case don't matter.

Why do they need humans looking at files? Can't a program be created that scans disk contents and classifies them in whatever way they need it analyzed?

I think that's what the "humans" would be doing - using software tools to scan, analyze and report on the data contained.

If they use a program they have to deal with Kim's legal team objecting and forcing the prosecution to convince a judge that they have a way to sift information with a 100% guarantee of not mistakenly taking anything it is not legal for them to take.

Easier to just hire a bunch of interns to do the work.

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