kim dotcom – praag.org

Me.ga suspended

Kim Dotcom, the founder of MegaUpload, has accused Washington of a “witch hunt” after the government of Gabon announced the suspension of his new site, which was due to be launched in January.

Last week, Dotcom unveiled plans to re-launch his file-sharing site in January 2013, using the Gabonese domain me.ga, with the message “this button will change the world.“

But the authorities of the African state thought otherwise.

“I have instructed my departments… to immediately suspend the site www.me.ga,” announced Communication Minister Blaise Louembe, saying, “Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people.”

Minister Louembe said the domain name was originally registered to someone in France who then transferred it to Dotcom.

Furthermore, Gabon’s communications ministry alleges that the website was set up to redirect traffic to another site hosted in France, which would provide access to shared files.

Dotcom immediately replied to the move by blaming Washington. “Don’t worry. We have an alternative domain. This just demonstrates the bad faith witch hunt the US government is on,” he tweeted.

The 38-year-old German national is free on bail in New Zealand ahead of an extradition hearing to the US in March.

The FBI and US Justice Department allege MegaUpload made $175 million in profits by offering pirated copies of movies, TV shows and other content, resulting in over $500 million damages to the industry.

Washington wants him on money laundering, racketeering, fraud and online copyright theft charges, and seeks a 20-year jail sentence.

Dotcom insists he is innocent and free to start a new file-sharing venture which will incorporate state-of-the-art encryption methods resulting in user-only knowledge of the uploaded material. – RT

Megaupload founder unveils file-sharing sequel

Like a good Hollywood sequel, Megaupload is back.

Kim Dotcom, the founder of the shuttered file-sharing site that housed everything from family photos to blockbuster films, on Thursday announced a new online storage service called Mega that will give users direct control – and responsibility – over their files.

Mega will launch in January 2013, just before the internet entrepreneur is scheduled to face an extradition hearing to the United States where he and other Megaupload operators face charges of online piracy, fraud and money laundering.

In a snub to U.S. prosecutors, the site will not utilize U.S.-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by U.S. authorities.

The U.S. government alleges that Megaupload, once one of the world’s most popular websites, was directly responsible for illegally uploaded content on the site and that it netted $175 million from unlawful activities.

“The new Mega will not be threatened by U.S. prosecutors,” Dotcom told Reuters in an interview, adding that he was confident Mega would avoid violating U.S. law.

“The new Mega avoids any dealings with U.S. hosters, U.S. domains and U.S. backbone providers and has changed the way it operates to avoid another takedown,” he said.

ENCRYPTION KEYS

Mega is the follow-up to Megaupload, which was shut down in January this year when New Zealand police helicopters swooped into the flamboyant Dotcom’s mansion outside Auckland to seize computers and other evidence at the request of U.S. authorities.

Users of the new cloud-based service will be able to upload, store and share photos, text files, music and films, encrypt those files and grant access using unique decryption keys.

“You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us,” a statement on the Mega website said.

While the new site will operate faster and boast a bigger storage capacity, the encryption technology marks a major change from Megaupload as Mega operators will not have access to files and will therefore be immune to content liability.

Ensuring that files are not pirated will be the job of content owners, a major change from Megaupload, which the U.S. film industry says was directly responsible for taking down illegally uploaded content.

“Content owners can still remove infringing material and they will even get direct delete access if they agree not to make us responsible for actions of users,” Dotcom said.

Dotcom’s announcement comes just weeks after a U.S. federal judge ruled that Washington’s criminal case against Megaupload will go forward for now.

Dotcom, a German national who holds New Zealand residency, faces an extradition hearing in March even though a New Zealand court ruled that the January raid and seizure were unlawful, while the nation’s spy agency was found to have illegally spied on Dotcom.

Thursday’s announcement was delayed for about one hour after the website was overloaded by users. According to Dotcom, much of the traffic was driven by U.S. authorities.

“FBI agents pressing reload…We see their IP addresses,” he said on his Twitter feed. – Reuters

Kim Dotcom says he was spied on without warrant

In the latest episode of the ongoing saga of accused hacker Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder says he suspects that the illegal intelligence New Zealand authorities collected on him was shared in real-time with American authorities.

The US government says Dotcom masterminded a multi-million-dollar copyright infringement conspiracy by running the Megaupload cyberlocker, and although the authorities refuse to release any evidence of the alleged wrongdoing, Dotcom says he thinks he was illegally targeted by a secretive snooping-collective with an international reach.

New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has already determined that the country’s spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), illegally monitored Dotcom when they subjected him to a rigorous undercover investigation reserved only for foreign nationals in the months leading up to the January 2012 raid on his home and his subsequent arrest. As a citizen of New Zealand at the time, the Germany-born Megaupload founder was targeted unlawfully and all intelligence gathered on him is now being brought into question. Speaking to the TorrentFreak website this week, Dotcom says the GCSB’s intricate involvement in the global Echelon intelligence network could have let US authorities come into possession with his personal communications.

“The interesting part is that the GCSB is one of the five partners in the Echelon project, the global spying project,” Dotcom says. “They are prying on every type of communication they can get their hands on, from wireless, to Internet, to satellite, to telephone.”

Last month, author and journalist Nicky Hager told Fairfax New Zealand News that the GCSB agents hired to conduct surveillance are “not spies in the normal sense” who have an array of technologies in their arsenal to monitor Dotcom’s activities. By locking into the Echelon network, Hager said the GCSB could “actually just plug in his email address, his name, his company name whatever and see what comes off it.”

Dotcom says he suspects the evidence the GCSB collected on him was fed into Echelon and offered to Americans on-the-spot, but says this could actually help his argument, “because all you can hear is that we were trying to do the right thing.”

“The GCSB was utilized to surveil all my communication in order to give the U.S. Government full access to all my communication, without the requirement of a warrant, and without the ability for me to get access to transcripts or discovery,” Dotcom adds to TorrentFreak. “The US has used this GCSB surveillance to get real-time access to my phone calls, Internet traffic and everything, and I can’t do anything about it. They refuse to cooperate with the court and say it’s all national security,”

The US is refusing to reveal the intelligence, however, despite their case against the file-sharing kingpin not advancing further than the indictment that has been unsealed since early 2012.

In a separate matter, Dotcom’s attorneys have hit another roadblock in their effort to have that indictment dropped, with the US Justice Department declining to play by their own rules as they try to keep their quickly collapsing investigation from fizzling to nothing. Attorneys for Dotcom have argued that the US must serve a company charged with a federal crime at their last American mailing address, but Megaupload never once operated out of the US.

“To this court’s knowledge, no court has ever dismissed an indictment for failure to meet Rule 4’s secondary mailing requirement,” Judge Liam O’Grady ruled last week when he dismissed the defense’s argument.

Dotcom’s attorneys first argued in July that “The Government bears the burden of proving that it has validly served Megaupload within the letter of the Rule… and effectively concedes it cannot carry it.”

Earlier this week, Dotcom’s US-based attorney Ira Rothken told the Inquirer, “Now that these procedures are coming under scrutiny they appear to have violated the law at nearly every part of the process,” adding, “From an illegal search warrant to what we believe is an illegal military style raid, to illegal data sharing with the US, illegal spying and ultimately what we believe is an overbroad takedown of the entire Megaupload enterprise.”