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So, Kim, a New Zealander, ran a HUGE file sharing site called Megaupload, and was raided by the NZ cops on information from the FBI supplied by the MPAA that he was supplying huge amounts of pirated entertainment. His American ISP was raided and all the servers seized. Kim has steadfastly maintained his innocence that he did not supply pirated media and that when he was notified that there was such on his servers, that he took them down.
Since then, it has been one huge WTF. The hosting company is pissed at the US because the servers they took contained a lot more than Megaupload. The US government doesn't want to pay for the servers to be maintained, which introduces the question of tainted evidence. New Zealand's version of the NSA is in trouble for conducting illegal surveillance of an NZ resident, and now this....
NZ's GCHQ claims that it's deleted all of the evidence about the Megaupload case.
A pending criminal case. And they deleted it.
In any jurisdiction, as far as I know, law enforcement and government is required to preserve evidence before trial, during trial, and pending the appeals process. And GCHQ says it's all gone.
The best part is the director of GCHQ previously appeared before Parliament and said "We're an intelligence agency: we never delete anything, we archive it."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140204/07522126085/new-zealand-spy-agency-deleted-evidence-about-its-illegal-spying-kim-dotcom.shtml
Since then, it has been one huge WTF. The hosting company is pissed at the US because the servers they took contained a lot more than Megaupload. The US government doesn't want to pay for the servers to be maintained, which introduces the question of tainted evidence. New Zealand's version of the NSA is in trouble for conducting illegal surveillance of an NZ resident, and now this....
NZ's GCHQ claims that it's deleted all of the evidence about the Megaupload case.
A pending criminal case. And they deleted it.
In any jurisdiction, as far as I know, law enforcement and government is required to preserve evidence before trial, during trial, and pending the appeals process. And GCHQ says it's all gone.
The best part is the director of GCHQ previously appeared before Parliament and said "We're an intelligence agency: we never delete anything, we archive it."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140204/07522126085/new-zealand-spy-agency-deleted-evidence-about-its-illegal-spying-kim-dotcom.shtml
