Some lovely news in the Kim Dotcom continuing saga

[thewayne]

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

Comments

[silveradept]

So that would mean the defendant is cleared of charges, if the evidence used has been deleted, I would think. Do they think it was outside influence, our just a screw-up internally?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that if charges have been filed, either it will have to go to trial or the prosecution/State would have to file for dismissal, not knowing how NZ law works. Under American law, the defense could move for a dismissal, but I think Kim would go for the trial to make the government look stupid and show them to be the tools of the Americans that they were. I think he was formally charged as there was a lot of back-and-forth on bail and the suspicion that he'd flee NZ to go back to Germany and could avoid prosecution. Since they've apparently destroyed their evidence, it should be a cake walk for Dotcom's attorneys to make mince meat out of the prosecution.

I've thought about it, internal screw-up or outside influence. I don't think it was an internal screw-up because, as the director said, they're an intelligence agency and they don't delete information. I also don't think it was outside influence, I'll bet the DOJ branch of the MPAA et al are pretty pissed at this happening. I think the most likely explanation is that internally they said 'We can't win this, and we're going to look like idiots regardless of what happens. If this goes to trial, how badly we violated our own law and constitution will be aired and we'll be pilloried. If we 'accidentally delete the evidence', then we look incompetent but we don't reveal how badly we screwed up.' I think it was a question of quickly yanking the bandaid off versus slowly removing it, and they went for the quick yank.

[silveradept]

Fair enough. Unlike the *AAs, it appears that this agency has a sense of how things will look and doesn't feel like they can run roughshod over everyone standing in their way.