On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 11:30 PM, James Smith <james@smithwaysecurity.com>wrote:
I can only imagine the bloodbath this will cause.!!
Show me a file sharing site with no illegal content! This is just insane. What's quite interesting is that Rapper/Producer Swiss BeatZ is the current CEO of megaupload how ironic.
-----Original Message----- From: Steven Bellovin Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 12:07 AM To: Suresh Ramasubramanian Cc: james@smithwaysecurity.com ; NANOG Subject: Re: Megaupload.com seized
I don't mean either -- I've only skimmed the indictment. But from the news stories, it would *appear* that they got a search or wiretap warrant to get at employees' email. I don't see how that would make it "not private". (Btw -- "due diligence" is a civil suit concept; this is a criminal case.) The prosecution is trying to claim that the targets had actual knowledge of what was going on.
I do know Orin Kerr, however. He's a former federal prosecutor and he's *very* sharp, and I've never known him to be wrong on straight-forward legal issues like this. He himself may not have all the facts himself. But here are two sample paragraphs from the indictment:
On or about August 31, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled lol. Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for the file Alcohol 120 1.9.5 3105complete.rar with a description of Alcohol 120, con crack!!!! By ChaOtiX!. The copyrighted software Alcohol 120 is a CD/DVD burning software program sold by www.alcohol-soft.com.
and
On or about June 24, 2010, members of the Mega Conspiracy were informed, pursuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were believed to be present on their leased servers at Carpathia Hosting in Ashburn, Virginia. On or about June 29, 2010, after receiving a copy of the criminal search warrant, ORTMANN sent an e-mail entitled Re: Search Warrant Urgent to DOTCOM and three representatives of Carpathia Hosting in the Eastern District of Virginia. In the e-mail, ORTMANN stated, The user/payment credentials supplied in the warrant identify seven Mega user accounts, and further that The 39 supplied MD5 hashes identify mostly very popular files that have been uploaded by over 2000 different users so far[.] The Mega Conspiracy has continued to store copies of at least thirty-six of the thirty-nine motion pictures on its servers after the Mega Conspiracy was informed of the infringing content.
(I got the indictment from http://static2.stuff.co.nz/** files/MegaUpload.pdf <http://static2.stuff.co.nz/files/MegaUpload.pdf> -- while I'd prefer to use a DoJ site cite, for some reason their web server is very slow right now...)
On Jan 19, 2012, at 10:48 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Er I'm sorry but do you mean joeschmoe@corp.megaupload.com type
emails, or joeschmoe@hotmail.com type emails?
If megaupload's corporate email was siezed to provide due diligence in such a prosecution - it would quite probably not constitute private mail
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
The Megaupload case is unusual, said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, in that federal prosecutors obtained the private e-mails of Megaupload’s operators in an effort to show they were operating in bad faith.
"The government hopes to use their private words against them," Mr. Kerr said. "This should scare the owners and operators of similar sites."
-- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~**smb<https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb>