Sludge Report #198
Ubiquitous Encryption -
The Promise Of Kim Dotcom's MEGA
By Alastair Thompson
SCOOP NOTE: While the following story is about Kim Dotcom and his new encrypted data delivery network MEGA.co.nz, it addresses a great deal more than piracy and copyright law enforcement. The author - Scoop founder, editor and General Manager Alastair Thompson (a member of the New Zealand Parliamentary Press Gallery for 20 years) - brings together a range of observations, images and videos on aspects of what is unquestionably the biggest and most nuanced NZ internet story ever. The context given here - particularly for an international audience – demonstrates how confusing the story of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload is for New Zealand and New Zealanders. The author seeks to explain why that is the case (it's due to a complicated matrix of factors), and in the process reveal the true scale of the story that our nation has unwittingly become a part of.
In this edition of the Sludge Report:
Size Matters
- Two Weeks To The Biggest NZ Website
Ever
He Who Must Not Be Named (In Polite
Company)
The Goldfish Bowl
Effect
Enter Stage Left
MEGA.co.nz
Ubiquitous Encryption - The Promise Of
MEGA
MEGA's Explosive Growth
Because Privacy Demand Is Huge - MEGA's
Implications Are Also Huge
The NSA Reaps A
Whirlwind
Amnesia Of The Johns - When Irony
Attacks
The Constitutional Conundrum of Prime
Minister John Key's Dotcom
Amnesia
We Have Only Just
Begun
Scoop Independent News - Scoop.co.nz - Raw footage of the re-enactment of the raid portion of the MEGA.co.nz launch held at the Kim Dotcom Mansion near Albany, Auckland on 20th January 2013. The footage was filmed in HD by former Scoop duty editor David McLellan using a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone. The footage is uploaded raw, just as it was recorded. Original raid footage filmed by the NZ Police Special Tactics Group as they raided the mansion at the request of the FBI in a globally coordinated police action on January 20th 2012 is HERE . The official MEGA.co.nz re-enactment footage can be found on MrKimDotcCom's Youtube Channel HERE (video includes full version of launch Press Conference - and at 42 mins, 49 seconds a question from the author).
Size Matters - Two Weeks To The Biggest NZ Website Ever
We need a starting point for this discussion, and as size is what both MEGA (and to some considerable extent Kim Dotcom) are all about, we shall start there.
MEGA is big and New Zealand is small. Right now New Zealand doesn't really have a clue about how much bigger Kim Dotcom is than they realise.
New Zealand is a small country - four million people, on the edge of the map. Internationally we are known for sheep, bungy jumping, hobbits and furry fruit. A substantial portion of Americans think we are across the Sydney Harbour Bridge from Australia.
New Zealand's entire internet footprint is significantly smaller than Kim Dotcom's Megaupload global storage and transmission network. While the writer could not find any exact figures for NZ's traffic utilisation, some sources put it somewhere below 100 Gbps (100,000 megabits).
By way of comparison according to Wikipedia the theoretical lit? capacity of the Southern Cross Cable (theoretically if all circuits were sold and running at maximum speed) is 2 Terabits.
According to MEGA spokesman Finn Batato, Megaupload's peak utilisation in December 2011 and January 2012 was 1.5 Terabits.
On the basis of these figures Megaupload's traffic footprint at the time of shutdown was roughly 20 times larger than the entire nation of New Zealand. And assuming it were possible to stick all the world's Megaupload traffic down the Southern Cross Cable it would near as fill it to brim.
Meanwhile after only two and half weeks of operations MEGA.co.nz's traffic volumes are already huge.
After briefly peaking at a level of global reach very close to that of the Guardian Newspaper (see image below) MEGA.co.nz has settled back to a level of usage (in terms of numbers of users) which is close to that of Trademe.co.nz Trademe.co.nz - which was till now by far the biggest New Zealand website by all measures.
Click for big version
(Source Alexa.com - MEGA.co.nz While mega.co.nz has declined from a launch peak to sit at approximately the same traffic rank as Trademe, we can safely assume that MEGA is already the biggest New Zealand site by traffic volume by a substantial margin because it’s in the business of moving large amounts of encrypted data. MEGA has a sub-top 1000 site ranking in 20 countries already including several large ones such as Spain, France, Brazil and Mexico.)
According to MEGA's Batato mega.co.nz broke the 50 million files uploaded mark less than two weeks after its launch (that’s 12 files for every New Zealander), and at the current pace, it will surpass Megaupload's number of registered users in a few months' time.
"User feedback is overwhelmingly positive, the main criticism being the lack of dedicated syncing and mobile applications - only once these are available, will MEGA become really useful, and they will be a few weeks down the road," Batato told Scoop.
And this is the first thing that New Zealand and New Zealanders have so far failed spectacularly to understand.
The size of MEGA is a lot bigger than they think.
He Who Must Not Be Named (In Polite Company)
Kim Dotcom has attained the status of the first true Kiwi-resident internet Superstar.
In New Zealand we revere Sam Morgan, the young Kiwi entrepreneur whose Trademe website completely dominates the NZ e-tailing space and which is responsible for the lion's share of time spent/page views online on New Zealand based websites (allowing that most NZers spend most of their online time browsing overseas websites).
Meanwhile New Zealand's most significant internet technical star is probably Dr Craig Neville Manning who holds a very senior position at Google and founded Google's software engineering center in New York City in April 2003.
There are a few other mildly stratospheric technology players who hail from NZ such as Chris Liddell whose stint as CEO of Microsoft coincided with the launch of Windows Vista.
Kim Dotcom meanwhile first landed in our nation in December 2008 and returned for a longer visit in August 2009. He was granted residency in November 2010 and spent $600,000 that year on a fireworks display to celebrate the residency decision.
At the time Megaupload was responsible for around 1% of total traffic in both the US and Europe, 2% of traffic in the Asia-Pacific region and 11% in Brazil (reference gigaom.com).
Megaupload was very big indeed.
Yet in NZ if you mentioned Kim Dotcom in official circles the response was almost universally a rather po-faced "Kim Dotwho?"
That was certainly the reported reaction of Prime Minister John Key when informed by his officials on the day before the black helicopter raid on Dotcom's house. (see more discussion about Prime Minister John Key's knowledge of the existence of Kim Dotcom below "Amnesia Of The Johns - When Irony Attacks")
When Kim Dotcom recently suggested that data-exporting could be a business model for NZ, that NZ could become a Switzerland for data, and that he might assist with the financing of a second cable to New Zealand a chorus of leading NZ technology commentators quickly dismissed this as foolish pie in the sky hyperbole.
And many journalists and politicians have been asking all year if the Kim Dotcom story "has legs".
Lower level government officials operating in Scoop's hometown of Wellington are mortally afraid of the prospect of any association with Kim Dotcom whatsoever.
In advance of the 30 January speech in Wellington by inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee - the writer suggested it would be interesting to know what his views were on the Kim Dotcom saga . To which Clare Curran, the NZ Opposition spokesperson on IT and Internet issues responded by saying:
@althecat @timberners_lee @kimdotcom reckon there's more to the internets than KDC (no disrespect)
— Clare Curran (@clarecurranmp) January 29, 2013
Barely disguised code for ‘enough already of all the Kim Dotcom stuff’. (See more about Sir Tim Berners-Lees views on the Kim Dotcom subject matter below.
Just this week the host of New Zealand's version of the "Most Wanted" TV genre show http://www.police.govt.nz/wanted/ten7 Police Ten 7 remarked that the Kim Dotcom story’s high profile was entirely unwarranted and the result of a gullible media.
The reality however is that this is a story which involves – in no particular order - illegal spying, Prime Ministerial amnesia, an armed raid on a mansion on behalf of the FBI (seemingly at the request of the US Vice President acting on behalf of Hollywood), a 6ft 7inch German who loves fast cars, alleged misdeeds by several cabinet ministers, an army of Lawyers and a challenge to the effectiveness and legality of the global spy network…
It’s no surprise As you might appreciate the media are is lapping it up.
And so are the public. Here too Kim Dotcom is fast becoming a star thanks in part to his extraordinary (and very un-Kiwi) PR antics, the most spectacular example of which was this Flight Risk: Kim Dotcom's Unexpectedly Eventful Journey
It would be fair to observe that inside NZ we are presently having a love-hate relationship with the flamboyant founder of MEGA.
But outside NZ his importance is more clearly understood.
Here in New Zealand people opine that Kim Dotcom is not a significant figure of the internet like in the realm of an Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, Jimmy Wales or a Mark Zuckerberg and yet that is precisely what he now is, a global internet megastar.
Last week (January 30th) another giant of the internet - inventor of the Web Tim Berners-Lee visited Wellington. Berners-Lee is the world's leading proponent of an open web and Public Lecture in New Zealand was on the subject of "openness", a subject that he addressed from multiple angles. Scoop's coverage of the lecture (including video of the Press Conference which followed can be found HERE "World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee In Wellington | Scoop Video Public Lecture + Press Conference".
Unfortunately Berners-Lee, who works at a diplomatic level as a kind of unofficial Secretary of State for a Free Internet - was like most official sources not at all keen to discuss Mr Kim Dotcom by name. Tim Berners-Lee's public lecture on January 30th did not mention Kim Dotcom at all.
However the issue was raised in the second question from the floor and also at the Press Conference.
It seems likely that having met with the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key earlier in the day Berners-Lee was well aware of the sensitivity of the subject in New Zealand, and being a very diplomatic chap did not wish to further inflame what is clearly a very complicated and delicate situation .
However several remarks by the inventor of the world wide web in his first public visit to New Zealand can be interpreted as meaning that the Dotcom/Megaupload affair is of considerable interest to the free internet's leading international diplomat.
Firstly Berners-Lee concluded his lecture saying that the two things he was most concerned about on the current world wide web were threats of government and corporate interference of two particular kinds: blocking and spying. (Arguably Megaupload and Kim Dotcom are the largest and most public illustrations of both sides of both these issues.)
Earlier, when speaking about "Open Platforms", Berners-Lee stressed the importance of networks not being restrictive about what devices connect to them and - importantly - what software they run. While he did not mention Kim Dotcom in this discussion it effectively relates to whether ISPs and Telecommunications Companies (and their host Governments) should attempt to regulate devices and software can connect to the internet. ( MEGA - a brand new encrypted version of the largest file sharing service ever deployed Megaupload - is the largest ever deployment of client side encryption technology - i.e. encryption which takes place inside your computer or phone. )
And finally Berners-Lee also sung - very proudly - the praises of the HTML 5 evolution of his invention (HTML). HTML-5 he said would create a much smarter, more mobile, more intelligent (but still open) and responsive web as a result of making pages programmable and standardising and opening the programmable parts of web standards. (MEGA is a very sophisticated example of HTML 5 technology which is why MEGA recommends its users use Google Chrome - the most standards compliant of the web browser platforms. When you access MEGA.co.nz the encryption software is loaded from the page source on the fly eliminating the need to install software on your computer to both access and produce fully encrypted data - enabling this to be done effectively from all devices, everywhere, simply).
Until the launch of MEGA.co.nz Kim Dotcom's profile in New Zealand was mainly premised on being a source of legal consternation, law and security service embarrassment, and presenting a constitutional law conundrum.
After the launch of MEGA.co.nz Kim Dotcom has arguably become an economic opportunity. Not that anyone significant is willing to say so yet.
This is partly because the implications of MEGA.co.nz are so huge, so threatening and so hard to understand for New Zealand. And it is also partly due to the fact that Dotcom offends New Zealanders' innate preference for self-effacement.
At the launch of MEGA the writer asked Kim Dotcom whether the illegal GCSB spying activity on him was the inspiration for his desire to launch an encrypted communications platform?
"It's a great part of the motivation behind it", Dotcom replied, "because, you know, before all this happened to me I was living in this happy bubble. I didn't know too much about spying, I didn't care too much about it, and when this happened to me I started doing my research and it's unbelievable the large scale spying that is going on today. I was like wow, how can that all be legal, where are our rights to privacy and that's why we were motivated to develop this product."
Ubiquitous Encryption - The Promise Of
MEGA Espionage is an arms race in technology, and
the launch of MEGA.co.nz is a significant milestone in that
race. What makes MEGA.co.nz different than anything
before it in the world of cloud storage is its promise of
ubiquitous "military grade" encryption. MEGA.co.nz is
offering to restore something which looks a lot like privacy
to an online world which had largely forgotten the meaning
of the word. MEGA.co.nz takes longer than your average
website to load because the page that you load is much
cleverer smarter than your average web-page. When you
connect to MEGA.co.nz your browser (running on your own
computer) is itself the encryption engine. Via a series of
fairly clever tricks - which appear to be still evolving as
they are critiqued by cryptographers from around the world -
MEGA.co.nz gives the keys of encryption solely to the
computer user. In order for anyone - including MEGA.co.nz
- to see what the contents of any mega file are they need
either to have (1) access to the computer of the user, or
(2) permission from the user. This differs from many
online encryption systems (Google Drive, iCloud, M$oft
Cloud, Amazon etc.) where the keys to the encryption are
held (safely) by the cloud storage provider.
In the first part of this story
we remarked on the spectacular growth path of the MEGA.co.nz
site in becoming the largest NZ site on the web in under a
month. It seems very likely that this pace of growth was
also a huge surprise to its creators. People in the
internet business are used to strong and steady starts
followed by - if you have a winner - what they call the
"hockey stick" trajectory of exponential growth. It
appears that this was not the case with MEGA. Instead
MEGA ignited like a bonfire. From zero to incandescent in a
very short space of time indeed. The fact that the
platform has been able to absorb these insane levels of
growth and survive is a tribute to the capability of the
engineers who have deployed it - and is probably down to the
fact that they had already built and deployed the world's
most popular distributed cloud-storage network in
Megaupload. However the question begged most loudly by the
insane growth of MEGA.co.nz is not how, but why? Why do
millions of people want to trust Kim Dotcom - a person whose
business was destroyed when his file systems were seized by
the FBI, along with their data? And the answer to this
question is obvious in an Emperor's new clothes like
fashion. There is a simply huge desire for privacy among
users of an Internet which appears to have forgotten the
meaning of the word. Because Privacy Demand Is Huge - MEGA's
Implications Are Also Huge On one level (as
explained by Dotcom himself) MEGA is a simple response to a
desire to put privacy back into his own life and that of his
business partners. However by doing so as easily as he
has done (five months from conception to launch), and by
effectively striking oil by experiencing such astronomical
levels of uptake, MEGA has opened a pandora's box. MEGA
has shown: 1. that this form of encryption technology can
be deployed effectively and relatively easily - at
scale; This creates the conditions for
massive investment to follow. And because the latest wave
of multi-threaded multicore processors + HTML 5 have made it
possible to build and deploy client-side (i.e. in your
phone) browser-based encryption services - which make the
data stream invisible to the network - it is now possible
for these services to quickly become ubiquitous. What this
means is that it is now possible to build a secure viber
like untappable voip network and indeed according to the
founders of MEGA, the idea of providing API like tools to
serve as the authentication and transport layer for these
services has already been identified as an enhancement of
their MEGA product offering. And that is the promise of
MEGA. To restore privacy to the internet. As Dotcom
himself tweeted: #Mega is the
PRIVACY company. Not the PIRACY company. Before the launch of MEGA.co.nz Kim
Dotcom was firmly in the gun sights of the Motion Picture
Association of America. They wanted him stopped. And on
January 20th 2012 they got their way. After the launch of
MEGA.co.nz Dotcom has initiated a game-changing technology
step change for the US National Security Administration
(NSA), the US Department of Homeland Security, the UK
Goverment's GCHQ and indeed every spying and law enforcement
operation on the planet. The full story of how Megaupload
was shut down is yet to emerge.What is known already points
towards a very heady mixture of political influence,
campaign finance and private use of the US law enforcement
apparatus. In this case through bowing to the wishes of
corporate lobbyists - and in the case of NZ through some
apparently extreme foolishness - the security agencies
involved in the shutdown of Megaupload have reaped a
whirlwind. For years (especially post 9/11) it has been
widely reported that our technology
giants have been providing back-doors to high level security
systems to the likes of the NSA - the enormous US National
Security Agency which does its best to run an all-seeing
global surveillance operation. The NSA is the lead US
agency in an intelligence partnership called UKUSA which includes NZ, Australia, Canada,
the UK and the USA. The NZ agency in this partnership being
the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau). The
so called "Echelon" surveillance network which is operated by the five UKUSA
powers is unquestionably the most effective signals
intelligence (spying) technology ever built. Cynical
observers have long suggested that by using this network spy
agencies get around the rules against spying on their own
citizens by spying on each other’s instead. And in the
Megaupload case this all went spectacularly wrong on the
24th of September last year. Unlawful
GCSB Activities - NZ PM John Key Press Conference 24 Sept
2012 On September 24th 2012 the New
Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced that he had
initiated an inquiry into how the GCSB had come to illegally
spy on Kim Dotcom in the lead-up to the raids on his house
in January of that year. The fact of Kim Dotcom's
surveillance by the NZ arm of the global Echelon spy network
emerged as a result of the legal process around US attempts
to extradite him, and information obtained by the legal team
working for Dotcom. In December 2012 the GCSB was enjoined
to a case as a respondent in Judicial Review proceedings
around the raid on Dotcom's home. The judge in these
proceedings had earlier found that warrants executed against
Dotcom were both illegally issued and improperly used. And
it appears that the police officer in charge of the New
Zealand end of the copyright enforcement action not only
used illegal unwarranted surveillance techniques, but that
he also lied about this in the High Court Proceedings. In
her December decision the judge in the Judicial Review
proceedings Justice Winkleman ordered, among other things,
that the GCSB produce a full accounting of all surveillance
activity against Dotcom. This is the first order of that
nature ever issued in the New Zealand legal jurisdiction and
is extraordinarily unusual. While we do not know what this
has revealed yet, Dotcom’s increasingly strident
statements on the matter suggest there is more dirty laundry
from the New Zealand Government yet to
come. Amnesia Of The Johns - When Irony
Attacks Kim Dotcom's
song Amnesia At this point in the
story behind why we have leading up to the MEGA launch we
need to go back a few months and examine how Kim Dotcom
found his way into the sympathies of the New Zealand
public. In the days after the raid the main line of
questioning by the NZ Press Gallery in the developing Kim
Dotcom saga was: "Why did this notorious international
criminal get residency in New Zealand?" However this
chorus soon changed, mainly as a result of the amnesia of
the Johns. In April the story was kicked off by this
remarkable report from New Zealand's leading TV current
affairs host John Campbell of Campbell Live: Banks knew about 'anonymous' Dotcom
donation - reports In the report John Banks - a
sitting cabinet minister in the newly elected John Key
Government and a critically important coalition partner of
the government - was recorded claiming that he could not
remember being taken by helicopter to Kim Dotcom's mansion
and being offered a $50,000 donation towards his campaign
for the Auckland Mayoralty. Nor could he remember whether he
had received the donation though it was subsequently alleged
that he had himself asked that the donation be split into
two $25,000 cheques so he could get it processed and
declared as anonymous. In New Zealand politics any hint of
a blatant lie is usually fatal for a cabinet minister's
employment. Ther are numerous examples of Ministers being
stood down for far lesser offences even. However because the
Government of John Key so needed John Banks’ vote in order
to pass legislation to enable a state asset sell-off,
sacking him was not a ready option in early 2012. And so it
began. In May 2012 TV3 followed up the John Banks amnesia
story with a fascinating report. Who knew what about Kim Dotcom which
begged a very curious question: How could it be possible,
as the Prime Minister claimed, that the first time he had
heard of Kim Dotcom was the day before the raids on his
house on 19 January 2012? Dotcom lived in John Key's own
electorate. Key's constituents had gone to his office and
both complained about and praised their new neighbour.
Dotcom was a major political donor to John Banks' whose run
for office was of significant interest to John Key's first
term government who had even engineered a gerrymander to
facilitate a Banks win . In addition Dotcom was a
significant high value high-tech economic migrant to New
Zealand, and had paid for a $600,000 firework display to
celebrate being granted residency. Several of John Key's
fellow cabinet ministers did know about Kim Dotcom. Justice
Minister Simon Power and Lands Minister Maurice Williamson
had been involved in the overseas investment office
deliberations over whether he should be allowed to purchase
his house. Two other ministers - Attorney General Chris
Finlayson and Police Minister Judith Collins - were aware of
Kim Dotcom due to their being in the loop - alongside
Justice Minister Simon Power - over the joint FBI Police
operation against Dotcom. By now the question of his
Amnesia was being regularly put to John Key directly. And he
consistently stuck to his guns. He had never heard of Kim
Dotcom until January 19th 2012. John Key even asked his
staff to do an exhaustive search of documents to see if they
could find anything to contradict him. They couldn't do so.
Not to his knowledge anyway.
The
Constitutional Conundrum of Prime Minister John Key's Dotcom
Amnesia Taken together the Prime Minister's lack
of knowledge of anything Dotcom related, and the
revelations of illegal spying, moved the Dotcom saga up a
notch as a political story. This is because the Prime
Minister is also the Minister solely responsible for
oversight of the GCSB. Before the GCSB revelations the
Dotcom story had been an embarrassment which was playing out
mainly in the courts. With the introduction of alleged
GCSB misconduct to the frame the Prime Minister was
personally and directly brought into the line of fire in the
New Zealand Parliament The story then set a course towards
becoming a constitutional crisis. When announcing the
GCSB screw-up on the 24th of September the Prime Minister
was asked when he became aware of the GCSB involvement in
the Dotcom inquiry? The PM replied saying he had found this
out on the September 17th a week earlier. (NOTE: News of
the GCSB involvement in the case prompted John Campbell to
broadcast another from-the-hip marvellous editorial : http://www.3news.co.nz/The-New-Zealand-institutions-that-broke-our-trust/tabid/367/articleID/272227/Default.aspx
The New Zealand institutions that broke our trust
Sensing blood the opposition turned up the heat
in Parliament questioning the Prime Minister's recollection
and probing the issue of who knew what when. In the midst
of this drama a leak from inside the GCSB revealed that
Dotcom had been mentioned in a briefing at the GCSB at which
Key had been present - thereby contradicting his earlier
statements to the media and to the house.Key was forced to
apologise to the house. But before he could do so there was
a significant breakdown in Parliamentary decorum leading to
the sending from the house of two senior MPs (Related
Links: The Scoop.co.nz team reported this period in these
reports: Also
on 18 October the writer sought the opinion of one of the
most senior members of the New Zealand Parliament, New
Zealand First Party Leader Winston Peters, on the fast
developing constitutional crisis. Winston Peters
expressed a view that there was no adequate procedure
available for Parliament to hold the Prime Minister to
account over these matters and that this gave rise to
questions around the efficacy of the constitutional
arrangements when it came to matters such as these.
All of which is to say (and
congratulations if you have read this far) that this is a
story that reaches across a very broad array of touch
points within the New Zealand security, political and legal
apparatus. And it is a story which is very arguably still
in its early phases. As the court process continues to
roll on, further revelations will almost certainly continue
to emerge. There are several distinct legal actions
underway - all of which will continue to provide fuel
to the fires of controversy. According to informed
sources the extradition case against Dotcom now looks likely
to be pushed back into 2014. A futures contract on this on
the ipredict website is currently indicating just a 3%
chance of extradition this year and only a 9% chance in
2014. 2014 also happens to be a general election year to
decide the next New Zealand Government. Thankfully the
Judicial Review proceedings in NZ and legal moves to strike
out the charges in the United States are moving considerably
faster and these will potentially have a bearing on whether
the extradition proceedings get dropped altogether. In the
political realm the story is also far from over. Near the
end of last year we also learned it was revealed via an
Official Information Act release made to Radio New Zealand
that New Zealand's domestic spy agency the SIS had been
asked to assist with the Dotcom case by the FBI in October
2010, 14 months before the raid on the Dotcom
mansion. They had declined to do so and had instead
referred the FBI to the New Zealand Police's new organised
and financial crimes taskforce. This is a significant new
fact as it begs the question: When did the SIS Director
Warren Tucker - a person who had previously served as GCSB
director - first learn that his sister agency was illegally
spying on a New Zealand resident? As a former director of
the GCSB he would of course be very clearly aware of what
limitations there are on GCSB surveillance operations inside
New Zealand. And once he became aware of GCSB illegality
did he inform the minister that he also reports to, Prime
Minister John Key? And then we have the question of the
future of MEGA itself. In the circumstances it does seem
possible even probable - notwithstanding Dotcom's assertion
that he is on very sound legal ground - that legal
proceedings will be brought against MEGA to try to shut it
down. These would most likely take the form of an
application for an injunction to block the use of the
mega.co.nz domain for operations as this would probably be
the most effective way to try to prevent the website from
operating. However any such action would almost certainly
simply see a new escalation of all of the issues covered
aboveadd still further fuel to the fire, and run the risk of
making MEGA even stronger if it failed. Aside from the
substantive issues related to whether we are entitled to
store our own files in privacy Dotcom's lawyers would be
able to assert that the New Zealand Government is acting in
bad faith having previously exercised illegal warrants which
were used to destroy his substantial global
business. It’s a long-held truism in journalism that
some stories will just run and run. And there’s definitely
no hiding from this story – to be continued.
ENDS
3. that there is massive latent demand for it
among internet users.
27 September Shearer: Chain of Command, Control, and
Conflicting Interests
1 October Key, Dotcom and
Hollywood
1 October PM Going to Hollywood | Peters in 'Fantasy
Land'
12 October PM Must Confirm Or Deny
Dotcom Comment
15 October Security Train Wrecks for Govt:
Dotcom | MSD | Huawei
16 October Key corrects his story on Dotcom
knowledge
17 October Gordon Campbell on secrecy about charter
schools, and Dotcom
18 October GCSB in the House on Wednesday )
Is The Kim Dotcom Affair Becoming A
Constitutional
Crisis?