Re: Megaupload.com seized

[Steven Bellovin <smb () cs columbia edu>]

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
-- 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