Kim Dotcom is charged with having facilitated a large scale piracy operation with his Megaupload, where people uploaded and stored their own, personal files. He faces 20 years in prison, if convicted, on a multitude of charges.
His primary defense had been that the vast majority of the data stored on his servers was of personal nature or backups of business deals and only a tiny percentage held copyrighted material. The US Department of Justice had told the owner of the servers that Megaupload had rented for the storage that since the DOJ has enough data to prosecute Kim Dotcom, they can proceed to delete the files. Kim Dotcom protested on two grounds: the data stored in these servers was the personal intellectual property of his customers and nobody had the right to deprive them of it, and he needed the data for his defense.
Now, without warning, all the data had been deleted…
‘The information stored on the dormant servers – “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property” – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.
“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter.
Lawyers representing his former company “have repeatedly asked Leaseweb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the US,” he added. ‘
Yeah – go ahead and defend yourself – now that the evidence in your favour had been destroyed!
Kim Dotcom also said:
“My goal is, within the next five years, I want to encrypt half of the Internet. Just re-establish a balance between a person – an individual – and the state,” Dotcom said in an interview with RT. “Because right now, we are living very close to this vision of George Orwell and I think it’s not the right way. It’s the wrong path that the government is on, thinking that they can spy on everybody.”
And you wonder why the US government is targeting him?!?!?
