Megaupload Founder Reveals U.S. Government Usage Stats

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Megaupload Founder Reveals U.S. Government Usage Stats


It turns out that the U.S. military had over 15,000 active accounts on Megaupload, while other agencies including Homeland Security and the FBI accounted for another 1000.

The file sharing site Megaupload was said [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/115362-UPDATE-Feds-Take-Down-Megaupload] earlier this month, were a hefty number of folks from the U.S. government.

And now, as the effort to figure out what belongs to whom continues, some specific numbers have emerged. Dotcom told TorrentFreak [http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-us-military-had-15634-megaupload-accounts-120326/] that 1058 Megaupload accounts are held by users from the dhs.gov, doe.gov, fbi.gov, hhs.gov, nasa.gov, senate.gov, treas.gov and uscourts.gov domains, 344 of whom paid for premium access to the service. All told, these users uploaded 15,242 files totally 1,851,791 megabytes.

That's pretty bad, but the U.S. military has it a lot worse. 15,634 Megaupload accounts were registered from the af.mil, army.mil, centcom.mil, navy.mil, osd.mil and other related domains, 10,223 of which were paid, premium accounts. 340,983 files had been uploaded from these accounts, adding up to a whopping 96,507,779 megabytes.

Dotcom made no allegations about the nature of the data, but regardless of how it was being used, the loss of nearly 100 terabytes of data, some of which is bound to be legitimate - photos, letters, whatever - to a heavy-handed shutdown is truly unfortunate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Carpathia Hosting have a program to assist Megaupload users who have lost data in the takedown up now at megaretrieval.com [http://www.megaretrieval.com/].


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deth2munkies

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Jan 28, 2009
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"takedwon" slight typo there.

On to the actual matter:

I don't think this is quite relevant. People use their work e-mails for a lot of things and it's not like this was sensitive intelligence or anything, it was most likely stuff like work powerpoints, memos, personal photos and videos, etc.

Hopefully Megaupload will be back up eventually, it's quite annoying to use rapidshare for everything.
 

CrazyBlaze

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Jul 12, 2011
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I hope that some of those people who wanted to bring down the megasites were part of all that and that they were involved in pirating materials. That would be sweet, sweet irony.
 

Knight Templar

Moved on
Dec 29, 2007
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Rocklobster99 said:
Now, whenever someone says that MU being shut down is a good thing, I can respond that they hate America.

Cool.
Don't like Megaupload?
Terrorist.
Like Megaupload?
Pirate.

Pick your poison.
 

draythefingerless

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Jul 10, 2010
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Knight Templar said:
Rocklobster99 said:
Now, whenever someone says that MU being shut down is a good thing, I can respond that they hate America.

Cool.
Don't like Megaupload?
Terrorist.
Like Megaupload?
Pirate.

Pick your poison.
BUT WHAT IF I DONT USE MEGAUPLOAD? D:

OT: well on the scheme of grand things....no, no, thats still a shit ton of people and legitimate uploads.
 

FURY_007

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Jun 8, 2008
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draythefingerless said:
Knight Templar said:
Rocklobster99 said:
Now, whenever someone says that MU being shut down is a good thing, I can respond that they hate America.

Cool.
Don't like Megaupload?
Terrorist.
Like Megaupload?
Pirate.

Pick your poison.
BUT WHAT IF I DONT USE MEGAUPLOAD? D:

OT: well on the scheme of grand things....no, no, thats still a shit ton of people and legitimate uploads.
Communist :D

OT: That's interesting
 

antipunt

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Jan 3, 2009
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Weird. I never thought Takedwondo
Taekwondo
would result in lost data. What kind of martial arts is dis?

j/k j/k, I love you Andy :3
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Sep 6, 2009
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So America just screwed itself in the ass?

I wonder, what would happen, if indeed it showed that the government and Army were using the service for illegally obtaining and trading movies.
 

gigastar

Insert one-liner here.
Sep 13, 2010
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I wonder how many files uploaded by government or military personell were classified...

Andy Chalk said:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Carpathia Hosting have a program to assist Megaupload users who have lost data in the takedwon up now at megaretrieval.com.
Another slip of the finger accounted for and immortalised for as long as this forum survives.
 

Wintermoot

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Aug 20, 2009
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this is just awesome! I wouldn't be surprised if the people that supported the MU take down also had accounts! so the ENTIRE server is gone?
 

vxicepickxv

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Sep 28, 2008
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Buretsu said:
gigastar said:
I wonder how many files uploaded by government or military personell were classified...
Approximately 0, possibly less.
Less than zero? I don't think it can get that low. I'll bet it was a very low number, probably zero, maybe even as high as 3 or 4.
 

SenseOfTumour

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Jul 11, 2008
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antipunt said:
Weird. I never thought Takedwondo
Taekwondo
would result in lost data. What kind of martial arts is dis?

j/k j/k, I love you Andy :3
Reminds me of what Emo Philips said about computers - 'a computer will always beat me at chess, but I'll always win at kickboxing.'
 

Sougo

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Mar 20, 2010
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So if 60% of accounts engaged in piracy, and there are at least 1000 active FBI accounts, then we should be seeing around 600 FBI employees fired, tried and sentenced to 20+ years in jail, right?

Right?

Wrong!
This be the US of A. Here there be pirates.

EDIT: But heaven forbid if they find a pirate in the MI5...