NZ Judge: Kim Dotcom's Being Spied On, Can Do Little About It

[Karloff]

NZ Judge: Kim Dotcom's Being Spied On, Can Do Little About It

You've got to prove it's the US doing it, says Judge Dawson.

Kim Dotcom [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119829-New-Zealand-Prime-Minister-Apologizes-to-Kim-Dotcom]'s extradition to the US has yet to be decided one way or the other. One of his concerns is that, according to an application made to Auckland's District Court, "he or his family may have been subjected to surveillance activities undertaken by or on behalf of the applicant [the US government] that would be prejudicial to Mr Dotcom at the extradition hearing to be held." Judge Dawson has said that yes, Dotcom is probably being spied on, even now. But his application still fails, because Dotcom would have to show that it was the US, specifically, that was spying on him, in order to make his case.

Dotcom's been having all kinds of phone problems. His iPhone battery keeps dying unexpectedly, a possible symptom, he says, of Trojan infection. The spyware could be increasing battery usage, as it communicates with the people who installed it. He's had some very odd experiences when calling his lawyer, William Akel, which could mean that his attorney-client privileged communications are being intercepted by the NSA.

The most intriguing symptoms occur when Dotcom's at his rural Coatesville property, which has lousy cellphone reception. He installed a few extra signal boosters, but they didn't help much. He resigned himself to poor reception, only to discover one day that he was getting a perfect signal. Except it wasn't thanks to his provider, Vodaphone.

"The closest cell tower is five kilometers away," says Dotcom. "We shouldn't have five bars' signal strength. The only logical explanation is Stingray, which simulates a cell tower, makes your mobile connect to it because it's the strongest signal source." Stingray [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the-machines-that-steal-your-phones-data/] is a surveillance device, known to be used by US intelligence agencies.

The court [https://zen.nzherald.co.nz/media/webcontent/document/pdf/201350/dotcomjudgement.pdf] accepted that it was "likely", but not proved, that surveillance had occurred. Even so, without direct evidence that the US was involved - evidence that Dotcom is unlikely ever to be able to provide - there's no reason to think he wouldn't have a "fair and just extradition hearing."

That hearing's scheduled for April 2014.

Source: Ars Technica [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/nz-judge-kim-dotcom-is-likely-still-being-spied-upon/]


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[rofltehcat]

Chances are that the signal quality will now decline a little bit to not make it as obvious.

Why doesn't he get his own cell phone tower, anyways? He has more than enough money for it.

 

[Tanis]

The United States of America:
Home Of The Free, As Long As You Can Pay The Fee.

I remember being told, as a child, that America was exceptional.
A lighthouse of truth, justice, and freedom in a world covered in the fog of deceit, prejudice, and heteronomy.

Guess it's just another lie, like Santa and the good old days.

 

[Colt47]

No I'm increasingly dissappointed with the country I live in and what the government is doing. If the government can't make a case without spying (and at this point from his symptoms he definitely is being spied on by the US, this is just a cat and mouse game), they don't have a right to make a trial in my mind.

 

[cerebus23]

The United States of America:
Home Of The Free, As Long As You Can Pay The Fee.

I remember being told, as a child, that America was exceptional.
A lighthouse of truth, justice, and freedom in a world covered in the fog of deceit, prejudice, and heteronomy.

Guess it's just another lie, like Santa and the good old days.

we were all fed the lie also.

now days our leaders mostly jump for who has the biggest wallets, and the mpaaa and the riaa have very very big wallets.

granted some of these guys are guilty of all sorts or stuff, but some of the actions and etc taken agaisnt these guys does not match the level of their crimes if any ("innocent" until proven guilty n all)

 

[CriticalMiss]

You and everyone else in the world Kim, they're just giving you the personal treatment. And they'll get away with it too because money because terrorism.

 

[crepesack]

If kim spends a few million of his own money to higher some white hat hackers/electrical engineers I'm pretty sure he could prove it.

 

[Weaver]

It's been heavily suspected for years that the NSA or other government body has worked with American phone and operating system manufacturers to create backdoors into their software/hardware for the government. This would not surprise me at all.

I think what most Americans should take away from this is your government is spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions a year to personally monitor some fat guy who made a site that let people store and share files. In Detroit the cops take 8+ hours to respond to a break in call due to massive budget cuts and huge crime rates. But if you're a company you can make the government illegally spy on a single individual overseas at great expense to the taxpayers.

This is reality.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Of course he's being spied on. Hollywood wants him dead because he's a threat to their slowly crumbling control over the media and they will pay the US government millions to destroy him. There is no question about what's going on, just an unsurprising lack of evidence permissible in court.

 

[Stu35]

It seems to be a massive double standard...

From you people. The forumers.

See, on the one hand, you demand Justice and Freedom, in particular that a man is Innocent until proven guilty.

One bloke suggests he's being spied on by the US government and everyone immediately assumes it must be the case. No proof, no evidence, in your minds you've already convicted the US Government of spying without a shred of ACTUAL evidence.

I'm personally not going to say one way or the other (Fuck it, of course I am: Yeah they probably are spying on him), however I find it fascinating how many people abandon the simple idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' as soon as it applies to someone (or something) they don't like.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I remember being told, as a child, that America was exceptional.
A lighthouse of truth, justice, and freedom in a world covered in the fog of deceit, prejudice, and heteronomy.

There was a time when the United States did stand for something good, but that period was much more brief than most people like to admit. Corruption began slipping in almost immediately and it pretty much had control by the mid 1800s. Corporations were declared to have the same rights as individuals not long after the civil war, which means they had to have had a lot of influence before that in order to push it through.
Now, the country stands for the very things that caused it to seek independence from Britain in the first place: multinational corporations profiting from the exploitation of weaker countries and a blind eye being turned to it because of bribes and insiders. They don't teach in schools anymore that the Boston Tea Party wasn't about Britain, but about the East India Trading Company's bribery of the British Parliament to allow the colonies to be exploited and unfairly taxed. America declared independence from Britain because it refused to do away with those corrupt ties.
Now we have the World Trade Organization, a multinational corporation using taxes and tariffs to exploit third-world countries in South America, Africa and south-east Asia without giving those countries any authority or power to have a say on what the taxes are. And US goes along with it because WTO has huge wallets and is more than happy to give its table scraps to our politicians for favors. Considering the vast ill-gotten wealth of the WTO, the US government has sold its soul surprisingly cheap.

History, it seems, repeats itself without shame.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

Little do they know, he's adopted a secret identity and is currently writing about video games under the alias "Jim Sterling."

 

[lacktheknack]

I wonder if it's going to turn into a bizarre scavenger hunt to find the cell tower within the next five months. That would make for some interesting news if he finds it.

 

[Eric the Orange]

I'd feel more sorry for the guy if he didn't change his last name to "dotcom". He just comes off as such a douche.

 

[Eric the Orange]

You and everyone else in the world Kim, they're just giving you the personal treatment. And they'll get away with it too because money because terrorism.

I like "the exhibitionist" personally,

http://www.xkcd.com/1269/

 

[Pebkio]

Um... yes? Of course? I'm surprised he wasn't expecting it from the start. I'm surprised he wasn't prepared for this bullshit as soon as his personal computers were illegally siezed. As for his claims, they aren't too out there. If you pay enough attention, you can tell when intereception of data is happening.

Now I won't say that it's definitely the US Government doing it, I wouldn't be suprised... but someone else might be spying on him. That's the whole proof part, I guess, I'd accept all of his desriptions as evidence of spying, but I couldn't accept them as the US spying. And I like Dotcom.

Speaking of which: Leave Mr. Dotcom, alright? The US is just pissed that he blazenly stood up to our "justice" system. It started with our government using it's resources for the betterment of a group of companies, but Mega was a big middle finger aimed squarely at us and now we just want him here to show everyone that no one can do that to us. That's my feeling from it, anyway.

 

[DEAD34345]

It seems to be a massive double standard...

From you people. The forumers.

See, on the one hand, you demand Justice and Freedom, in particular that a man is Innocent until proven guilty.

One bloke suggests he's being spied on by the US government and everyone immediately assumes it must be the case. No proof, no evidence, in your minds you've already convicted the US Government of spying without a shred of ACTUAL evidence.

I'm personally not going to say one way or the other (Fuck it, of course I am: Yeah they probably are spying on him), however I find it fascinating how many people abandon the simple idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' as soon as it applies to someone (or something) they don't like.

The government was already found 100% guilty of illegally raiding his home with goddamn assault rifles, weren't they? I don't think there's any way they could be any more guilty than they already are to be honest, this is just more injustices on the guy to add to the pile.

If kim spends a few million of his own money to higher some white hat hackers/electrical engineers I'm pretty sure he could prove it.

They've frozen his money. He actually made an offer to willingly go back to the US himself if they'd unfreeze his funds "for lawyers and living expenses".

 

[skorpion352]

It seems to be a massive double standard...

From you people. The forumers.

See, on the one hand, you demand Justice and Freedom, in particular that a man is Innocent until proven guilty.

One bloke suggests he's being spied on by the US government and everyone immediately assumes it must be the case. No proof, no evidence, in your minds you've already convicted the US Government of spying without a shred of ACTUAL evidence.

I'm personally not going to say one way or the other (Fuck it, of course I am: Yeah they probably are spying on him), however I find it fascinating how many people abandon the simple idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' as soon as it applies to someone (or something) they don't like.

The government was already found 100% guilty of illegally raiding his home with goddamn assault rifles, weren't they? I don't think there's any way they could be any more guilty than they already are to be honest, this is just more injustices on the guy to add to the pile.

If kim spends a few million of his own money to higher some white hat hackers/electrical engineers I'm pretty sure he could prove it.

They've frozen his money. He actually made an offer to willingly go back to the US himself if they'd unfreeze his funds "for lawyers and living expenses".

I believe they have since unfrozen most of his funds, in the wake of the whole "search was illegal" thing. They had to return anything that wasn't evidence (basically, everything other than his hard drives, and I think he might have gotten a couple of those back too, but I'm not sure), which meant he got a large chunk of his money back.

Of course, if he words it the right way, posing it as a challenge, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that would do it to a) fuck with the government, and b) just because they can. Any cash prize would be icing on the cake for those people.

The whole thing is just a giant clusterfuck at this point and 90% of the "evidence" they are probably going to try and use to extradite him was probably obtained illegally. Also, the only charge he has to fight at the extradition hearing is the racketeering/money laundering charges, as under New Zealand law/extradition agreements, copyright infringement does not qualify for extradition. So if they can't provide enough evidence to show they have a case for the racketeering/money laundering charges, he can't be extradited.

 

[Yopaz]

It seems to be a massive double standard...

From you people. The forumers.

See, on the one hand, you demand Justice and Freedom, in particular that a man is Innocent until proven guilty.

One bloke suggests he's being spied on by the US government and everyone immediately assumes it must be the case. No proof, no evidence, in your minds you've already convicted the US Government of spying without a shred of ACTUAL evidence.

I'm personally not going to say one way or the other (Fuck it, of course I am: Yeah they probably are spying on him), however I find it fascinating how many people abandon the simple idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' as soon as it applies to someone (or something) they don't like.

You know I was reading that article and his description of what was going on and I really thought it seemed kinda paranoid. Most likely he is being spied on to some degree and most likely more than most of us since he's definitely on their watch list, but the part about his iPhone battery dying... well, it is an iPhone.