Kim Dotcom’s Mega
Kim Dotcom’s Mega: File-sharing tycoon Kim Dotcom has a plan to become a multi-millionaire again: He’s filed a seven-figure lawsuit against the New Zealand government over the spectacular 2012 assault on his mansion, and the electronic spying that preceded it.
Court filings released this week show Dotcom and associates have made good on a threat last year to sue police and the country’s main spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, for the SWAT-style raid in which Dotcom and the others were arrested a year and a half ago.
The New Zealand government appealed a ruling last year that granted Dotcom the right to sue, but lost last March. Court documents filed in the High Court earlier this year, but not made public until this week, lay out Dotcom’s case that the police were excessively invasive and aggressive in conducting the raid, and used NSA-like spy systems to place him under covert surveillance.
“The case will show how the Five-Eyes spy cloud, X-Keyscore and PRISM were utilized in our copyright case,” Dotcom tells WIRED. “Remember, I’m not a terrorist.”
Dotcom’s mansion was illegally raided on January 20, 2012 by heavily armed police officers from the elite Special Tactics Group and Armed Offenders Squad, arriving in helicopters and vans. Some of the officers wore uniforms; others were dressed in civilian clothes without any police insignia or similar identification.
The U.S. government is accusing Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, of running a criminal conspiracy that made hundreds of millions of dollars by letting users share copyrighted files online. The Justice Department seized the company’s many domain names, servers and assets at the time of the raid, and is seeking extradition of Dotcom from New Zealand to the United States for trial.