Canadian Court Rejects US Demand For Full Access To Megaupload Servers

[nsane.forums]

United States government will only have limited, court-supervised access.

An Ontario judge has refused a US request for unfettered access to the data on Megaupload servers hosted in Canada. The ruling is another sign that overseas courts are not giving US officials the degree of deference they've grown accustomed to in this case under US law.

Megaupload once had servers around the world, but they were shut down in a coordinated raid on January 19, 2012. In the United States, the government quickly took possession of servers Megaupload had leased from Carpathia Hosting, copied the data they wanted from the hard drives, and then returned the servers to Carpathia. Carpathia has complained it lost thousands of dollars because it was not able to re-allocate these leased servers to another client.

The government wanted similarly unfettered access to the Canadian servers. But Megaupload objected. As Canadian Justice Gladys Pardu described Megaupload's position: "[T]here is an enormous volume of information on the servers... sending mirror image copies of all of this data would be overly broad, particularly in light of the scantiness of the evidence connecting these servers to the crimes alleged by the American prosecutors."

Justice Pardu sided with Megaupload, denying the government's request for full copies of the servers, which she described as "equivalent of that contained on 100 laptop computers." Instead, she ordered the United States and Megaupload to negotiate about which information the government should get access to under court supervision. If the parties are unable to reach an agreement, Justice Pardu herself will make the decision.

There are good reasons to worry about overly broad disclosures of electronically-stored data. When Ohio videographer Kyle Goodwin, who used Megaupload as a backup service, requested the return of files on the servers, the government responded by examining Goodwin's files. It found he had uploaded "music files with MD5 values that matched the hash values of pirated versions of popular music."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Julie Samuels argued that demonstrates "that if users try to get their property back, the government won't hesitate to comb through it to try to find an argument to use against them." Goodwin had not been suspected of any crime, so there was no reason his files should have been subject to scrutiny. The Canadian procedure is meant to ensure that the government only has access to evidence that's relevant to the Megaupload case.

New Zealand courts have also tried to rein in US access to information in the Megaupload case. Last summer, a judge ruled the search warrant used to raid Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's mansion was invalid. Unfortunately, the US had already taken custody of some of Dotcom's hard drives and transferred them to the United States.

View: Original Article

[iaTa]

"equivalent of that contained on 100 laptop computers."

Lol. She knew what she was talking about then, not!

[nsane.forums]

Canadian Court Refuses to Ship Megaupload Servers to the US

A Canadian court has rejected a request from the United States to hand over 32 servers hosted by a local provider. Instead of simply handing over all data, which may include personal files of users, the court decided to first determine what files are stored on the machines. Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken is pleased with the ruling and hopes the United States will be more considerate of the privacy of cloud hosting users when requesting data seizures in the future.

When Megaupload was raided last year the U.S. Government seized 1,103 servers at Carpathia’s hosting facility in the United States.

However, that was not the only hardware used by the file-hosting site. Megaupload also had machines elsewhere including 32 servers at an Equinix datacenter in Canada.

Suspecting that these machines may hold crucial data for the ongoing lawsuit, the U.S. Government asked Canada to hand them over for investigation.

In their request to the court the authorities back up their claim by citing an email from Megaupload staff, stating that the Canadian servers “will serve as a database / number crunching machines.”

Megaupload protested this broad request arguing that the servers may contain a lot of information that’s simply irrelevant to the case. The company asked the court to either deny the request, or appoint an “independent forensic examiner” who can inform the court what kind of files are stored on the 32 servers.

The Ontario court agreed with this reservation, and refused to send the servers to the United States before the contents are confirmed.

“The appropriate balance of the state interest in gathering evidence and privacy interests in information can be struck by an order that the servers be brought before the court [...] so that the court can make an order refining what is to be sent,” the order reads.

This likely means that an expert will be instructed to look at the Equinix servers to see whether the United States has any interest in the data. Until then, the servers will remain where they are.

Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken is pleased with the ruling which he says protects the interests of users.

“We are pleased that the Canadian Court has issued a ruling designed to protect the privacy rights of Megaupload users,” Rothken told TorrentFreak.

“We hope the United States going forward will take into consideration the privacy rights of cloud storage users before attempting to search and seize servers globally in criminal investigations.”

According to Rothken the public should be very careful as to what information they store on cloud hosting services. He adds that people should use encryption to make sure that their personal files don’t fall into the wrong hands.

“The Government’s aggressive conduct here makes it clear that cloud storage users should strongly consider encrypting what they store in the cloud to use technology as the ultimate guardian of privacy rights,” Rothken adds.

While the old Megaupload didn’t offer built-in encryption, it is no coincidence that the new Mega will.

Kim Dotcom previously told TorrentFreak that he hopes to turn encryption into a mass product with the new Mega, which is scheduled to launch in a few days.

“Our easy to use one-click privacy feature will turn encryption into a mass product. We believe within five years half of all Internet traffic will be encrypted with solutions born from our new API,” Dotcom said last month.

Meanwhile, the legal battles will continue.

View: Original Article

[nIGHT]

If canada request the same kind of access to some servers in the US will they heed to their request also? I think not. :P