Department of Justice Pulls the Plug on Megaupload File Sharing Site

"The [Mega Conspiracy] case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.

The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) [link added], with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Philippines also provided assistance."---Department of Justice (1-19-12) 

The Department of Justice Criminal Division Cybercrimes and Intellectual Property Taskforce has taken down a file-sharing site called Megaupload. This action was taken after a federal grand jury studied the evidence for two years, determined that there was probable cause that felonies were/are being committed, and issued an Indictment.


A website of the U.S. Federal Courts explains the functions of the grand jury and the petit (trial) jury:


The United States attorney, the prosecutor in federal criminal cases, presents evidence to the grand jury for them to determine whether there is "probable cause" to believe that an individual has committed a crime and should be put on trial. If the grand jury decides there is enough evidence, it will issue an indictment against the defendant. Grand jury proceedings are not open for public observation.


According to page 18 of the grand jury's Indictment, 525 servers leased by Megaupload are located in Ashburn, Virginia. The computers are owned by Carpathia Hosting, a company "headquartered in Dulles and with data centers in Ashburn, Harrisonburg, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Toronto." Ashburn Patch (1-20-12). According to the Ashburn Patch (1-20-12), millions of dollars are going to a Carpathia bank account in Richmond, Virginia. Details about the financial transactions between Megaupload and Carpathia Hosting are available at the Ashburn Patch (1-20-12), but I think the same information is in the 74-page Indictment.

Seven people and two companies (Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited) were indicted, but the Indictment says that other people "known and unknown to the grand jury" were also part of the conspiracy. (See page 2 of the Indictment.) The mention of known and unknown conspirators might mean that the government has unindicted co-conspirators who are cooperating with the investigation, but nobody knows who is talking to the grand jury and/or the authorities and whom the authorities are still tracking down. According to the Indictment (page 13), Megaupload employs more than 30 people in approximately 9 countries.   

The founder of Megaupload is said to be Kim Dotcom (formerly known as Kim Schmitz), a person with a string of aliases and a long history of unethical and criminal behavior. Schmitz sounds like a cartoon villain in a Bond movie according to this colorful article titled "Inside Megaupload's Megamind" (1-20-12). 

Read the DOJ press release titled Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement. See more information about the Intellectual Property Task Force.

It is hard to read the FBI and DOJ sites because the hacktivists called Anonymous are taking it down with a Denial of Service attack.  Cyber criminals evidently think that there is nothing wrong with preventing the public from reading our government's websites or with making millions by selling stolen movies.

Some people parked the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in a file on the Megaupload site. Now the site is shut down, and global warming denialists like Virginia's oppressive Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Ashburn's ludicrous blogger "ex-CIA operative" Kent Clizbe might not be able to access these stolen emails in order to mischaracterize their contents and defame climate scientists as liars and criminals. This suits me just fine.

In order to seem like an authoritative source on the so-called "hoax" of global warming, blogger-conspiracist Kent Clizbe claims that he used to be an operative for the CIA; but Kent Clizbe fails to inform his readers that the CIA is giving climate scientists security clearances or that the CIA is studying the national security implications of climate change. If people want to know what the CIA says about climate change, perhaps they should read what Larry Kobayashi, the head of the CIA's Center for Climate Change and National Security, explained to the media in an article titled "Our Man in the Greenhouse: Why the CIA is Spying on a Changing Climate." For Kent Clizbe's unhinged disinformation campaign read "Kent Clizbe: Our Man in the Nut House."

Virginia's Attorney General Cuccinelli and Ashburn's "ex-CIA operative" Kent Clizbe might also want to read what the National Intelligence Council says about global warming and climate change. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) "is a center of strategic thinking within the US Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community." Probably they know more than Ashburn's "ex-CIA operative" and blogger-conspiracist Kent Clizbe.

The NIC does research on a variety of foreign policy and national security issues, but they are most recognized for their groundbreaking research on transnational organized crime. According to the National Intelligence Council, “Transnational criminal networks are actively targeting U.S. ... government programs.”

The NIC has posted a document called "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." This document is a collection of research and conference reports. On June 25, 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, summarized this report in Congress.

In his testimony before Congress, Dr. Fingar stated:

"Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses andcontracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community."

The conspiracist Ashburn blogger Kent Clizbe and the abusive Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is persecuting the world-famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, might want to read "The Impact of Climate Change to 2030." In my opinion, Cuccinelli persecutes climate scientists because his father is a consultant/lobbyist for the natural gas industry. His father's company, Quest-Fore, gave $96,000 to Attorney General Cuccinelli's campaign, according to a report published on the Internet.

The mendacious Cuccinelli and his deputy W. Russell claim that Dr. Michael Mann is being investigated for fraud, not because he is one of the world's foremost climate scientists. That is a transparent lie. Dr. Mann is being hounded by operatives for the fossil-fuel industry who are operating against our national security from their outpost in the Virginia Attorney General's office.

Dr. Michael Mann earned two Ph.D.s from Yale and a Nobel Prize (2007) for his work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

Dr. Mann and Dr. Kump have co-authored a book titled Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. This book is based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report and more recent research.

Our intelligence agencies accept what the IPCC scientists say, but when he sued the EPA, Attorney General Cuccinelli used an article from the Russian government's press agency RIA Novosti as "proof" that climate scientists are fudging their research.