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US Gov't Says They Can Still Freeze Megaupload Assets If the Case Is Dismissed
The Megaupload case continues, and on Friday attorneys for the U.S. government made some interesting claims. They were in court to argue against a request to dismiss the indictment against Megaupload that was raised on the grounds that Megaupload has no U.S. address. After a debate about jurisdiction and precedent, this happened:
"The government also argued that it could keep Megaupload in legal limbo indefinitely. 'None of the cases impose a time limit on service,' the government's attorney told the judge. Therefore, the government believes it can leave the indictment hanging over the company's head, and keep its assets frozen, indefinitely. Not only that, but the government believes it can continue to freeze Megaupload's assets and paralyze its operations even if the judge grants the motion to dismiss. That's because in the government's view, the assets are the proceeds of criminal activity and the prosecution against founder Kim Dotcom will still be pending. The fact that the assets are in the name of Megaupload rather than its founder is of no consequence, the government claimed."
Telling the court that you're going to circumvent the law in the case you lose probably isn't going to be so swell.
should be brought to justice... This is insane and a clear message from the government to everyone: You have NO rights at all! Time to fight terrorism people and it starts at home.
Guilty until proven innocent?
Who needs things like laws and due process when the government can just shut down your business without them?
Fuck yeah.
"The fact that the assets are in the name of Megaupload rather than its founder is of no consequence, the government claimed," will probably not work. Golly, I've been waiting a long, long time to make an IANAL comment on Slashdot.
Japanese scientist: Technically, sir, tomatoes are fags. Military scientist: He means fruits.
who do we vote for that has
1. a realistic chance of winning, and by realistic I mean you could find a bookie to give you 100-1 odds of it happening
2. and will not only stop these kinds of abuses once in office but use the full force of the government to destroy the lives of those officials from the previous administration responsible for them
Face it. This is no longer a country of laws. The powers that be do what they want, how they want, whenever they want. Get used to it.
What the US govt got from this?
The US government does not benefit anything from this, but on the other hand, those who are paying the politicians, ie, the king makers get to thumb their collective noses down to the rest of us
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Get used to it.
If you wanna bend over and get it, that's your choice
But do not bet on it that many will follow you
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Pretty much just exploding termites.
I think I saw that in a Loony Toons episode once.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This happens with citizens all the time.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/singlepage (Behind a paywall, bu the first paragraph will give you the gist.)
You get arrested for a crime. Your assets are seized. Charges are dropped or you are found not guilty. They don't give you your assets back.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Doesn't this violate the Speedy Trial Clause?
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Declare the assets breaking the law and seize them. Since assets have no rights they can keep them indefinitely. Highly unConsitutional but it hasn't stopped them yet.
This story is tagged "piracy". One can only assume it's referring to the opinions of the US Attorney...
Not only that, but the government believes it can continue to freeze Megaupload's assets and paralyze its operations even if the judge grants the motion to dismiss.
The message they are sending seems to be: If you do something that might piss off a powerful enough lobby in the United States, even if the legal system sides with you, get your money out of the country.
That doesn't seem like a very smart message to send.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-government-is-the-looter/2012/05/18/gIQAUIKVZU_story.html
It's much worse than what I've said. Some people commit a crime on your property and they seize your property.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sometimes, i have the feeling that the government is one big, stupid, nasty, bulling, KID.
Then i wake up, and realize that it is not just a feeling...
US Constitution, Amendment V:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
An executive branch agency just deciding to keep your property because they don't like the outcome of their attempt to indict you is not the "due process of law". In fact, it's quite the opposite: it's grand larceny.
While I hold no illusions about the US government's willingness to break the law and violate the constitution whenever they find it convenient to do so, the constitution remains the entirety of the legal basis for its existence. When the government violates the constitution, it does not act as the agent of the people, but as usurpers of the people's sovereign power.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If they don't follow the law then they're not the government they're just a gang.
Like the thugs in any 3rd world hole - they're already making threats of what they'll do regardless of what the court rules.
Pack them up and send them off to North Korea where they belong.
Biden brought the Hollywood money back in the day, and that got him the VP slot and his **AA bosses some seats in the Justice Department, including Mr. MacBride who's working Kim Dotcom today. Despite the whole "supporting your vice president" thing, that's a liability moving into new elections. I don't want to think the O-man needs to or wants to make these sacrifices as an incumbent. He's a constitutional scholar and I think, a geek like us. At least I hope so.
BTW: I really hate the politicization of /. during crazy season. And yet here I am contributing to it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The government used the "there are no temporal limitations on" (insert some named power) argument with the PPACA. In that case the government argued that there were no temporal limitations on the commerce clause, which the Court did not entertain. Regardless of where you fall on the healthcare bill, these sort of arguments are inane and I find it very troubling that they are being used at all.
ALL the branches of the US government have become corrupt outlaws who have no clue as to what the Bill of Rights means. It's behavior for the last 8 years is a dictionary example of "power corrupts", made worse by the insufferable arrogance they display.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It's one thing to uplift the platform and get the president elected. It's a whole other thing to be a fucktard at re-election time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The US government accused Kim Dotcom of racketeering. And now they say they themselves are the real racketeers. Oh the irony.
In light of this, if I had a business that I thought might conceivably run afoul of the "authorities", I would simply ensure I didn't HAVE any assets anywhere where the government could "freeze" them. That was their first mistake. They need to find a place where the local government can't or won't be pressured by the officials of the US government, or the people who own them, (the rich and powerful).
I wonder if people realized that we could turn the tables on the rich, simply by refusing to accept US dollars anymore as payment, and started trading in something else. If all workers did this, we could take the power back in a minute. Imagine...
Of course, commerce would come, oh... not to a grinding or screeching halt, but it would act like it just plowed into the side of a mountain. A mountain of reinforced concrete. We'd have to replace it with something, and THAT could be a problem. I don't think there's a viable alternative. Before anyone responds "BITCOINS!!!" forget it. I mean REAL money, not monopoly money. Cold, hard, cash. Unfortunately, cash is only as good as the ability of the producer of it to prevent forgery, and maintain a degree of scarcity, while at the same time ensuring a sufficient quantity to lubricate transactions...
Now that I think about it, everyone refusing to accept dollars right this moment, at any given moment, would be kind of like hijacking a plane by having men outside cut the wings off, thinking you can then fly it to Rio. Doesn't work that way, it just falls screaming out of the sky.
But anyway, all the government has done, or is doing with this is assuring more people will secure their money beyond the reach of the US government. So this really is just a stupid thing for them to do, to protect the interests of the rich, super rich, and filthy rich.
(Because no middle-class or lower person really worries about whether or not the MPAA or RIAA, etc., is making enough money unless they work for it, and probably not even then.)
... I am the law...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Welcome to the promised land... Now renamed "Democratic People's Republic of America" Hail "Injustice" Department.
And the school bully can still kick anybodies ass after he has been to the principles offices and been told not to.
Until the American People stop it, it will go further. People now bitch and moan a bit. At one point they will want to do something about it and it will be too late to do this in a civil matter.
At some point you would want your rights back. This can happen peacefully, or this can happen by a lot of bloodshed.
No idea what will trigger it or when it will happen. There will be an enormous outcry and people will finally go to the streets.
It has happened already so many times, I won';t even try to come up with examples.
As an aside: /. quote I see is NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The US had the audacity to lecture parts of the world about using its 'safe' cloud providers.
With legal ideas such post or pre court semijudicial software and hardware disappearances - why risk your data in the USA?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Who needs hammers if all that's required is your name on the wrong list? He won't be able to fly, get a government or bank job and will probably be unable to get a job flipping burgers starting Monday if they'd take him seriously.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Sorry Taco, but this is just some prosecutor, not the whole government. Certainly not the political power structure, which can hire and fire prosecutors, but can't interfere with individual cases.
Actually they're saying that indefinite asset seizure -by the government during an investigation in order to prevent criminal activity- is within the law. You are assuming this case is a dispute between some hollywood bigwig and a person - ie. a civil case - but it's not. It's the government "researching" (so to speak) whether this guy was committing criminal activities directed against the community as a whole (like, say a murder investigation). As a general rule, if you're under criminal investigation, the government is pretty much at liberty to do a whole lot of things to you and you have no recourse.
(to make this more clear, compare it to the police -and thus the government- taking a gun away from a shooter - it is obviously not theft. The question you should be asking is why this is a criminal investigation. But they certainly seem to have support from congress for making it a criminal case ...)
The exact argument made : ...)
1) because the law empowering them to seize those assets exists and does not mention a time limit, nor the necessity of there being a case afterwards (of course they have to return the assets if they decide not to sue, but until then
2) there have been tons of court cases about this, in all cases judgement was in their favor
So, to be realistic, this is a fucking strong argument.
Like anarchy? Move to Somalia.
The western system will grind you to dust if it gets you into its gears but it is still a million times better even for the pile of dust then the pure anarchy of the libertarian.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...why I should care for American copyright laws? Ahh, forget it. I would ignore them anyways.
Get rid of the party system. Get rid of popularity contests and get rid of single sentence referendums.
The entire problem is that the running of a country, a society, a culture is FAR to complex to leave to religious lunatics and sound bite issue describers.
Religious lunatics? You don't have to believe in a talking bush to believe. Socialist, Capitalist, Communists and Libertarians and god knows what other feeble dregs exist, they ALL believe in the doctrine of their chosen fate.
An excellent example of this was in The Netherlands when right during a parliamentary investigation into the effects of privatization during the last two decades and wide spread condemnation of the miserable results of privatization in healthcare and public transport, the VVD and CDA were caught advocating taking it even FURTHER while a few doors away the disastrous effects were being discussed.
These two parties BELIEVE in the free market and facts be damned.
Not that it is just a failing of the right. The bleeding hearts keep ignoring clear evidence of troubles with immigration. Belgian TV has aired a docu showing a hidden camera following a woman through several areas, recording the harassment by immigrants. The left media is AMAZINGLY silent on this, not even mentioning it. News that youth unemployment among immigrants is sky high could not be ignored but the list of causes was mysteriously short in the left wing media.
They BELIEVE that nothing can be going wrong with the idea of a multi-cultural society and will do EVERYTHING to ignore it. And the right? The VVD (right wing) had a minister say Holland needed MORE Moroccan immigrants to start new businesses to boost the economy... guess who let immigration get out of control in the first place? The right, to import cheap labor to break the unions and lower salaries.
When the boss of the dutch state bank was questioned about the bank crisis, he kept referring to the people who didn't see it coming (himself included) as the experts and those who did see it coming as doomsayers. He couldn't grasp that HE was no expert, that he and everyone close to him that he hired was wrong and incompetent and the people he was still dismissing as quacks, were the ones who really understand economics.
------
It is NOT right vs left
BOTH sides, ALL sides, are WRONG.
Really running a country (and the US that claims to be capitalist but has tons of socialist programs is a prime example) is the job of balancing a pendulum upside down. You can't do it if you are convinced that the counter movement that needs to be done is "wrong". You just need to do it. That means sometimes you need to do a "leftie" policy and sometimes "right" and sometimes a weird mix or something else altogether.
And neither can you do it with simple referendums. LA has these. Do you think cannabis should be legal for the ill? DOES NOT WORK.
Because it doesn't then give a full policy such as "what defines ill". "who is going to grow it". "when does someone become better again". "when does medinal use become recreational use" "who pays for it" "who pays for it when people abuse it".
Nor does it answer questions about heroine which started out as a drug and can still be used for medical purposes if it did not carry the drugs stigma. It is a very effective pain killer and for terminal patients, the addiction is not an issue.
A real policy on drugs needs to be extremely broad and you cannot run it on ideals of people who smoke and drink who think abusing substances is against the word of god.
You would need a body of wise men who have NO opinion of their own, who can look at what society needs and wants (and wants and needs can easily contradict each other) and then create a policy that is mostly in line with this.
It would require looking at public transport not as a restriction of the freedom of car travel or the environment or road congestion but ALL of them at once without to much bias but with a very heavy dose of reality. the s
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lost to looting, fire, admin disappearance/liquidation - that sounds local to one of your hired hosting centers.
With a good backup system your ready to go again.
The problem with the US is you lose your data, assets, bank accounts, the accounts of people who 'helped' you are at risk, your bank gets trouble...
and they come after you with an international enforceable warrant ie legal rendition.
In the past a good lawyer might be able to save you in a US state court.
With the US federal conviction rates and this new post/pre trial asset grab - what can save you or how could you pay back the costs of trying?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Can someone explain me, how it was legal for USA to shutdown servers not placed on US's soil? Seriously, can be the latest behaviour of US govnmt. (at all fields) called as democratic?
And this is why no-one likes Americans. America, keep your crazies locked up please.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Hopefully people uploading code and projects to forums have learnt their lesson... but I still see people using cyberlockers.
For all those projects that were on megaupload, all those links are dead. I'd like to know, how many forums that enforce copyright link to megaupload. This might help get some stats.
Does the court even acknowledge that this content was on the Megaupload servers? Does the court even know WHY people on forums like xdadevs were using megaupload?
The syntax for "linkto: megaupload.com/*" ?
A blog I run for the wealth
"The government also argued that it could keep Megaupload in legal limbo indefinitely."
Translation: We're big so we can do what ever we please and damn the courts, the people and what is right.
You really think that if a prosecutor is violating due process, nobody can interfere? Come on. They don't interfere because they are complicit, not because their hands are tied.
“The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process,” said Attorney-General Eric Holder... ( http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/holder-defends-obamas-view-of-due-process/article534036/ ) - granted this was in response to Obama's "Hit List" (i.e. the ability for the Executive Branch to execute American citizens who they deem to be a national threat without legal process).
However it pretty much shows the mindset you'll get on Pennsylvania Ave and the Robert Kennedy Building.
As long as there is a process - they feel they are within the constitution.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
If they're saying they can freeze the company's assest because somebody involved with the company allegedly committed a crime, does that mean the next time somebody at Sony, Microsoft, Apple, or the RIAA commits a crime that makes money for the company, they'll freeze the entire company's assets?
This is nothing new it is just in an area /. readers care about.
When the war on drugs did this and more, nobody said a dam thing. Who cares about them, they are sub human they are not me... and they are guilty until proven innocent.
Far worse is done on the drug war but take away some movie piracy from the consumers and another minority starts talking revolution... The majority will see you as fanatics and out of touch-- they don't care about you or the stuff you care about and you are probably guilty of piracy and therefore less of a person and deserve what you get!
BTW, they've taken property without due process and KEPT it after losing in court on the primary charges for decades. One has to sue and spend at least $20k after winning just to get the stolen property back again. That is, if they even bother to charge you with a crime and just don't take your stuff under the claim that it was bought with drug money - they don't need to convict you of anything; the property was bought with drug money because they said so. You prove otherwise.
This is nothing new. wake up. Same old "1st they came for the jews" applies here and any situation where short sighted selfishness eventually blows back on you.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
hour of the pig quite good v funny
I donated and phone-banked for Obama in 2008. But his record on Constitutional issues is uniformly abysmal. I am now convinced that he has no moral principles at all.
He's a typical major politician from Chicago, the unabashed pinnacle of US big-city machine politics since the end of Tammany Hall. Chicago was "The City That Works" because ANYBODY could buy the government functions at well-known and affordable prices.
Those of us with ANY experience with Chicago politics knew this even before he won the Democratic nomination - and told everyone whose ear we could bend. We're not surprised at all with how things are going, even now. This is EXACTLY what we expected.
(What will be interesting is whether Tampa and the Republican machine will make the same mistakes with this year's Republican convention that Chicago and the Democrat machine made with the Democratic convention in '68.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
has to the the most fucked up, ignorant and self-important government on the planet at this point in time. Why do other countries and (most of all) the American citizens put up with something so blatantly obscene ?
Would any of the people commenting on the widespread corruption of the US gov't, and the apparent apathy of the citizenry, care to offer practical advice on how to change things?
Vote? Yeah, that really helps when both candidates are just flipsides of the same messed up coin, products of the same system, never keep campaign promises, and the entire electoral process is either corrupt or obsolete (electoral college)?
Demonstrate? Yeah, that really made a huge difference during OWS. The only difference it made is in the minds of those who demonstrated, who felt like they did something meaningful. No real change.
Strike? That's a leverage tactic for affecting change in the workplace, not so much gov't.
Seriously, I'm not trolling. I really want to know what average US citizen can do to help change things for the better, even in small ways.
What the US govt got from this?
The US government does not benefit anything from this, but on the other hand, those who are paying the politicians, ie, the king makers get to thumb their collective noses down to the rest of us
Tax revenue and US corporate profits, not necessarily in that order.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Was the complaint originally from the principals or an anonymous do gooders tip? I am not familiar with mega upload. If they were selling copyrighted material then I hope they do prosecute them and shutdown their bank account. So much fake, bootlegged, counterfeit, copied crap physically coming through our customs now...maybe we should have some form of cyber customs for the Internet also? No probably would not work, but what might work better is companies and individuals protecting their own material..strong arm if necessary. Yes physically break arms and fingers THEN I bet they would leave what is not theirs alone
It is the judges who are tasked with "interfering," not the President. Really the only person who can step in is the Attorney General. And he's not going to do that at an early stage like this. And that would never happen at the lower court level, it would only be on higher level appeals where there would be any reason to, and only if the courts were somehow going way out on a limb with strange rulings. The Attorney General would pay a huge price in prosecutor morale if he interfered. It was by very unusually, and clearly bad management.
It is also not as clear as you think, there is a certain amount of gamesmanship that is being played here on account of Dotcom not being in the country yet. This ups the ante and if Dotcom thinks he can win the case, it could make him less likely to fight extradition.