Kim Dotcom Offers $5 Million Bounty To Defeat Extradition
heretic108 (454817) writes "Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom has posted a bounty of $5 million to anyone who can dig up any dirt which saves him from extradition to the U.S.. This bounty would be payable not only to government employees, but also to anyone who can retrieve documents clearly proving corruption in the whole prosecution process. 'We are asking for information that proves unlawful or corrupt conduct by the US government, the New Zealand government, spy agencies, law enforcement and Hollywood', Dotcom told website Torrentfreak.com."
Snowden did it to keep his oath and he's still getting prosecuted. Anyone doing it for money would have no leg to stand on in the view of the people who would go after them. Corruption in the US judiciary system is a very real problem and people who expose it are heroes but this reward is the worst possible way to get people to come forward.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
What about the film industry creating a cartel and using laws to enforce it, stuff like region coding DVD's and BluRay's, encryption, or adding unskippable bs like copyright notices on LEGIT bought products. The "pirates" are obviously giving consumers a better product, but corrupt governments side on the media cartels who refuse to update their business models to the current real world - they are stuck in the last century.
The law has been bought and paid for by the corrupt media cartels. The law is a disgrace, as are our bought corrupt politicians.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Hundreds of millions of people _do_ do copyright infringement, because there are typically no adverse consequences.
FTFY.
If simply being an asshole was just cause to terminate your civil rights, we'd all be behind bars.
Yea, you should definitely defend the fraudster by claiming it was US government corruption that put him where he is.
He should be let off because his corruption was okay, because someone else was doing it too ... right?
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
If it's not yours, don't take it without permission.
If it's not just yours, pay a corrupt legislature to make it exclusively yours, and to make anyone else using it a criminal offense, enforced by the threat of violence.
Fixed that for you.
And why does he need to be extradited in the first place? The poor kiwis don't have any courts of their own?
Ezekiel 23:20
buy a nice boat an disappear and dont forget plenty of fishing gear and a shortwave radio-receiver, go find some abandoned Polynesian island with a fresh water source and just retire and forget modern civilization
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The US Government is corrupt in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2. You needn't prove it to know it is true.
That's true of all government.
... Do you know absolutely ANYTHING about kim dot com? If he were JUST an asshole, I'd agree with you.
Let me guess, you know nothing about his history and you think megaupload was a legitimate file sharing site?
Being an asshole is one of his better traits.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why doesn't he just go to some other country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA
EG North Korea, he'd fit right in with all the other Kim's there
Because our justice system is based upon the notion of due process. We've let murderers go because cops bungled far smaller things.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
i wouldnt call it being corrupt, hes not asking people to make stuff up, he is asking for people to expose corruptness, and putting a reward for doing so. is it wrong? probably but i wouldnt call it corrupt
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
For anyone who doesn't know, Kim Schmitz aka Kimble aka Kim Dotcom has a history of electronic theft, theft of trade secrets, insider trading, fraud, and has narrowly avoided prison in Germany a handful of times. He's was doing it before his "career" took off, hacking into banks from as early as 1995.
Go look into Kimvestor, a shoddy investment firm, and Data Protect. He made his "fortune" selling the latter off at the peak of the dot com bubble. Later he straight up pump-and-dump'd Letsbuyit.com, netting over â1.5m in profit.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
...I wouldn't count on him actually planning to pay a cent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.
He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."
Wait what? It's corrupt to expose illegal activities commited by US officials and being hidden by the US government?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
What is your point? That he was guilty then, so whatever charges the government brings against him now are valid, and no matter how much the government violates standard procedures and illegally obtains evidence, it should be ignored?
well im sure they think as much, i mean look at how they are railroading snowden for doing so
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
That's really only true in the United States and somewhat less so in Europe. In most of the rest of the world they don't really give a damn about copyright, at least in practice. Oh sure, foreign governments will sign the copyright conventions or promise to enforce local laws, but in practice they turn a blind eye.
First, film and music piracy is largely considered to be an American problem and it's hard to get people to care much about rich foreigners being less rich (and all Americans are rich by their standards). Second, in Mexico, Brazil and other South or Latin American countries, media piracy is looked upon with about the same seriousness as jaywalking if it's looked upon as a crime at all, which it's often not. The police down there largely couldn't care less and they look the other way in return for modest bribes. Third, in societies such as Mexico and Brazil, which are very unequal in terms of wealth and income, pirated or knock off goods are the only way that most people have any access to consumer items. Without pirated media and knock off goods, they largely wouldn't be able to afford any foreign things like DVDs, name brand fashions, music, video games and the like.
Lastly, the copyright business in Mexico especially is frequently under the control of the cartels (the drug cartels not the American media cartels). The two biggest are Los Zetas (who based their logo on the title card of The Godfather) and La Familia Michoacana. The pirated DVD business doesn't bring in as much scratch as drugs, but it does provide walking around money to pay cartel foot soldiers and helps the cartels maintain presence and better control territories in Mexico. Of course, it goes without saying that they're not very concerned about copyright laws being that they torture and kill as a matter of doing business. The Mexican government itself already doesn't have a large enough budget for their own internal needs, never mind enforcing foreign copyrights. So you see, copyright is essentially de-facto meaningless outside the United States and Europe.
All these people complaiing about how "horribly corrupt" the US government are are just playing a huge round of "First World Problems". The US is #19 on the Transparency International list. That's not superb, but it's out of 177 countries... I mean, for crying out loud, Yanukovych in Ukraine had a personal zoo at his house - tens of billions of dolllars stolen from a country whose per-capita income is less than that of Mongolia's. And that sort of stuff is hardly unusual in the world. Have any of you complaining about evil "US corruption" ever lived in a country with *real* corruption, at all levels?
#FirstWorldProblems
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
If you can make an exact duplicate of my car and drive it away, leaving my car behind, the only thing I'm going to ask is that you burn your duplicate copy of the registration and insurance info, and get your own plates, at your earliest convenience. Why should I care that you have an exact copy of my car? Your analogy, the carjacking, is nothing like copying. First of all, there's the threat of violence. Then there's the time between when you take it and when you return it that I don't have it.
So if you want to fallaciously argue by analogy, at least use a better analogy.
Oh, and please don't copy the car while I'm in it. That could get confusing, and my duplicate self will probably be just as attached to the duplicate car as I am to the original.
For anyone who doesn't know... Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
Sure, he is. What's truly incredible is that a piece of lowlife scum such as that can come out looking like the good guy. He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
He might be bad, but the people pursuing him are much worse. The fact that they're doing it using your taxes and claims of legality makes it vastly worse still.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the /. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
Suckers, all of you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Someone being raped is a consequence. It doesn't necessarily have a large consequence for the rapist, but there are consequences.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
> It's amazing how corrupt Hollywood is, they went back to 1787 to bribe the founding fathers to include copyright in the constitution [...]
How long was copyright protection then? How long is it today? Was infringement a criminal offence then? Today?
Ah, and BTW: it is actually amazing how much corruption Hollywood can get away with. And deepressing.
I think you misunderstand. Rape, murder, and theft all cause a harm which can be clearly defined. Causing harm is a consequence of an action. I'm saying that they inherently have consequences to society, unlike copyright infringement, which doesn't cause harm in the traditional sense, since there's no rival good involved (one's body would be a rival good in this context).
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
OF all the countries in the world, the US should be #1, because of things like the DoI, and Constitution. Our history and the stories we tell, are all about "Give me Liberty or Give Me Death" type liberty, and yet, here we are talking about how corrupt our government is and how it acts illegally, from Snowden to Dotcom..
The problem is that we have too much power accumulated in too few hands, because we don't like the decentralized form of government because it doesn't offer the support for Government Criminality that we desire.
Remember, we keep voting for the same set of people expecting different results. IF you vote (D) or (R), you ARE the problem you hate.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to defraud telephone companies with custom made electronic boxes that let people cheat the established system, making long distance calls for free. That was before their careers took off, building and selling computers. Please elaborate on how that activity done as teenagers for kicks invalidates Apple as a legitimate business today?
This is bullshit fear mongering.
Statistics about rape vary widely, mostly because "rape" is not clearly defined. People with an agenda to push use "rape" as a term because our mental image is that of someone brutally abusing his (generally) victim, forcing sexual intercourse against physical resistance, with screams and blood and violence.
But to arrive at that 30% number, you need to include every outlandish definition of "rape", which includes statutory rape (boyfriend who is age-of-consent +1 day having consensual sex with his girlfriend who is age-of-consent -1 day), date-rape (aka you were drunk and regretted your decision when you sobered up) and various other kinds of so-called "rape" that include all the shades of grey you can imagine.
The whole topic is so emotionally charged and confusiong that it has its own Wikipedia article, and if you follow that, you get some enlightenment:
Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.)
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which uses a narrower definitions, found that only 0.5% of women and 0.06% of men, age 12 or older, were victims of rape or sexual assault in 1995. (The NCVS groups together rape and sexual assault.) By 2010, these numbers had decreased to 0.2% of women and 0.01% of men.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Kim Dotcom steals from the rich? Kim Dotcom facilitates acquisition of 'protected' material to the poor? Sounds like my kind of scum.
The fact that he's taking on government corruption is a nice bonus.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The proof is all about connecting things. It is like trying to prove that humans can walk on two legs using the general theory of relativity. You have models that work on the small scale, and those that work on a bigger scale. Proving even the simplest things that are normally done on the large scale is a quite difficult exercise, but it helps to add validity to the small scale model.
Attitudes like, "it's obvious" is what led to beliefs that the world is flat. And I'm pretty sure I can find some government of a primitive tribe that rules over less than 50 people that isn't "corrupt".
Irrelevant. His rights are immutable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials
No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate, for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.
What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.
I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.
"95% of all Slashdot