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How Apple and Facebook Helped To Take Down KickassTorrents (pcworld.com)
Reader itwbennett writes (edited): Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of the torrent directory service KickassTorrents, was arrested in Poland earlier this week, charged with copyright infringement and money laundering. As we dig deeper as to what exactly happened, it turns out Apple and Facebook were among the companies that handed over data to the U.S. in its investigation. Department of Homeland Security investigators traced IP addresses associated with KickassTorrents domains to a Canadian ISP, which turned over server data, including emails. At some point, investigators noticed that Vaulin had an Apple email account that was used to make iTunes purchases from two IP addresses -- both of which also accessed a Facebook account promoting KickassTorrents.if you're wondering where exactly iTunes came into play, here's a further explanation. It all started in November 2015, when an undercover IRS Special Agent reached out to a KickassTorrents representative about hosting an advertisement on the site. An agreement was made and the ad, which purportedly advertised a program to study in the United States, was to be placed on individual torrent listings for $300 per day. When it finally went live on March 14th 2016, a link appeared underneath the torrent download buttons for five days. Sure it was a short campaign, but it was enough to link KAT to a Latvian bank account, one that received $31 million in deposits -- mainly from advertising payments -- between August 2015 and March 2016. Upon further investigation of the email accounts, and corresponding reverse lookups, it was found that the account holder had made a purchase on iTunes.
it's called extradition treaties and they've been doing it for years. Team America: World Police
Many countries have such treaties, not just the United States, and not just with the United States.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
American companies are sued all the time in other countries. For example, Brizillian authorities arrested Google's top executive in Brazil after officials said he violated the South American country's election law when he didn't take down online videos that allegedly slandered a political candidate.
So, it's not just the United States, and indeed it happens quite often all over the world.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
For those not willing to sort though the links/doc:
Name of the Canadian ISP seems intentionally omitted, as it is repeatedly referred to only as that (Canadian ISP).
As to the details, it is really only referred to as a "request" and doesn't really get into exactly what information was used. I suspect most of what is in the criminal compliant (up to that particular point), which is quite long and you'd probably have to be a lawyer to figure if that was adequate justification or not. Below is the quote from the 48 page document:
On or about April 12, 2016, in response to a Mutual Legal Assistance
Treaty request to the Central Authority of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police received the business records and made a forensic image of the original hard
drives associated with the KAT Canadian IP Addresses. Thereafter, those records
and forensic images were turned over to HSI.
Would still like to know exactly which ISP was involved regardless. Was it one of the big guys like Bell or Rogers, or one of the small independents? Privacy (or lack thereof) works both ways I suppose as one could probably do an FOI request to actually find out...