Tech

MegaUpload owner claims DOJ, Senate staffers were avid users of his site

Josh Peterson Tech Editor
Font Size:

Kim DotCom, the owner of popular cyberlocker MegaUpload, claimed Monday that a large number of MegaUpload user email addresses belonged to U.S. government officials, including staffers within the Department of Justice and U.S. Senate.

The information was revealed as MegaUpload lawyers and digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation work to reunite users with personal data lost in the FBI sting that took down the site.

“Guess what — we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate,” Dotcom told the tech blog TorrentFreak.com. “I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has raised objections about the takedown of the site, noting that users who did not engage in illegal file-sharing activities, but rather used the site to store data and personal files, were also harmed. EFF recently started a project called MegaRetrieval.com, which allows former MegaUpload users to share their tales of woe.

“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” said Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at EFF, on the MegaRetrieval site. “We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”

DotCom is set to face extradition hearings by the U.S. in August. He is currently out on bail in New Zealand, despite objections from the FBI.

“It is expected that in the coming week more news will come out about an eventual resurrection of Megaupload, so users can download their personal files,” reported TorrentFreak.com.

DotCom and six colleagues were arrested on Jan. 19 in New Zealand and charged by the United States with operating “an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners,” the Justice Department and FBI said in a statement.

The takedown of the site in mid-January sparked an uproar from the political hacker community Anonymous, which responded by using Twitter to spread a link roping unsuspecting Internet users into a DDoS — distributed denial of service — attack against the sites of various government agencies, as well as various websites belonging to the film and recording industry, including the Motion Picture Association of American.

Follow Josh on Twitter

Tags : megaupload
Josh Peterson

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel