New Zealand minister OKs Kim Dotcom extradition to US Kim Dotcom, founder and CEO of defunct file hosting service Megaupload, revealed this week that his long-fought extradition to the United States was finally approved. The verbose Dotcom informed his Twitter/X followers of the news in a grievance-filled post, alongside warnings of worldwide systemic collapse. The extradition …
Could Kim Dotcom's plan involve waiting until Donald Trump assumes the US presidency and then just pay him to have the charges dropped? Musk paid $45 million to Trump to stop him shit-talking about EVs, letting Trump instruct a DoJ full of his cronies to drop all the charges might come in cheaper.
KDC isn't really on the run. Everyone knows he is in New Zeeland and KDC himself is not exactly denying that either. What has changed now, unlike during Trump's first term, is an actual extradition approval. KDC says he has a new plan to avoid extradition, which will be different from his previous plan to avoid extradition using the legal process. Banking on Trump grabbing power might be part of his plan.
Banking on tRump would at the least require delaying matters until November. And apart from tRump being completely nuts, it isn't clear why he'd be inclined to suborn the justice system to drop charges. And surely President Harris won't do that, as a former prosecutor herself.
Maybe he plans to change his name to Kim Bebimbop and try for North Korean asylum?
Trump is definitely "inclined to suborn the justice system" — he's said so, in public, multiple times. Whether he'd bother doing it for Dotcom is another question. And receiving a pile of cash from Dotcom probably doesn't move the needle much on that one, since Trump has a long history of not rewarding his bootlickers.
A "non-bill payer who makes promises they can't fulfil" could just as well refer to Mr Dotcom. The man's been stiffing contractors right and left, and talking a big game about the amazing things he's going to do for the country in appreciation for not being extradited.
Good riddance, I say.
I'd like to think he's relying on Trump to rescue him. That'll go well. Just like it did for Assange.
I don't have any sympathy for Dotcom, but (even as a US citizen) I'm very tired of US prosecutors wielding the extradition stick for minor or irrelevant cases. Aside from a handful of entertainment-industry lawyers and some prosecutors hoping to boost their careers with a media-friendly trial, does anyone in the US actually give a rat's ass whether Dotcom gets prosecuted? If there's a great public outcry, I've missed it.
This sort of bullying does us no favors on the international stage.
Its nice to hear that view from an American citizen.
As a non US citizen, i can speak for many when we say your govs (and agencies NSA/CIA) overeach (and invlolving / coercing more likely the UK government of the day) into following you into unneccasry wars / conflcit / couips - and pushing the US view on how the world should be governed and social fabric managed is deeply frustraing and counter productive to a harmoneous world. Thank you for being candid and that thoughtful.
.....if you think that "cloud-based" storage and backups might be a good idea......
.....just consider that MegaUpload was shut down in less than seven days because the US asked for the closure........
.....without warning........
.....do the math......can you get your data get restored LOCALLY using the bandwidth you have LOCALLY.....in a day or two?
.....if the answer is "No"......you need to do a risk assessment and some detailed planning!
Indeed; the first I heard of the person was back when he was going by Kim “Kimble” Schmitz when Attrition.org was still keeping track of such charlatans.
His antics are, at this stage, not remotely entertaining or amusing- if anything, they are pitiful.
Additionally, if he's holding out on trying to ask the Orange Menace for a bribe paid pardon, Mr. Tiny Hands doesn't work like that- you have to give him something of significant value first- something that would utterly ruin you otherwise. (Just ask Rudy Giuliani how well that worked out.)
Anyone who had to deal with his shit from the mid 90s on knows exactly what a turd he was and is. Lots of variety and targets, sometimes for cash, sometimes for ego.
A bit of copyright infringement is just a minor footnote. As is his trying to dress himself up as some sort of edgy freedom fighter.
If KDC has any sense he would have been spending the last 12 year squirreling away his money and left himself with just enough to live off, then if the extradition to the US he might have to do some time but can claim he can't pay the however many billions the media companies claim they have lost because of people sharing on Megaupload.
Although i don't know if the US have an equivalent of the UK proceeds of crime act, which basically says when you get charged with a financial crime any money and assets you have are assumed to be from criminal activity, unless you can prove otherwise. Kinda of fscked up really as puts the burden on the defense to prove its not from crime rather than the prosecution to prove it is.
The US has both criminal and civil forfeiture for the proceeds of crime. So even if KDC wasnt found guilty of crimes himself, the federal authorities can still seize assets that they are able to argue were the results of criminal activity. That way the proceeds of crime can't be "washed" by being given to others.
In the past civil forfeiture has been used to seize organised crime proceeds from people like mafia bosses even when there isn't proof they directed the criminal activity. I think it's currently being used to go after assets that Sam Bankman-Fried gave to his parents.
Though the Daily Mail and its allowed are now going all Henry II about the riots. They have spent years publishing inflammatory articles about foreigners and asylum seekers but now look all innocent and say "Good heavens, we didn't expect anyone to try to do anything to the people we have been vilifying as freeloading criminals. Nothing to do with us."
I've no liking for him. He's definitely not nice (use your own interpretation of 'not nice').
However, on a worldwide 'not nice' scale of 1 to 100 I'd say he scores 1.
Having said that, compared to the people who are trying to get hold of him he still scores 1 on a 'not nice' scale of 1 to 1000.
Probably should be a log scale like pH or decibels. Even if we used body count as the basis of not niceness the difference between your average murdering american gun crazy, or serial murderer and your run-of-the-mill genocidal autocrat would be several orders of magnitude.
A petty crook who made the mistake of defrauding (in their view) the rich and powerful rights holders. Elizabeth Holmes can affirm that diddling the rich and powerful doesn't end well. :)
For turning a rather dislikable character into a folk hero
The original charges were rather bogus and clearly triggered by the Mega announcement of a large music service and signing several large names to the project, rather than the rampant piracy - they'd been ok with that and Mega doing takedowns upon request for the previous few years but heaven forbid a foreign outfit setup credible opposition to the copyright cartels
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