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Dotcom can still sue New Zealand spy agency, though evidence to be shared limited a little
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 7 March 2013
A New Zealand court has ruled that the intrepid Kim Dotcom can sue the country’s spy agency, aka the Government Communications Security Bureau, over its investigations into the MegaUpload business ahead of the swoop in January 2012 by US and New Zealand authorities that saw the controversial file-transfer operation shutdown.
As previously reported, after the homes of four MegaUpload execs living in New Zealand were raided, just as their company’s servers were being taken offline in the US, it was revealed that New Zealand police had secured the wrong kind of warrant for the raids, and later that some of the GCSB’s investigations ahead of the swoop hadn’t had the right legal clearances.
The New Zealand courts subsequently said that Dotcom could sue the GCSB for snooping on him and his business affairs illegally, leading to a squabble about how much of its MegaUpload papers the spy agency should have to share with the Mega chief. GCSB bosses also moved to try to have Dotcom’s right to sue the agency directly taken away by the courts.
And it’s that move that has been blocked by a judge this week. Although the same judge has limited the amount of MegaUpload evidence the GCSB must share with Team Dotcom to only that which the government agency shared with police ahead of last year’s raids.
Dotcom and the MegaUpload team are, of course, fighting legal battles on various fronts in relation to the January 2012 shutdown, and America’s efforts to extradite Dotcom to the US to face charges of money laundering, racketeering and copyright infringement.
Meanwhile Dotcom is also occupied with running the new version of Mega which launched earlier this year. That company is reportedly currently seeking a CFO to help with plans to float the new Mega business in the next eighteen months, which would be interesting if it happened.
