Quote:Police mysteriously lose video of Megaupload raid

Video footage of a police raid on the home of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is missing, and authorities claim they’re not quire sure what happened to it.

This flub is just the latest in anti-piracy allegations against the file-hosting site, and comes amid the evidence discovery phase in the case against Kim Dotcom, the extravagant and eccentric founder of Megaupload, which was raided by New Zealand authorities after the U.S. movie and music industries accused the site of extensive media piracy.

Following the raid, New Zealand’s highest court chided authorities for filing the wrong paperwork for their warrant, then filing the right request after the raid already transpired in hopes of making their request retroactive. The site’s founder has since claimed key pieces of evidence against him are actually files he legally owned, indicating that the prosecution’s case has some serious weaknesses.

And now, a new wrinkle: Police reportedly agreed to let Megaupload’s IT expert download a copy of security camera footage stored on Dotcom’s personal file server, which was seized by police during the raid even though it was not among the evidence they claimed to be pursuing. But when Dotcom’s expert arrived at the police station recently, he discovered that the server had been “completely disassembled,” according to Ars Technica. Then officers reportedly refused to reassemble the server or provide any of the data contained therein, even after their previous agreement to release the footage.

That means evidence which could be key to Dotcom’s defense may be gone for good, and New Zealand authorities may ultimately avoid heightened scrutiny of their actions during the raid.

Quote:Police affidavits related to the raid on Kim Dotcom's Mega mansion appear to show that New Zealand police and spy agencies are able to tap directly into United States surveillance systems such as PRISM to capture email and other traffic.

The discovery was made by blogger Keith Ng who wrote on his On Point blog that the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) requested assistance from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the country's signals intelligence unit, which is charge of surveilling the Pacific region under the Five-Eyes agreement.

A list of so-called selectors or search terms were provided to GCSB by the police [PDF, redacted] for the surveillance of emails and other data traffic generated by Dotcom and his Megaupload associates.

'Selectors' is the term used for the National Security Agency (NSA) XKEYSCORE categorisation system that Australia and New Zealand contribute to and which was leaked by Edward Snowden as part of his series of PRISM revelations.

Some "selectors of interest" have been redacted out, but others such as Kim Dotcom's email addresses, the mail proxy server used for some of the accounts and websites, remain in the documents.

Megaupload co-founders Bram van der Kolk and Sven Ecthernach was were also targeted for electronic surveillance, ditto Dotcom's wife Mona.