Kim Dotcom’s Revenge
by
Gary North
Tea Party Economist
Recently
by Gary North: Backfire
on Obama – Gun Control
Kim
Dotcom really is his name these days. He had it legally changed.
The federal
government shut down his enormously profitable file-sharing business
in 2011. It wonÂ’t shut down his latest version of file-sharing.
His new company,
Mega, offers 100% encryption. His company canÂ’t crack it. The
U.S. government can’t crack it – not at a price it can
afford, anyway.
So people can
post movies, songs, or anything else on his site. You get 50 megabytes
of free storage to start out.
His lawyers
can now say this: “Our company will cooperate with the governments
of the world. But, sorry, we have no idea what people are putting
into their accounts.”
The federal
government opened a gigantic can of worms when it did HollywoodÂ’s
bidding and shut him down. It made him mad. He decided to get revenge.
The
federal government can track some kinds of digits. It cannot track
all of them.
As people seek
privacy, hackers like Dotcom will sell it to a few major players,
and give it away for free to everyone else.
The days of
easy tracking of data are coming to an end. People who donÂ’t
really care to defend their privacy will remain vulnerable to government
intrusion. Those who decide they will no longer remain sitting ducks
will not have to.
There is a
new generation of haves and have-nots coming into existence: those
who have privacy and those who do not.
Continue
Reading at Forbes:
Inside Mega:
The Second Coming Of Kim Dotcom
Kim Dotcom,
a.k.a. Kim Tim Jim Vestor, a.k.a. Kim Schmitz, doesnÂ’t act
much like a man with a net worth in the negative.
At 11 a.m.
on a Tuesday he’s driving me around on a golf cart “safari”
of his 60-acre estate outside of Auckland, New Zealand. He weaves
among a grove of olive trees with alarming speed–he’s
removed the speed regulator in his fleet of electric buggies, and
they can clock up to 19 miles per hour. We swing past his 2,000-bottle-a-year
vineyard and barrel down a hill toward his $30 million mansion,
complete with a hedge maze, a five-flatscreen Xbox room and a 75-foot
cascading water display.
Given that
he owes millions of dollars to defense lawyers and now has to raise
his five children on a $20,000-a-month government allowance meted
out from his frozen bank accounts, wouldnÂ’t it be wise to live
a slightly simpler life?
“No way,”
he says, leaning his massive 6-foot-7, 300-plus-pound body onto
the cart’s steering wheel. “That would be allowing them
to get away with this stunt. I wonÂ’t accept that. By staying
here I’m saying, ‘Eff you! You can’t defeat me!’”
The “stunt”
Dotcom refers to is the police helicopter raid on his compound that
made global headlines 15 months ago, timed to coincide with the
U.S. indictment that shut down his ultrapopular constellation of
Mega-branded websites under charges of hosting half a billion dollarsÂ’
worth of pirated movies and music. Overnight Dotcom went from an
underground entrepreneur to one of the most public and controversial
figures on the Internet. His site domains, including the flagship
Megaupload.com, are now the property of the U.S. government. His
servers have been ripped out of data centers around the world and
sit in evidence warehouses. HeÂ’s had to let go of 44 of his
52 house staff as well as MegauploadÂ’s hundreds of employees.
All but 2 of his 18 cars have been seized or sold.
But today Kim
Dotcom is putting all of that in his souped-up golf cartÂ’s
rearview mirror. His new storage startup, called simply Mega, launched
Jan. 20, defiantly a year to the day after the sudden destruction
of Megaupload. ItÂ’s already exploded to exceed 3 million registered
users. His engineers tell me itÂ’s moving 52 gigabits of data
per second–that’s nearly half the entire bandwidth of
New Zealand–and growing at 30% a week. The traffic has been
driven in part by DotcomÂ’s own larger-than-life persona: an
Internet mogul who doubles as either an intellectual-property-stealing
supervillain or an oppressed freedom fighter, depending on whom
you ask.
Either way,
Dotcom has learned from his legal misadventures and promises that
the copyright cabal will find this company much harder to snuff.
Mega is “the Privacy Company.” Unlike Megaupload, everything
sent to Mega is encrypted. No one can decrypt those scrambled files
except the user–not the FBI, not the Motion Picture Association
of America, not even Kim Dotcom. Mega claims to keep the eyes of
both authorities and snoops off its usersÂ’ files, a libertarian
ideal that fits neatly into DotcomÂ’s personal narrative as
a victim of the U.S. governmentÂ’s overreach into the digital
world. “Mega is not just a company,” he says. “It’s
a mission to encrypt the Internet. We want to give the power back
to the user.”
The revenge
Dotcom is planning, he says, will be twofold: Not only will his
new, better company be immune from his enemies, but he has also
hired a team of 28 global lawyers who he believes will make the
U.S. government pay for treating the Internet as a subjugated colony.
He powers his
golf cart up a steep hill to a peak overlooking his estate, with
life-size giraffe sculptures in the distance and MEGA spelled out
in 15-foot-tall white letters laid out next to his winding driveway.
“This
is a low point,” Dotcom says quietly. But his sulking doesn’t
last long. “I’m going to be bigger than ever.”
April
19, 2013
Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright ©
2013 Gary North