👷🏼 🍞 🍝 Kim Dotcom: Caught, the most wanted person online. Part 1 🕺🏻 👨🏿‍💻 🐢

For some, Kim Dotkom, the founder of the infamous file hosting MegaUpload, is a criminal and an Internet pirate; for others, he is an unbroken fighter for the inviolability of personal data. On March 12, 2017, the world premiere of the documentary film was held, in which interviews were given with politicians, journalists and musicians who know Kim “from all sides”. New Zealand director Annie Goldson, using a video from personal archives, talks about the essence of Dotcom's legal battles with the US government and other government agencies that have proclaimed a battle for global Internet piracy.

In his youth, Kim Dotcom considered the United States a bastion of world democracy, a country whose government selflessly fights for the triumph of justice throughout the world. After playing the roles of a hacker, a juvenile delinquent and a computer security consultant, by the age of 30, Kim decides to start a business and creates the largest file hosting service, MegaUpload, which has reached 160 million users. Almost until the closure of the site in 2012, it ranked 13th in the ranking of the most visited Internet resources. Over the 7 years of MegaUpload’s existence, Kim has earned more than hundreds of millions of dollars, but as a result of litigation has turned into bankrupt. The United States initiated the prosecution, accusing Dotcom of posting pirated content and copyright infringement, which allegedly caused damage to the copyright holders in the amount of 500 million.dollars.

So far, Kim has not been able to recover from the blow and improve financial matters, since he spends all his money on the services of lawyers and the creation of new innovative projects, such as the K.im platform, the so-called “file store”, which makes payments to based cryptocurrency.

The article tells about the plot of the film "Caught in the Net", as well as excerpts from other journalistic materials inaccessible to the Russian-speaking reader.

Prologue

In 2012, the MegaUpload file hosting service was closed, and its owners were charged with piracy. An independent film crew, led by documentary filmmaker Annie Goldston, began to monitor this matter, since Kim Dotkom had been living in New Zealand for several years. In early 2016, Kim agreed to be interviewed and provided filmmakers with unprecedented access to their archives.

“All this is very similar to a Hollywood movie! This is a dramatic movie that has been going on for 4 years! And I am the star of this movie. What an absurdity! ” - with this statement of the smiling Kim, the documentary film begins, which was released in the spring of 2017.

“What about the notion of“ innocent until proven guilty? ” What about this? ” - Kim answers this question cheerfully: “That's it! In this Hollywood film, the main character was guilty from the very beginning, but the court found him guilty only now! Nonsense".

Having said this, Kim stops smiling. He's trying to look crisp. But eyes that cannot be hidden from the all-seeing eye of the movie camera do not let you lie - Kim is damn tired. Tired of being pressured by the threat of extradition, tired of litigation, of all the hype that has been going on around him for the past few years.

New guy in town

“We locals knew it was just a very big house,” says Allan Curtis, unofficial mayor of Coatesville. “The house itself was not very noticeable until it was surrounded by a stone wall around the perimeter.”

There were many rumors about who would settle there. Most of all, the inhabitants of the town liked to believe that Tom Cruise would open his Scientology center on this estate.

From a secret correspondence between FBI agents: “Dotcom is likely to celebrate his birthday on the 21st or 22nd” - “Yes, he decided to celebrate it this weekend.”

Soon, a man took possession of the house, who changed the name of the estate to DOTCOM. He was never seen strolling through the streets. Then, video cameras appeared on poles around the house, and residents wondered if there were microphones on them to listen to everything around. They did not like this innovation, and some decided to delve into the past of the Dotcom using the powerful and terrible Internet. And then it began: "Oh my God, who brought this to us in Coatesville!"
One of the neighbors decided to find out who the owner of the house is behind the fence, and found all the sites, one way or another connected with the name “Kim Dotkom”. "Hacker. Criminal Records. Hacking sites. Pirate Kim Schmitz ”- the more she read with Nepster, the more she felt uneasy about the kind of person who had joined the community of residents of the patriarchal town.

From secret correspondence of FBI agents: “The operation is scheduled for Friday.”

“Ground unit: the gates are open!” - with this phrase at 6:47 a.m. on January 20, 2012, the capture of Kim Dotcom began. The camera of a helicopter of the anti-terrorist unit shows a landing in the center of a completely empty area in the courtyard of a huge private house.

A surveillance camera mounted outside the fence fixed a second helicopter on the lawn in front of the garages. In the parking lot you can see several cars from the personal fleet of the owner of a luxury mansion.

So New Zealand was at the center of one of the largest scandals on piracy on the Internet. Local dawn police raid on behalf of and on behalf of the FBI. Kim Dotkom becomes the scandalous "Doctor Evil" of the media space.

Some call him a criminal genius, others - an online innovator. It is indisputable that Kim Schmitz, who took the name "Dotkom" in 2005, is the most wanted person online.
From the secret correspondence of FBI agents: “Have a nice weekend! I hope Dotkom gets caught! ”

Munich, Germany, 1994

“He always tried to stop by, but I never let him go. I just didn’t let it in, ”recalls Caivan Mir Haidari, the manager of the P1 disco club in Munich. "And he kept asking why I wouldn’t let him in."

At that time, Kim wore a white suit, which for the youth club looked rather strange. Kaivan recalls how he answered this question: “To be honest, I don’t know why!” Kim said that if I am the one who makes decisions here, without knowing their reasons, then this is very strange. “I thought:“ But he is a funny guy! ” So it all began, so I met Kim. ”

Kaivan always knew that Kim was somehow connected to the Internet, but without any specifics. Kim himself says that in those days he was a hacker. Hackers were considered almost wizards. They could immediately identify the weak points of any network, any Internet system. And in this Kim was very good. For example, he made free calls around the world, breaking into the system of paying for telephone calls over the Internet.

Then, in the mid-90s, Kim took the nickname “Kimball” in honor of Richard Kimball from the movie “The Fugitive”. He claimed to have hacked the sites of the Pentagon, NASA, and Citibank and downgraded world leaders to almost zero. Many believed in these fantastic stories, because they seemed to be Hollywood versions of what a hacker should be. Others thought that Kim was too boastful for a person breaking the law, because the police claimed that Kim hacked office telephone exchanges of American companies, selling access codes for them at $ 200, and traded stolen phone card numbers.

Much of what Dotcom did at that time, he did for the sake of self-education and the growth of his reputation in hacker circles. But he received his first term for explicit crime. It was a criminal calling card scheme that brought money into Dotcom's pocket. He was caught in 1994, showing 11 episodes of computer fraud and 10 episodes of information espionage. He remained under arrest for a month, then he was released, then he was arrested again, then he was released again. Only in 1998, the judge finally ruled that Kim should go through a 2-year probationary period, and sentenced him to 20 months in prison on probation. He said that there was a mitigating circumstance in the case - youthful recklessness, that is, due to age, the defendant did not understand that this was not worth doing.

In fact, this sentence marked the beginning of Dotcom's career. The arrest helped inflate his reputation. Kim built a whole business around the idea of protecting companies from hackers like himself. If companies do not have their own security experts and you offer them your help, consider that you are well-placed because you can tell them anything. “Mr. Grevenkrut’s line is safe” - this was the title of a story from a Munich television studio telling how Kim “Kimball” Schmitz sets up a secure computer network for one of his employers.

Beginning of the MEGA Empire

Kim used the fame of a hacker to build confidence in himself as an expert in computer security, and by 2000, newspapers called him that. The reputation that he built, talking about his abilities, allowed him to attract the investments necessary to open his own business. Kim says that his whole life has been an innovator and has been ahead of what the rest has been doing. His company, DataProtect, specialized in data protection and was one of the first to use firewalls to warn the user of a hacker attack. Among Kim's customers was even Lufthansa airline. In 2001, he created Kimvestor, an investment company, and two other electronic payment systems companies, Monkey AG and Monkeybank.

At a time when no one was thinking about the symbiosis of a car and a computer, Kim created MegaCAR.com - a video conference broadcast from a car in real time.
Kim patented and sold all the developments that he had been thinking about for a long time. “My classmates wanted to become firefighters, garbage collectors ... ordinary childhood dreams. And I wanted to become a millionaire! ”

“Half a billion hacker” - under this title, one of the Berlin newspapers published an article in which she asked the question: “Will the 29-year-old Kim Schmitz realize his ambitions to become a member of the Billionaire Club?” In 2003, Harald Schmidt invited Kim to his nightly comedy show, which he hosted on Sat1.

Kim did everything to maintain his reputation as a hacker in a white hat. He even used the details and details of his personal life to advertise his professional activities.
“So you were an evil hacker?” - asks Harald. “Yes, very angry!” Kim answers. “And you were tried for cybercrime?” So what did you really steal? ” - “Data, information, knowledge, power”!

After spending 3 months under arrest, Kim was released with a two-year suspended sentence. “After that, I found out that suddenly 50 companies wanted to take me to their security consultant!” - These words of Kim evoke audience laughter.

“At first, he seems like an imposing big guy in a white suit, but soon you see him as a bear, a cute little bear who you want to hug with,” recalls Kim’s friend, musician and TV presenter Michael Schmidt. “He sent me an e-mail, in which he wrote,“ I know that you like car racing, come to us for a weekend in Monaco to look at Formula 1. I invite you and your girlfriend, we’ll come off and hang out! ” Kim liked the music of the Smudo band, and he sent a helicopter that took the couple straight to Monaco.

Michael is talking about the events of 2000, when Kim spent a million dollars to rent a 70-meter yacht, which was moored in Monte Carlo during the Formula 1 championship. On a yacht, Dotcom arranged a series of luxurious parties for eminent guests, on one of which even Prince of Monaco Rainier III was seen.

Michael once asked Kim if he was friends with all these people with whom he spent a lot of time: “Do you even know them?” Kim replied: “No, I’m practically not friends with any of them!” “Why do you invite at all?”, “It's very simple - I like to have fun and at the same time surround myself with certain people!”

Kim always carried a camera with him and offered to take a picture, it doesn’t matter who he was standing next to at that moment - Richard Branson, Ronaldo or Bruce Willis. Kim immediately posted all these photos on his website, and everyone thought: “Oh God, Kim is familiar with all these people!”

The public believed that Kim used all these celebrity parties to inflate the significance of his own person, but Michael Schmidt says that in reality the friend was completely different. Everyone got drunk with champagne, put the girls on their lap, but Kim never drank or tried to pose as a macho. He probably believed that as an organizer of bohemian parties people would like more because "they really like champagne, yachts and beauties!" Despite the fact that Michael liked Michael, he still felt in all these parties falsity, absurdity and the desire for shocking. A person with such a reputation clearly should not have attracted so much attention, including law enforcement.

Caivan Mir Haidari recalls that he never discussed his childhood with Kim. “It was probably as complex as my brother and I, and he knew about it. In such cases, you simply leave each other alone. ”

Kim recalls being a difficult child. He and his mother had to endure a lot of difficulties because of his father, because he was an alcoholic. “He broke my mother’s bones several times, and beat me with a mortal battle. It is because of him that I don’t drink alcohol, because I saw with my own eyes what he can do with a person. ”

Kiel, Northern Germany

After a divorce from Kim’s father, despite difficult times, the mother did everything to buy her first computer. Having received it, Kim began to consider school a waste of time. He wanted to know everything about computers, he wanted to know the future.

In January 2001, Dotcom publicly announced that he was going to invest all his money in the electronic market LetsBuyIt.com, which was actually an early version of Amazon.com. At the end of the year, the stock price of this resource jumped sharply, Kim sold his share and earned several million dollars. After that, he went to Thailand, as he says, to rest. “However, some people who did not like my behavior and my lifestyle suggested that something was unclean with my arrival. And then the German government launched a case against me on trading inside information. ”

Kim decided to wait out the storm abroad and in 2002 came to Bangkok, where he was soon arrested and sent to Xuan Plu's Thai prison. As he admitted, this was the worst time of his life. After a couple of weeks, people came to him who said that they could do the documents for Kim, after which he could return to Germany. Of course, he had to accept this offer.

The German government sets out this event as if he had to forcibly return Dotcom from Thailand to his homeland. Dotkom says that he returned of his own free will to appear before a German court. So, in November 2003, after five months of waiting for the court on charges of embezzlement of funds taken from the bank for Kimvestor, he pleaded guilty. Kim again received a suspended sentence - all the same 20 months, plus a fine of 100 thousand euros, and the judge noted that this was the last warning. Almost immediately after the verdict, Dotkom moved to Hong Kong: “I just wanted this to end, I wanted to leave Germany in the past and start life in a new place.”

Hong Kong and the Pirates

If on earth there is still a city that exists on the verge of business, finance and the rule of law, then this is Hong Kong. For business, it is like the Wild West, where capitalism comes first. Here new companies appear and disappear daily. This city is simultaneously in the center of the world and on its border.

In 2003, Kim decided that he would easily continue the business he had started in Germany if there was no control over him - “Welcome to KIMperia!”

Using computers to download music is a hot trend because record companies have gone to court. Representatives of the entertainment industry started a war with sites such as Napster, which allowed users to download music from the Internet for free. A surprisingly simple idea - to share music files on the Internet - aroused the indignation of many copyright holders. “Napster lets people steal our music!” - In an interview, said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich.

The first victim of Internet piracy was the music industry. From now on, owners of song content could not single-handedly decide how their product would be distributed. If the composition is digitized, then any user using Nepster could send it to the other end of the world.

Michael Schmidt recalls that when he wanted to listen to a specific song and could not order it on the Internet or buy it in a store, he went on the Internet and downloaded the necessary song from Napster or another darknet file hosting service. It was fashionable, bold, and everyone was doing it at the time of transition, when the legitimate market for Internet content was just beginning to take shape.

DJ Moby says about the beginning of the 2000s: “All aspects of music have changed - the way it was perceived, distributed, promoted. But the old guard held onto the old order and punished everyone who threatened their sources of income. It got to the point of absurdity - media moguls sued housewives from the suburbs who downloaded 20 songs to sue them for millions of dollars. ”

However, many of the creators of their own music content were of a completely different opinion as to who are being harmed by Internet pirates. During the Washington-Atlanta TV bridge, rapper Chuck Dee from the Public Enemy group said to the representative of the American Recording Association Hilary Rosen: “In any case, the studios do not care about the musicians. 95% of musicians hardly manage to get their fees from large corporations. We have only 4, I repeat, 4 large corporations with huge revenues, and at the same time you are trying to protect their interests! Miss Rosen, you're just worried about your personal income! ” In response, Hilary said she was worried about the income of everyone who works in the music industry.

At first, the film industry naively believed that it was untouchable, since movie files weigh 2-3 GB, and if you try to download them through a modem, it will take many days. But the development of high-speed Internet technologies has put them at the same risk as sellers of original music files. At the same time, the business model of film production was very different from the business model of the music industry. If you like a musical composition by downloading it, you will listen to it tens or hundreds of times. But if you download the film, then it is unlikely that you will begin to review it the second, and even more so the third time. Therefore, movie studios had good reason to worry that people would not watch movies in movie theaters and deprive them of their sources of income.

As the president of the American Film Association Jack Valentine said, you can make 10 thousand digital copies of the film, and all of them will be of the same good quality as the original. "If it is allowed, copyright will cease to protect us on the Internet, and movie studios will come to an end."

The music industry was almost ruined, but the filmmakers of the film industry did not realize the threat of piracy almost until the moment when the situation with the distribution of digital content thanks to the Internet got out of control of copyright holders.

At this time, Kim Dotkom in his Mercedes “CL3000” took part in the Gumboll rally, an event gathering the owners of the most expensive cars so that they can travel thousands of speed kilometers across Europe.

Someone or even Kim himself was filming videos of these races, but Dotcom could not forward them to friends, because the files were too large to be sent by email. Then Kim decided to create his own website, where you could upload the file, and then just send a link to it to your recipients. No matter what the size of this file will be, the recipient simply downloads it from the site to his computer, and the problem will be solved.

When the MegaUpload file hosting service, created in 2005, was successful, Kim's company was a small development team. Kim says that there are not many people whom he can call geniuses, and Matthias is one of them (pictured next to Dotcom): “He was the brain of our code, he is a real genius!” Brent (pictured second from Kim) was a true Dotcom fan because of his success at the Gumball races. Brent told Kim that he was also a coder and could help him with something. Finn Batato, MegaUpload Marketing Director, was not one of the founders of the project. He met the guys in Munich when they hung out at the P1 club. Kim took him to the team because the site was expanding, and there was a need for competent marketing and advertising of the resource. He fully trusted Finn and the marketing policy that he implemented.

In the mid-2000s, there was a real boom in file sharing. People used them for legitimate and non-legitimate purposes, stored information in what we now call the "cloud." It would be fair to say that MegaUpload was among the pioneers of the cloud service. The interface design for this site was surprisingly simple. MegaUpload was used not only for music and films. Various studies, scientific data, photographs and a personal video - here they stored everything that no longer fit on the computer's hard drive.

In an interview with the crew of the movie "Caught on the Net," computer lawyer Julie Samuels said: "The whole point of the Internet is precisely that people can freely share their information around the world, multiply it and share again." This technology underlying cloud service makes the use of MegaUpload very relevant.

Workers at the MegaUpload call center in the Philippines sadly recall that they had huge potential for growth at the time. A million visitors visited the site daily, and each of them could become a potential profit for advertising. Each month the site doubled, and he needed new servers and more power. Kim was surprised: “I didn’t think that such a simple thing as a file hosting service could grow to such a size! But I immediately realized what the potential of all this is ... "

It was the Megaupload project that became Kim's most profitable venture. By 2012, he acquired one of New Zealand’s most expensive mansions, where he moved back in 2008, became the owner of a fleet of almost two dozen expensive cars, a helicopter and other luxury items.
The service grew and developed, although it remained in its original format: separate hosting services for photos, videos, streams and, of course, for pornography appeared. MegaUupload earned money on paid accounts and advertisements on its pages, deleted illegal materials at the request of copyright holders and, apart from a very simple UI, practically did not differ from many of its competitors. At the peak of the heyday of the project, up to 4% of global Internet traffic flowed to MegaUpload servers.

But still there was one significant difference, and it consisted in the nature of the owner of the resource. Dotcom’s arrogance, often bordering on impudence, allowed him to publicly “run into” services that did the same as MegaUpload - they earned from distributing illegal content. In October 2011, Dotcom sent a PayPal letter in which he talked about his plans to sue some file hosting services for their “illegal activities”. Kim advised companies not to cooperate with them, explaining that they transfer funds through the payment system to users who downloaded pirated content.

By the new 2012, Dotkom has released a video in which stars such as Will.I.Am, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Macy Gray and others sing a song about the excellent Megaupload service. But then a rather strange story happened. In December 2011, a huge scandal erupted: MegaUpload threatened a Universal studio court with a sabotage campaign to sabotage a file sharing ad campaign. The fact is that when this video clip got on YouTube, the Universal label received a complaint about copyright infringement. In accordance with its copyright holders policy, YouTube first blocked access and then left it to interested parties to deal with the issue. As a result, the video was returned to YouTube.

Kim Dotcom: Caught, the most wanted person online. Part 2

Topic: , : Megaupload, , , . 1

:)

Thank you for staying with us. Do you like our articles? Want to see more interesting materials? Support us by placing an order or recommending to your friends, cloud VPS for developers from $ 4.99 , a unique analog of entry-level servers that was invented by us for you: The whole truth about VPS (KVM) E5-2697 v3 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 480GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 19 or how to divide the server? (options are available with RAID1 and RAID10, up to 24 cores and up to 40GB DDR4).

Dell R730xd 2 times cheaper at the Equinix Tier IV data center in Amsterdam? Only we have 2 x Intel TetraDeca-Core Xeon 2x E5-2697v3 2.6GHz 14C 64GB DDR4 4x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100 TV from $ 199 in the Netherlands!Dell R420 - 2x E5-2430 2.2Ghz 6C 128GB DDR3 2x960GB SSD 1Gbps 100TB - from $ 99! Read about How to Build Infrastructure Bldg. class c using Dell R730xd E5-2650 v4 servers costing 9,000 euros per penny?

Kim Dotcom: Caught, the most wanted person online. Part 1