I agree Jimbo, but the bigger question in my mind is how can my government arrest and prosecute foreign nationals? Frankly I think it's none of our business. We are guilty of illegal seizure in my opinion and maybe the owners of personal data will have some recourse against the FBI stormtroopers.

And there are still Filesonic, Uploading, Extabit, TinyPic, Photobucket, etc. ,are they going to try to take them all down?

I read an article that seemed to be saying, the US Government is going to destroy ALL of the Megaupload data (illegal or otherwise)!
Megaupload data 'to be destroyed': Could feds swoop on file-sharers? | ZDNet

If that is true, it proves that these new laws (Governments are trying to introduce) have nothing whatsoever to do with piracy.

seekermeister said:

Nor is it the government's job to acquire evidence for the accuser, unless it has already been established that a crime has been committed, but not a crime by some unknown person, but by a specific individual or group, which is clearly defined prior to any investigation.

Ever notice how the people that state that "the Government shouldn't regulate businesses", are the same people who demand that "the Government must enforce copyright"?

No, probably falls under the same sorts of clauses that allow the government to do what it likes with seized property used in the commission of a crime once the criminal case is over and the evidence is no longer needed - the government destroys cars, resells homes, and apparently can destroy servers hosting data. Welcome to your 20th century government handling 21st century issues, I suppose.

cluberti said:

No, probably falls under the same sorts of clauses that allow the government to do what it likes with seized property used in the commission of a crime once the criminal case is over and the evidence is no longer needed - the government destroys cars, resells homes, and apparently can destroy servers hosting data. Welcome to your 20th century government handling 21st century issues, I suppose.

The trouble is that is like the Government bulldozing an entire suburb, because one house hosted a drug lab.

I hope everyone who didn't have illegal content, launch a giant class action suit against the Government.

Actually, it's not, but I get your drift. It'd be more akin to destroying an apartment building because of a lab in one apartment, but as I said, 20th century ideas governing 21st century realities - by the time the government catches up, it'll probably be the 22nd century and we will lather, rinse, and repeat with something else.

cluberti said:

Actually, it's not, but I get your drift. It'd be more akin to destroying an apartment building because of a lab in one apartment,

They don't care how much "collateral damage" is caused.

...
The only problem was that the three enclosures worth of servers apparently included the sites for many more customers than just the one being investigated and DigitalOne is responding to the outages reported by those customers by letting them know that the FBI has those servers and there is no way that they can check on them, or do anything else with them, for that matter.

Despite their interest in just a single DigitalOne client, the FBI’s actions have affected “tens” of clients, according to DigitalOne CEO Segej Ostroumow. The FBI has not yet commented on their actions nor have they provided any way for the customers they were not interested in to recover their server data.

ZDNet
FBI throws a scare into datacenter service providers | ZDNet

cluberti said:

but as I said, 20th century ideas governing 21st century realities - by the time the government catches up, it'll probably be the 22nd century and we will lather, rinse, and repeat with something else.

Agreed. :)

I've used Megaupload for legit purposes for years.
While I understand that Megaupload was a dot com domain, and therefore technically under US jurisdiction, how can they justify arresting foreign citizens?

As an American citizen and taxpayer it is infuriating to see our federal agencies becoming puppets for the likes of the MPAA/RIAA. I'll be adding my name to any class action suit that arises, however i doubt it will ever see the light of day. Maybe I'll get lucky enough to get my taxes back that were spent on this "crusade".

This is THE Achilles heel of ALL cloud services and in the rush to embrace what has been heralded as the next great coming of the Internet people have failed to recognize this fact....whenever you allow/contract with someone else to maintain your data your are at that point vulnerable based on their performance or lack of performance not to mention reliance on their level of expertise as relates to security.....You always get what you pay for, there is a reason that the lowest bidder is the lowest bidder, a corner (or a few corners) will be cut somewhere.

Keep your data under your control, back it up and have a recovery plan in place....you will have no reason to loose sleep if you just remember these few steps. You can always share it in different ways but you can't always get it back once it is gone.

I just hope this incident will make people and corporations think twice about this rush to outsourcing of data storage but I doubt it will make much difference...when someone thinks they can do it cheaper by outsourcing then hell will freeze over before they admit to the downsides, having a recovery plan costs the money that outsourcing saves.....again, there is a reason that outsourcing costs less up front...it is the back-end costs that are cut and you never know until you need those back-end services unless you are professionally paranoid like most DBA's and Network Security Analysts.