Court gives go-ahead for Kim Dotcom’s hard drives to be passed to FBI

By RNZ

Kim Dotcom’s latest bid to stop the Government releasing his hard drives and passwords to the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has failed.

The controversial billionaire behind now-defunct data-sharing website Megaupload has been at the centre of multiple litigations in New Zealand, after armed police stormed his Auckland mansion in 2012 and seized hundreds of devices.

In September he appealed a 2022 High Court ruling that found the devices - which also hold private family photos and videos of the birth of his children - could be sent to aid the FBI’s copyright prosecution, along with relevant passwords.

Now the Court of Appeal has dismissed the proceedings brought against the Attorney-General (on behalf of the Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB).

A second appeal against an order for Dotcom and his wife to pay $55,000 in costs has also been dismissed.

At the hearing in Wellington last year, Dotcom’s lawyer Simon Cogan argued the law under which the material would be released to US authorities only applied to the criminally relevant information on the devices, rather than the hard drives themselves. Sending the entire devices would be against the Bill of Rights, Cogan said, submitting that New Zealand Police should sift through the material first.

Kim Dotcom has been at the centre of multiple litigations in New Zealand. Photo / Greg Bowker

“It’s entirely possible to identify what material would be relevant to those allegations and what wouldn’t ... photographs, music, videos, etc are at a technical level quite capable of being identified.”

The High Court ruling had found there was too much data on the hard drives to cherry-pick what was needed, and doing so would undermine evidential integrity.

Crown lawyer David Boldt said local authorities should not be tasked with deciding what was relevant to FBI prosecutors.

“For example, a lot of the content on these devices is music - now, we don’t know whether a particular music file might actually be relevant ... [to] a case involving large-scale copyright breach. It could be relevant or it could just be lawfully obtained material Dotcom was listening to.”

In June, two other key figures in the Megaupload case were banned from being company directors for five years, a year after they were sentenced in the High Court at Auckland.