http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/yoko-ono-talks-other-beatles-resentment-becoming-paul-204042501.html             

Yoko Ono Talks About Other Beatles’ Resentment Of Becoming ‘Paul’s Band’

By Chris Willman | Stop The Presses! – 7 hours ago

Was the Beatles’ breakup partly due to the fact that the semi-democratic band was on the verge of turning into “Paul McCartney and the Beatles”?

“John, in fact, was not the first one who wanted to leave the Beatles,” says Yoko Ono in a newly released interview. “Ringo one night with Maureen (Starkey, his first wife) came to John and me and said, well, he wanted to leave. And George was the next, and then John. Paul was the only one who was trying to hold the Beatles together. But then again, the other three felt that Paul was going to hold the Beatles together as his band. They were getting to be like Paul's band, which they didn't like.”
McCartney and Ono (Lester Cohen/WireImage/Getty Images)If John Lennon’s widow sounds a little less conciliatory and political about this than she has lately, that’s because this is the still slightly bristling Yoko Ono of 1987, who has come to us in a time machine to offer some thoughts less filtered by the passage of time. Her lengthy take on the breakup is a big chunk of a previously unpublished conversation with record industry mogul Joe Smith, which has just been made available as an audio file by the Library of Congress.
At one point in the chat, Smith says that he and a lot of people in the music industry had been rooting in the 1970s against the Beatles getting back together, lest they come back with substandard material and tarnish their brilliant ‘60s legacy.
Ono agrees and, after flatly declaring “I did not break up the Beatles,” adds: “You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group.”
She also maintains that the resentment Ringo Starr and especially George Harrison may have felt about being second-class citizens in the supposed democracy may have fed into the breakup.
“In the early days Paul and John wrote the songs. Rather, John and Paul,” she said, correcting the order with a chuckle. “George didn’t write much, and Ringo especially didn’t write at all. When George started to write a lot of songs in the end, it was like, who’s gonna get the space? John was really trying to protect George and not ignore him and put (in) as many songs of George’s as possible. But frankly there wasn’t much space for that on one album, and they can’t keep on making double albums. So in a way all three of them were outgrowing the Beatles. I think Ringo was getting interested in film, and George was more interested in playing with Ravi Shankar.
“That was very, very logical, because in the group George is still George and Ringo is Ringo, but when they go outside, George is the Beatle and Ringo is the Beatle and they’re treated differently,” Ono continued. “And in fact George did mention that ‘I feel more comfortable playing with those (other) guys because they understand me and this and that, and here I’m treated like the backing group for Paul.’ And that was the complaint that was expressed may times.
“So in the beginning,” Ono went on, “when all four of them were more insecure, there was compromising and just uniting to make it. Then when they made it, of course, they blossomed and each one of them became the king. So it was very difficult to unite and do something together.”
Yoko, John, and PaulOno sounds like she considers herself Lennon’s second wife—with the Beatles, not Cynthia Lennon, as the spouse she replaced.
“For John it was like a divorce,” Ono is heard telling Smith. “I think he was feeling very good about it, as if a big weight was off him. At the same time, he was very proud of the group. He had an extremely high opinion about each one, which might be surprising. He used to say, ‘Well, they're very intelligent kids, you know. The fact that they come from Liverpool, you'd think they wouldn't understand these things; they do.’ That sort of attitude. He was always very protective of them in that sense. I don't really think he had voiced anything that he really missed about the Beatles, maybe because I was the other party that he got the divorce for. At the same time, that's a very bad thing I said, that he ‘got a divorce’ for marrying me. I fell into the trap right away about the whole ‘Does that mean you broke up the Beatles?’ Um—I didn't break up the Beatles. Each one of them were getting very independent.”
John and YokoReplacing the other three lads in Lennon’s heart and mind was a trickier task than she’d imagined.
“There was an incredible period of unpleasantness for John, so you would think that he would like it that he was out of there,” Ono told Smith. “In a funny sort of way, I felt the weight of the breakup. Because he was communicating and having an extremely intense, stimulating exchange with three very intelligent, very quick guys. And now he expected all that to be replaced by me. And so our communication was very heavy. And it went very well, but at the same time… Initially when we got together, he would go to the studio and he would be playing with the other three, and I had a little time off, in a way. But that was gone.
“It was a very heavy load, yes,” she continued. “It also was a challenge. And also, I did understand the situation. It was like the Duke of Windsor announcing to the world that ‘I am with this woman.’ Of course who is not going to feel honored and make sure that I respond to his expectations?”
Smith wondered if there had ever been a moment in the 1970s when Lennon considered a reunion.
“Maybe Paul might have felt that he wanted to get together. But on the side of John, I think he was very adamant that he did not want to repeat the past. And at one point when we were separated, in 1974—between 1973 and 75, like 18 months or something like that—I think it was a marvelous time to see if John wants to go back to the Beatles. But he had no desire for that… I think he was thinking of doing something with Harry Nilsson. But it seems like (a Beatles reunion) never crossed his mind at that point.”
Former Capitol/EMI president (and interviewer) Joe SmithSmith, the former president of Capitol/EMI, conducted interviews with hundreds of top artists for his 1988 book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. This year, he donated unedited versions of those quarter-century-old recordings to the Library of Congress. At their website, you can listen to his conversations with musicians including McCartney, Harrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Little Richard, Elton John, Ray Charles, Woody Herman, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Sting, David Bowie, and about 200 others.
McCartney might not appreciate Ono’s pointedness about the songwriting order in her interview with Smith. (He once unsuccessfully lobbied her to have the credits on some of his solo compositions changed from “Lennon/McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon.”) He probably wouldn’t agree with her saying that in the early days “John probably felt that he needed the commercial side of Paul, and Paul probably felt that he needed the artistic side of John.” And he almost certainly wouldn’t agree with the charge that the Beatles were in danger of becoming “his” band.
But he would probably concur with a lot of the other things Ono told Smith in the mid-‘80s. In a recent interview with David Frost, McCartney maintained that “she certainly didn't break the group up—the group was breaking up,” and agreed that the Beatles left “a neat body of work" and their finite status "wasn't that bad a thing."
As for the contention that McCartney was ultimately the ringleader in the group’s last days, that’s not terribly in contention. The recent deluxe edition of Magical Mystery Tour on DVD and Blu-Ray makes it clear that McCartney was most headstrong about helping the suddenly rudderless group find a sense of direction after the death of manager Brian Epstein, even if “Paul McCartney & Wings” was never in danger of being directly preceded by a group that had turned into “Paul McCartney & Fabs

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/12/27/armed-teachers-guards-key-to-school-security-in-israel/       

Armed teachers, guards bolster school security in Israel

By

Published December 27, 2012

| FoxNews.com

JERUSALEM –  Americans intent on ensuring a school massacre like the one in Newtown, Conn., never happens again could learn a lot from Israel, where the long menu of precautions includes armed teachers.
The Jewish state, which has long faced threats of terrorist strikes in crowded locations including schools, takes an all-of-the-above approach to safety in the classroom. Fences, metal detectors and armed private guards are part of a strategy overseen by the country’s national police. And the idea of armed teachers in the classroom, which stirred much controversy in the wake of the U.S. attack, has long been in practice in Israel, though a minority of them carry weapons today.
Oren Shemtov, CEO of Israel’s Academy of Security and Investigation, noted that attacks typically happen in a matter of minutes, and said gun-toting teachers could, at the very least, buy time for kids to escape while police race to the scene.
“Two (armed) teachers would have kept (the Newtown shooter) occupied for 45 seconds each,” said Shemtov, who is one of 16 people in Israel authorized to train those who instruct school guards.
Shemtov, a veteran of Israel’s security services who has been teaching security methods for 22 years, praised the Newtown teachers who gave their lives trying to protect children, but lamented the fact that they weren’t able to shoot back when gunman Adam Lanza opened fire, killing 20 children and six adults before shooting himself in the head as police converged on Sand Hook Elementary School.
“We need to give them the tools to be heroes,” Shemtov said. “No one wants to be a hero. They did what they had to do.”
Security consultant Dov Zwerling, an Israeli counter-terror police veteran, believes armed guards are crucial for school security.
“From what I know of almost all of the active shooter events in the U.S., almost all of them conclude with the shooter taking his own life the moment he is challenged by the first officer on the scene,” Zwerling said. “Why not challenge him earlier?”
Shemtov said the two most critical keys to protecting schools are armed guards and armed teacher response teams. But, as in the U.S., the idea of teachers carrying guns raised some objections in Israel, he said.
“At one point the Interior Ministry mandated that a certain percentage of teachers be armed but because, over time, fewer teachers carried weapons, for a number of reasons, including philosophical objections, and due to increased terror attacks, private guards were mandated at all schools," he said.
School security in Israel is an extension of the comprehensive approach authorities there take to protecting all public places. According to National Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, police work with the Israeli Defense Force and the private security companies that protect such places as malls, bus stations, schools and universities. A centralized command system allows for quick dissemination of intelligence to every police officer and private guard in the field, he said.
A collective effort among police, private guards and teachers requires that the civilians involved in armed security receive rigorous training. Private guards undergo at least three weeks of advanced training with a 9mm weapon and guards employed for school protection must pass criminal, mental and physical checks.
“A long course, at a minimum of 40-60 hours, is needed so that the instructor can feel out the student,” said Shemtov, noting that not all teachers or guards are suited for school protection. “Course candidates should be a certain age, emotionally mature, of a certain mentality, physically healthy - and from there move to training.”
In order to station armed guards in U.S. schools, an idea advocated by the National Rifle Association, America could tap a ready pool of qualified candidates, Shemtov said. U.S. soldiers returning from overseas are well suited for school protection, he said, and “instead of returning with nothing to do there’s a sea of work” as school guards.
“They’re the elite of the American people,” Shemtov said. “You have people obligated, morally and ethically to the state, to the flag - this is a soldier. It’s a person who went out to do this. All you have to do is give him the appropriate training to do this in the private sector....This is the best of the American people, like they’re the best of the Israeli people. They’re people who took it upon themselves to help others.”
Greg Tepper is a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/12/27/armed-teachers-guards-key-to-school-security-in-israel/print#ixzz2GOio48U6

The planned re-election of Obama, revolutionary style

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/46516           

Obama administration, including his czars and his closest Progressive supporters, are planning a manufactured insurgency against America. Using the media to garner both sympathy and support for his unfinished goals

The planned re-election of Obama, revolutionary style

- Doug Hagmann (Bio and Archives)  Tuesday, May 8, 2012

---

HomelandSecurityUs.com
The Contact

It was not the proverbial 3:00 a.m. phone call, but close enough. And it was not made to the White House, but to my house, which is not white, nor is it in DC. It was about 2:30 a.m. on 25 April 2012, and the call itself was somewhat unexpected. I had anticipated the telephone call from my DHS insider much earlier the previous day, but our schedules didn’t synch up. I was traveling on an investigative assignment, while my source was in meetings all day. I had just fallen asleep, and was slumbering no more than 20 minutes when the phone rang.
In most households, a ringing phone at that time of night causes concern for everyone who hears it. In my household, it seems to surprise only my surly, 140 pound light-sleeping German Shepherd. He let out an objective grunt as I stepped over him to take the call in another room. It was “Rosebud,” the code name given my insider source.

About Rosebud

Just a little bit here about my source and his “super-secret code name.” I’ve known this government insider since 1979, when he first became a municipal patrol officer. He took a job in a bigger city and had a very successful run as a cop. Before retirement and after the events of 9/11, he was tapped by the feds, where he worked in various capacities under the umbrella of DHS. He worked his way up, and suddenly found himself in what he terms the inner sanctum of the “TEC” building. TEC, he explains, is an acronym for what he calls “The Estrogen Challenged,” which houses the upper echelon of the Department of Homeland Security. I’ll leave it at that.
As far as his code name, it originates from an incident that occurred at the end of the disco era. It is something that we both privately laugh about, but rarely ever talk about. His “code name” is known to him, me, and at the time, a young woman who has since vanished amid the glitter of disco balls and constant replays of the Bee Gees in a dark nightclub some 32 years ago, and has no “cloak and dagger” origins.
But he is real, his position serious, and his knowledge vast. Unfortunately, that’s what makes the whole situation frightening and deadly serious.

The information

It began on Wednesday, 2 May 2012 with a 45-minute interview on TruNews with Rick Wiles when I first disclosed the information I received the previous week from my source. The information I relayed “went viral,” as they say, across the internet.
To support the statements I made during that interview, I am showing my handwritten notes taken contemporaneously during our conversation. My notes consist of two pages and are, at various points,  admittedly difficult to decipher. I ask that points not be deducted for my penmanship given the time of the morning which they were taken.
According to my source, there is talk among the highest levels of the uppermost echelon of the Department of Homeland Security, which he describes as effectively under the control of Barack Hussein Obama. During this call, he said that the DHS is actively preparing for massive social unrest inside the United States. He then corrected himself, stating that “a civil war” is the more appropriate term. Certain elements of the government are not only expecting and preparing for it, they are actually facilitating it,” stated my source.
“The DHS takes their marching orders from the Obama administration, from Obama himself, but mostly from his un-appointed czars. And Jarrett, especially Valerie Jarrett. Don’t think for a minute that the administration is doing anything to stabilize events in the U.S. They are revolutionaries, and revolutionaries thrive on chaos,” he added.
My source stated that he has not seen things this bad since he began working within DHS. “It’s like they [DHS agency heads] don’t care about what the American people see or feel about what the DHS agencies are doing. They figure that if the average American will put up with being “sexually groped and nuked” just to fly, they’ll accept almost anything. “That’s why their actions are becoming more overt.  “It’s in your face and the brass actually chuckle about it” said my source.

New Information

Astounded by the information my source provided “going viral,” I spoke to him again early Sunday morning. This was a scheduled telephone call (as noted on page 2 of my notes) based on a high level meeting of DHS personnel that was scheduled for and took place in Chantilly, Virginia, on Saturday, 5 May 2012.  He hoped to provide me with more information to supplement that which he already given. Although he was not personally present, his source was. While he would not say who was at the meeting on Saturday or give its precise location, he said that the many of the names would be recognizable. He spoke to his source late Saturday night.
I contacted him on his cellular phone early Sunday morning to get the promised update.
“Geez, nice job on getting the word out about what’s really going on at DHS and in this administration,” were the first words out of his mouth, followed by “thanks a lot.” I asked him why he would be thanking me. “I just wanna’ tell you that I’m going to have to hire someone to start my car, and I’m surely not going for any rides in small planes in the immediate future,” he said with a bit of nervous laughter. “I hope no one finds out who I am or it’s going to be more than my pension I’ll have to worry about.”
“I can tell you word is getting out that people are starting to wake up, which is causing a lot of ‘pissed off brass.’  I can’t tell if they are more desperate or upset about the exposure, but the tone is starting to become a lot more tense. I hope that we’re having something to do with that,” he added.
With that, he provided me with additional information to supplement that which he already given me on 25 April. For clarity purposes, I have combined the information together from both contacts. The following information includes the updated information provided to me Sunday morning.

Obama the revolutionary

Metaphorically speaking, there’s a revolution going on in the U.S., propped up by three legs. Economic chaos, chaos through racial division, and chaos through class division, all joined by one core element: Barack Hussein Obama and his stable of unelected czars. Obama is using the lessons learned in 1968 as the template for 2012, and many of those who were active in the late 1960s are now calling the shots for 2012.
“The Obama administration and many of the un-elected ‘czars,’ either directly or indirectly, are engaged in covert activities with the occupy movement, various labor protests, and other subversive activities inside the U.S.,” stated my source. Using untracked campaign funds, they are paying people to infiltrate the various movements to cause physical destruction of property and disrupt commerce. That began last year, but has increased ten-fold already this year,” stated this source. He added that they are using some lower level DHS agents to make the payments under the context of tracking subversives, but they are the unwitting subversives. “It’s like Fast & Furious” but in the social realm,” he added.
“Obama is using some high profile people as pawns to foment the revolution. I heard several times through very credible sources that [Louis] Farrakhan is on the CIA payroll. Other have been named as well, but I’m not prepared to identify them yet. Farrakhan is to coordinate the Blacks and the Muslims to prepare for riots this summer, using any means necessary.”
“Mentioned at the meeting Saturday were methods to use pawns to simulate the rioting in the Arab Spring countries, but to the benefit of this administration. A controlled chaos thing,” stated my source. They envision rioting starting in the urban areas first, such as New York and other major cities, followed by a disruption of business and commerce. This will allow the DHS to mobilize their various teams into the streets of America without objection of the people,” stated my source.
“They want to restrict travel, if not through high energy prices, then by checkpoints and curfews mandated by rioting and unrest. They understand we are the most well-armed nation in the world, yet they are aware of our vulnerabilities and intend to fully exploit them,” he added. The whole purpose is to keep Obama in office for another term, no matter how unpopular he is, as he is not finished changing our country from a Constitutional Republic. This is the run-up to the 2012 elections, or perhaps causing enough chaos to delay them - indefinitely.”
One statement that rattled me more than anything was that a great number of those already in power, whether in appointed or elected positions, actually want to see Obama stay in power, according to this source. “This is what we’ve been working toward and we’re closer now than we’ve ever been. If we lose now, we might not have another chance.”
This chilling common goal also explains the lack of interest in the Constitutional legitimacy of Obama. It is common knowledge that Obama is not an American, and neither is his agenda. Of course, criticism of his bona-fides feeds into the cries of racism, despite the massive fraud perpetrated on the American people. Party lines are meaningless when the common objective is the revolutionary overtaking of America.

Obama, the professor of Keynesian economics

“The Obama administration is working closely with Bernanke, Geithner and others not to save our economy, but to outright destroy it. He is not the first or only one to try this, but the most effective and most vetted for that purpose. Do you actually think that the fact that Timothy Geithner’s father worked with Obama’s mother in Indonesia was coincidental,” stated my source rhetorically. “What we’re seeing now is the fourth quarter of a game that started long ago, which also currently involves the Clintons. Obama would not be where he is if it were not for the Clintons, and to a lesser extent, Bush, but that’s for other reasons.  Don’t be fooled, the Clintons never left or lost power,” he added.
“There are file drawers full of papers, heavily guarded papers at the ‘TEC building’  so I can only imagine what’s in them, about international financial dealings going back decades. I do know, or at least I was told, that they involve organizations that are the so-called conspiracy fringe groups, such as the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral Commission, and people including George Soros, Henry Kissinger, and current leaders of big industry. Some are fossils. They’ve been around a long time. Others are up-and-coming. They’ve got one thing in common, though, and that is to put in place a global system of governance, including a common currency. Economics is a huge part of this revolution, and they want to replace the dollar, to see it collapse. They expect, that is, they are working toward this very goal, and when this happens, it will cause chaos like never seen before in the history of this country.”
“Why do you think Jon Corzine is not only walking around, but heavily involved in Obama fundraising? They know it’s just a matter of time that Europe will implode economically, and when it does, start counting the days before we see massive hyperinflation and the ultimate collapse of the U.S. dollar,” stated this insider.  “What will it look like in the streets of America when the general population realizes that there is no money? That’s right, chaos.”

Obama & the planned racial divide

According to this insider, the Trayvon Martin case is just the tip of the iceberg. “You certainly don’t have to be a genius to understand how Obama and his team played the public on this issue, and it’s far from over. But that’s not the sole element of what we’ll see this summer.”
“Remember the shots fired at the White House not too long ago?” asked my source. There was an element of outrage that was squandered, according to ‘team Obama.’  In fact, Obama and some of his closest advisors, especially [Valerie] Jarrett were incredibly angered that the outrage was seemingly tempered. It should have been an opportunity to use our force against the Tea Parties, the gun clingers, the Constitutionalists, and everyone who has complained about Obama. DHS should have stepped in right then, and used that event to start the clampdown,” this source stated about White House comments.
This source stated that from that point on, the DHS must become more responsive and aggressive.
Watch for a false flag event against Obama or his family, something that will outrage ‘black America.’ It will be carefully choreographed, but executed in a manner that will evoke the ugliest of reactions and create racial chaos in this country that will make the Watts riots, 1968 and the Rodney King riots pale in comparison. That’s the third leg in this.”

The planned end-game

Does Obama look worried about the upcoming elections? Look at his lavish vacations, his limited work schedule, and those with whom he is working.  This is a very dangerous man who has, as his closest advisors, people who have orchestrated the revolutions of the 1960s. They know the “trigger points” in America.
The Obama administration, including his czars and along with his closest Progressive supporters, are planning a manufactured insurgency against America. He is using the media to his advantage to garner both sympathy and support for his unfinished goals. He is desperately seeking a way to remain in office, even if it means the surreal prospect of an indefinite postponement of elections - if it can be pulled off. So far, he’s got the support of the majority of the DHS “brass” behind him, according to my source.
“They’re power hungry, and they want to remain in charge,” stated this source.
The “surreal” aspect of suspended elections won’t look so surreal when you see any or all of the “trigger points” take place in the not-so-distant future.
“The end-game plan for America is its destruction as a Constitutional Republic, with the assistance of the agencies under the umbrella of the DHS.”
My sourced stated one more thing that seemed to tie things together. He urged me to recall the quote by Henry Kissinger who was speaking at a Bilderberg meeting at Evian, France, on 21 May 1992:
Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.
That threat need not be from beyond. All it might take is a world of starving, broke and desperate people.
Note: My source promised more information at a later time. Stay tuned.

Copyright © Douglas Hagmann
Douglas J. Hagmann and his son, Joe Hagmann host The Hagmann & Hagmann Report, a live Internet radio program broadcast each weeknight from 8:00-10:00 p.m. ET.
Douglas Hagmann, founder & director of the Northeast Intelligence Network, and a multi-state licensed private investigative agency. Doug began using his investigative skills and training to fight terrorism and increase public awareness through his website.
Doug can be reached at: director@homelandsecurityus.com

http://thetruthwins.com/archives/you-might-hate-america-if             

You Might Hate America If…

By Michael, on December 28th, 2012

 

In America today, there is an all-out attack on the values that this country was founded upon.  Many of the people that are involved in these attacks actually claim to "love America" and yet they viciously attack the values and the principles that were foundational to what early Americans believed.  In particular, there are two documents that were greatly cherished in early America that are being relentlessly assaulted today: the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.  In colleges and universities all over America, students are being taught that these documents are "flawed" and that they need to "evolve" as society changes.  Those teaching this philosophy honestly believe that modern values are far superior to the values found in those documents.  They are convinced that it is foolish to be "bound" by the wisdom of the past.  That is why they love to refer to the U.S. Constitution as a "living, breathing document".  They believe that they should be able to "reinterpret" the Constitution without going through the hassle of the formal amendment process.  And of course we have seen courts do this over and over again in recent years.  When they feel it is necessary, our politicians and our courts will even openly ignore the Constitution when they feel it is necessary.  At this point, the Constitution has been so watered down and so many of our freedoms and liberties have been stripped away that we really don't have much of a Constitution left.  Sure, it is still there on paper, but our nation really doesn't follow it anymore.
Of course a similar thing could be said of the Bible.  In colleges and universities all over America, the Bible is relentlessly attacked.  Trust me, I have sat in university classrooms where it happens.  The goal is to cast doubt on it, discredit it and make it as irrelevant as possible.  In other words, they are trying to do the same thing to the Bible that they are doing to the U.S. Constitution.
But those two documents were the two most important documents in the early years of the United States.
Those two documents contained values and principles that helped make our country great.
Unfortunately, today we think that we "know better" and we are turning our backs on those values and principles.
So do you hate America and the values and the principles that it was founded upon?  The following are some indications that you might...
If you refer to the U.S. Constitution as a "living, breathing document", you might hate America.
If you believe that the U.S. Constitution is "inherently flawed", you might hate America.
If you go around telling people that "we cannot let the Constitution become an obstacle", you might hate America.
If you believe that the U.S. Constitution "represented values we should abhor or at least reject today", you might hate America.
If you are convinced that there is "something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century", you might hate America.
If you find yourself uttering phrases such as "capitalism does not work" or "capitalist pigs", you might hate America.
If you consider marriage to be an "antiquated institution" and you believe that it enslaves women, you might hate America.
If you believe that the fact that the percentage of married couples in America today is at an all-time low is a good thing, you might hate America.
If you think that football is "too violent" and should be banned, you might hate America.
If you believe that those that are "reverent of individual liberty" are potential terrorists, you might hate America.
If you consider California to be a positive example for the rest of the nation, you might hate America.
If you believe that U.S. soldiers should be ordered to avoid criticizing "anything related to Islam", you might hate America.
If you believe that students should be sent home from school for wearing shirts that display the American flag on the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, you might hate America.
If you think that the U.S. military should be able to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without ever granting them a trial, you might hate America.
If you believe that "liberty" and "freedom" are "dangerous", you might hate America.
If you believe that all human activity should be centrally planned and managed "for the good of the environment", you might hate America.
If you believe that Christianity exists to keep the poor from killing the rich, you might hate America.
If you think that the government should take away most of what people earn through taxes, you might hate America.
If you believe that it is a good thing that millions of American jobs are being shipped to communist China, you might hate America.
If you consider small businesses to be "irrelevant", you might hate America.
If you want to trample on our Second Amendment rights, you might hate America.
If you believe that volunteer chaplains should be banned from using the name of Jesus on government property, you might hate America.
If you think that the U.S. government should continue running trillion dollar deficits every single year, you might hate America.
If you think that traffic camera fines are a good thing, you might hate America.
If you believe that our borders should be left unprotected, you might hate America.
If you believe that illegal immigrants should be able to legally get driver's licenses, you might hate America.
If you believe that illegal immigrants should be able to practice law in the United States, you might hate America.
If you are wearing a shirt that proclaims that you are "proud to be politically correct", you might hate America.
If you think that the United Nations should be given control of the Internet, you might hate America.
If you are convinced that license plates that say "Choose Life" on them are unconstitutional, you might hate America.
If you believe that government agencies should be able to read your email without a search warrant, you might hate America.
If you believe that faith is a "mental illness", you might hate America.
If you work for MSNBC, you might hate America.
If you believe that preppers are "dangerous extremists" that should be carefully watched and monitored, you might hate America.
If you believe that TSA goons should touch the private parts of our women and our children before they are allowed to board their flights, you might hate America.
If you are convinced that "it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism", you might hate America.
If you believe that making a profit is a sin, you might hate America.
If you consider the Founding Fathers to be "terrorists", you might hate America.

Sandy Hook: Aleister Crowley, interview freak-show, police audio

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/sandy-hook-aleister-crowley-interview-freak-show-police-audio/                 EYE   OPENER !!!                  People    R  waking up  ALL over this Globe !           

Sandy Hook: Aleister Crowley, interview freak-show, police audio

Sandy Hook: Aleister Crowley, interview freak-show, police audio
by Jon Rappoport
December 28, 2012
www.nomorefakenews.com

I’ve been listening to a stream of police dept. audio during the initial response to the Sandy Hook shooting.

This link has most of its action in the first four minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8uVR7TifS

At roughly 2:38, a police voice says: “Party in custody.”

Then at 3:49, “We have a suspect down.”

This next link, for me, was somewhat clearer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-Ix_aaDhg

Starting at roughly 3:13 (in the second link), there are relevant police comments:

“A teacher reports two shadows running past the building past the gym.”

“They’re shooting.” (??)

“Yeah, we got ‘em.”

“They’re coming at me down Kurt’s (sp) Way!”

“Got ‘em (?)…proned out.” (5:34 in the second link)

We get the distinct sense there are multiple shooters.

Whoever is proned out, whoever is in custody, whoever is “coming at me,” whoever is down…we don’t know what happened to them.

Reporters on the scene have, as far as I know, provided no information, and neither have police. The suspects have disappeared down the memory hole.

Then we have these television interviews with families of the victims.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VizQGl8bu8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmdXR3TtOvM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddF6UzgoPiY

It’s astounding. Parents are smiling. They’re actors from Central Casting? One thing is for sure. They’re androids, if you measure their responses against reports of what happened in the Sandy Hook School.

And as androids, they’re only matched by the TV reporters who are interviewing them.

If you’re tempted to say the parents and family members are in shock, or they’re reacting to being on television, forget it. Their attitudes don’t match a massacre by any stretch of the imagination.

Is Sandy Hook/Newtown a Stepford Village? Are these people all programmed to be pleasant and accommodating No Matter What?

It’s about as bizarre as the purported video footage of the Aurora theater during the shootings there this summer. As people exit the lobby and come out on to the street, there is no sign of blood and no one is coughing from the reported tear gas inside the theater.

With these Sandy Hook parents, we’re looking at a level of conditioning in which Being Nice can completely overwhelm even the murder of one’s own child.

Tears? Not one person in these interviews has actual tears running down his or her face.

One of the fathers, Robbie Parker, has had his interview played and replayed all over the planet on YouTube, and you can watch him smiling and grinning, for all the world looking like he’s just been appointed CEO of a company he works for…and then he steps to a podium to make his statement, and as one poster succinctly describes it, “gets into character.”

This isn’t just an internal event. You can watch Parker huffing and puffing and pushing himself into what he thinks is a tragic and grief-stricken state of mind. He does it so badly you wonder why no one in the room calls him on it. It’s beyond strange. Yet reporters later talked about Parker “struggling through tears and suffering to make a heartfelt statement…” The reporters are just as deranged as Parker is.

This boggling show isn’t confined to Sandy Hook. A commenter below a Deseret News article on Parker replied: “Brave young father, wise to forgive early and choose to move forward—nothing can be gained by dwelling on what cannot be changed.”

At times, watching these interviews, I wondered whether the parents had been conditioned to believe, in the face of ANYTHING, that good and nice children all take a choo-choo train to heaven and there is nothing to regret about their murders at all.

In an earlier article, I pointed out that, indeed, at 1hr:58 of The Dark Knight Rises, Gary Oldman, talking about an impending attack on “Strike Zone 1,” is pointing to the words “Sandy Hook” on a map in front of him. These are the only legible words on the map.

By happenstance, the production designer of Dark Knight Rises, Nathan Crowley, is related to the infamous British black-magic legend, Aleister Crowley, who was sometimes called The Great Beast 666.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/An-arousing-display-at-the-Met/8583

In an interview, Nathan said, “Yes, Aleister Crowley is a direct relative, he’s my grandfather’s cousin, but we were never allowed to even mention his name because we were a very Quaker family.”

Nathan is also the production designer of Lady Gaga’s video ad for her Perfume, Fame.

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-lady-gaga-fame-142761

In terms of “the dark side,” the full 5:41 version of the video-ad makes Dark Knight Rises look like a Disney cartoon by comparison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az1-oLmxhHQ

But not to worry. What happened at Sandy Hook was exactly as the major media portrayed it, and nothing more. Sure. You bet.

Jon Rappoport

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/senate-fisa-amendments/           

Senate Approves Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers

• By David Kravets
• 12.28.12

Whistleblower Mark Klein provided this photo of a secret room in a San Francisco AT&T switching center, which he claimed housed data-mining equipment that enables the government to spy on electronic communications.

The Senate on Friday reauthorized for five years broad electronic eavesdropping powers that legalized and expanded the President George W. Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which was expiring Monday at midnight, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
The House approved the measure in September. President Barack Obama, who said the spy powers were a national security priority, is expected to quickly sign the package before the law Congress codified in 2008 expires in the coming days. Over the past two days, the Senate debated and voted down a handful of amendments in what was seen as largely political theater to get Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to lift a procedural hold on the FISA Amendments Act legislation that barred lawmakers from voting on the package.
In the end, the identical package the House passed 301-118 swept through the Senate on a 73-23 vote.
The American Civil Liberties Union immediately blasted the vote.
“The Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping, once considered a radical threat to the Fourth Amendment, has become institutionalized for another five years,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel.
Amendments senators refused to enact included extending the measure for just three years, another one requiring the government to account for how many times Americans’ communications have been intercepted, and one by Wyden prohibiting U.S. spy agencies from reviewing the communications of Americans ensnared in the program.
“The amendment I fought to include would have helped bring the constitutional principles of security and liberty back into balance and intend to work with my colleagues to see that the liberties of individual Americans are maintained,” Wyden said immediately after the vote.
The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.
The government has also interpreted the law to mean that as long as the real target is al-Qaeda, the government can wiretap purely domestic e-mails and phone calls without getting a warrant from a judge. That’s according to David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department.
In short, Kris said the FISA Amendments Act gives the government nearly carte blanche spying powers.
Kris, who headed the Justice Department’s National Security Division between 2009 and 20011, writes in the revised 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions:

For example, an authorization targeting ‘al Qaeda’ — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad—could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

The National Security Agency told lawmakers that it would be a violation of Americans’ privacy to disclose how the measure is being used in practice.
After Obama signs the legislation Friday, the spy powers won’t expire until December 31, 2017.
The law is the subject of a Supreme Court challenge. The Obama administration argues that the American Civil Liberties Union and a host of other groups suing don’t have the legal standing to even bring a challenge.
A federal judge agreed, ruling the ACLU, Amnesty International, Global Fund for Women, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association, The Nation magazine, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union and other plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case because they could not demonstrate that they were subject to the warrantless eavesdropping.
The groups appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that they often work with overseas dissidents who might be targets of the National Security Agency program. Instead of speaking with those people on the phone or through e-mails, the groups asserted that they have had to make expensive overseas trips in a bid to maintain attorney-client confidentiality. The plaintiffs, some of them journalists, also claim the 2008 legislation chills their speech, and violates their Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
Without ruling on the merits of the case, the appeals court agreed with the plaintiffs last year that they have ample reason to fear the surveillance program, and thus have legal standing to pursue their claim.
The case, argued last month, is pending an opinion from the Supreme Court.
Homepage Photo: wallyg / Flickr

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/megaupload-mega/               

Megaupload Is Dead. Long Live Mega!

• By Charles Graeber
• 10.18.12
• 
  

Photo: Wilk

They’ve been indicted by the U.S. government for conspiracy and briefly thrown in jail, but Kim Dotcom and his partners in the digital storage locker Megaupload have no intention of quitting the online marketplace.
Instead the co-defendants plan to introduce a much-anticipated new technology later this year that will allow users to once again upload, store, and share large data files, albeit by different rules. They revealed details of the new service exclusively to Wired.
They call it Mega and describe it as a unique tool that will solve the liability problems faced by cloud storage services, enhance the privacy rights of internet users, and provide themselves with a simple new business. Meanwhile, critics fear that Mega is simply a revamped version of Megaupload, cleverly designed to skirt the old business’s legal issues without addressing the concerns of Internet piracy.

Read More:

Inside the Mansion—and Mind— of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net

(Dotcom and three of his partners remain in New Zealand, where they were arrested in January 2012. They face extradition to the U.S. on charges of “engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement,” according to the Department of Justice.)
What Mega and Megaupload do have in common is that they are both one-click, subscriber-based cloud platforms that allow customers to upload, store, access, and share large files. Dotcom, and his Mega partner Mathias Ortmann say the difference is that now those files will first be one-click-encrypted right in a client’s browser, using the so-called Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm. The user is then provided with a second unique key for that file’s decryption.
It will be up to users, and third-party app developers, to control access to any given uploaded file, be it a song, movie, videogame, book, or simple text document. Internet libertarians will surely embrace this new capability.
And because the decryption key is not stored with Mega, the company would have no means to view the uploaded file on its server. It would, Ortmann explains, be impossible for Mega to know, or be responsible for, its users’ uploaded content — a state of affairs engineered to create an ironclad “safe harbor” from liability for Mega, and added peace of mind for the user.
“If servers are lost, if the government comes into a data center and rapes it, if someone hacks the server or steals it, it would give him nothing,” Dotcom explains. “Whatever is uploaded to the site, it is going to be remain closed and private without the key.”
Dotcom’s belief is that even the broad interpretation of internet law that brought down Megaupload would be insufficient to thwart the new Mega, because what users share, how they share it, and how many people they share it with will be their responsibility and under their control, not Mega’s.
Dotcom says that according to his legal experts, the only way to stop such a service from existing is to make encryption itself illegal. “And according to the U.N. Charter for Human Rights, privacy is a basic human right,” Dotcom explains. “You have the right to protect your private information and communication against spying.”
Dotcom says that the new Mega will be an attractive product for anyone concerned about the state of online security. And to address the concerns about data loss of the sort that affected Megaupload customers whose files were seized by the FBI, Mega will store all data on two sets of redundant servers, located in two different countries.
“So, even if one country decides to go completely berserk from a legal perspective and freeze all servers, for example — which we don’t expect, because we’ve fully complied with all the laws of the countries we place servers in — or if a natural disaster happens, there’s still another location where all the files are available,” Ortmann says. “This way, it’s impossible to be subjected to the kind of abuse that we’ve had in the U.S.”
Ultimately, Dotcom envisions a network hosted by thousands of different entities with thousands of different servers, in countries all over the world.
“We’re creating a system where any host in the world — from the $2,000 garage operation to the largest online host — can connect their own servers to this network,” Dotcom says. “We can work with anybody, because the hosts themselves cannot see what’s on the servers.”
One of the more unique wrinkles of the new service may come from Mega’s decision not to deploy so-called de-duplication on its servers, meaning that if a user decides to upload the same copyright-infringing file 100 times, it would result in 100 different files and 100 distinct decryption keys. Removing them would require 100 takedown notices of the type typically sent by rights holders like movie studios and record companies.
While Mega is adamant that this is not the point of their technology, others fear the service may atomize the piracy problem, turning internet policing into an even more elaborate game of Wack-a-Mole. “As we learned from the first iteration of Megaupload, how it describes itself and how it really operates can be two very distinct things,” says one industry spokesman who asked not to be named. “We’d rather not wade in here until we can see the thing with our own eyes.”
Julie Samuels, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that while the new Mega may present an interesting development for internet users, it doesn’t answer the issues raised by the unique and, by her lights, questionable interpretation of Internet law used in the case against Megaupload. “It’s likely to change the cat-and-mouse game that goes on in terms of this issue on the Internet,” Samuels says. “But it’s still a cat-and-mouse game.”
Samuels says that the technology may affect how easy or difficult it is for rights holders or law enforcement to determine exactly what kind of files are being shared. “But there are still some fundamental questions that need to be answered. At this point, it’s not technology but the courts which need to address them.”
Dotcom insists that Mega is not “a giant middle finger to Hollywood and the DoJ,” or a relaunch of Megaupload. And Ortmann points out that if users choose to violate copyright with the new technology, there are already rules in place to address it. “If the copyright holder finds publicly posted links and decryption keys and verifies that the file is an infringement of their copyright, they can send a DMCA takedown notice to have that file removed, just like before,” he says.
As with Megaupload, Ortmann says, Mega will also grant direct access to their servers for entities such as film studios, allowing them to remove copyright-infringing material themselves. “But this time, if they want to use that tool, they’ll have to accept, prior to getting access, that they’re not going to sue us or hold us accountable for the actions of our users,” Dotcom says.
In any event, the Mega team believes that a government takedown of their new service is extremely improbable. “Unless our legal team tells us that the DoJ is likely to go berserk again,” Ortmann explains. “But in my view, they can’t pull off this stunt a second time.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/ff-kim-dotcom/all/       

Inside the Mansion—and Mind— of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net

• By Charles Graeber
• 10.18.12

Photo: Wilk

Please Choose One of the Following Statements:

• A. Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. He’s a hero. The savior of my online liberties. A visionary digital entrepreneur. His company Megaupload was a legitimate data-storage business used by hundreds of millions of individuals and by employees of NASA, US Central Command, even the FBI. The raid on his New Zealand home was excessive and illegal—shock-and-awe bullshit. Hollywood is terrified by the digital future, and an innocent paid the price. Kim is a martyr. But Kim will triumph.
  You’d like him, he’s cool.
  
• B. Kim Dotcom is a pirate. A megalomaniacal gangsta clown. An opportunistic and calculating career criminal. His Megaupload enterprise willfully made hundreds of millions of dollars off stolen movies, songs, videogames, books, and software. And, oh yeah, he couldn’t be more obnoxious about it.
  He wanted Wired to write a nice story about him, so he manipulated its writer by providing exclusive access, and even a few tears, in hopes of a puff piece. But Kim is a criminal. He knows he’s a criminal. Like any pirate, the only freedoms he really cares about are the ones he can exploit to make himself rich. The rest is all PR.
  If you think he’s cool, you don’t know him.
  
• C. Kim Dotcom is rich enough to work however and wherever he wants. And what he wants is to work from bed.
  

His bed of choice is a remarkable piece of custom Swedish craftsmanship made by a company called Hästens. Each one takes some 160 hours to produce and is signed by a master bed-maker who lays out the most perfect matrix of horsehair, cotton, flax, and wool. Price after custom framing: $103,000. Kim has three such beds in his New Zealand mansion, one of which faces a series of monitors and hard drives and piles of wires and is flanked on either side by lamps that look like, and may well be, chromed AK-47s. This is Kim’s “work bed” and serves as his office. It was here that he returned in the early morning of January 20, 2012, after a long night spent on his music album, one of his many side projects.

Read More:

Megaupload Is Dead. Long Live Mega!

Kim had spent the previous seven hours down the road at Roundhead Studios, laying down beats with songwriter Mario “Tex” James and Black Eyed Peas producer Printz Board in a studio owned by Crowded House frontman Neil Finn. They finished around 4:30 am, and Kim slid into the backseat of his Mercedes S-Class for the ride back to his mansion. Soon after leaving the parking lot, Kim noticed headlights behind them. He said to his driver, “I think we’re being followed.”
They pulled into Kim’s rented palace around dawn. His wife and children were long asleep in another wing. Kim walked to his upstairs chambers, showered and changed into his customary all-black sleeping costume, grabbed his customary chilled Fiji water from the upstairs fridge, and settled before the monitors of his work bed. Then he heard the noise.

A low, wavering bass, it seemed to be coming from outside. Kim couldn’t tell—the cavernous stone labyrinth of rooms swallowed and scattered sound, and the thick velvet blackout curtains blocked out everything else. Kim guessed it was his helicopter. He didn’t bother with details, he had a staff for that, but he did know that VIPs from the entertainment world were expected in from LA in celebration of his 38th birthday. Maybe they’d arrived early and Roy, his pilot, had been dispatched to meet them. A moment later the helicopter theory was confirmed by the sound of rocks from the limestone drive raining against the windows. Fucking Roy! He’d been told not to land too near—the thought was interrupted by a boom, echoing and close.
This noise was coming from the other side of his office door. It was heavy hardwood several inches thick, secured by stout metal bolts in the stone casement. Kim struggled to his feet as the door shook and heaved on its hinges. Someone or something was trying to break through. Now Kim heard other noises, shouts and bangs and the unmistakable stomping of boots on stairs. Intruders were in the house. Kim Dotcom realized he was under attack.
Across an ocean, hours before Operation Takedown began, the US Department of Justice had already tipped off a select group of journalists about the raid’s planned highlights. If you know nothing else about Kim Dotcom, about the federal case against him and his former online business, Megaupload, you’ve probably heard about the raid. The story played out like a Hollywood blockbuster. And it was a great story.
The scene: New Zealand. Lush and Green and Freaking Far Away. It’s the Canada of Australia, Wales in a Hawaiian shirt, a Xanadu habitat for Hobbit and emu.
And harbor home to the villain: Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, aka Tim Vestor, Kim Tim Jim Vestor, Kimble, and Dr. Evil. A classic comic book baddie millionaire, an ex-con expatriate German ex-hacker lording over his own personal Pirate Bay just 30 minutes north of Auckland. Kim Dotcom was presented as a big, bad man, larger-than-life, larger than his 6′ 7″, perhaps 350-pound frame. We saw him posed with guns and yachts and fancy cars. We watched him drive his nitrox-fueled Mega Mercedes in road rallies and on golf courses, throwing fake gang signs at rap moguls and porn stars, making it rain with $175 million in illicit dotcom booty.
His alleged 50-petabyte pirate ship was Megaupload.com, a massive vessel carrying, at its peak, 50 million passengers a day, a full 4 percent of global Internet traffic. Megaupload was a free online storage locker, a cloud warehouse for files too bulky for email. It generated an estimated $25 million a year in revenue from ads and brought in another $150 million through its paid, faster, unlimited Premium service.

Kim, they say, was like Jabba the Hutt, running a bazaar of copyright criminality with impunity from his Kiwi Tatooine.

The DOJ maintains that the legitimate storage business was only a front, like a Mafia pork store; the real money was made out back, where Megaupload was a mega-swapmeet for some $500 million worth of pirated material, including movies, TV shows, music, books, videogames, and software. Kim, they contend, was the Jabba the Hutt-like presence running this grand bazaar of copyright criminality with impunity from his Kiwi Tatooine, protected by laser break beams and guards and guns, CCTV and infrared and even escape pods—including a helicopter and high-performance sports cars. The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that would wipe his servers all across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his doomsday button.
Operation Takedown was carried out by armed New Zealand special police and monitored by the FBI via video link. Descriptions of the raid varied from one news outlet to another, but most included the cops’ dramatic helicopter arrival on the expansive Dotcom Mansion lawn and their struggles with a security system fit for a Mafia don.
We read that police were forced to cut their way into Dotcom’s panic room, where they found him cowering near a sawed-off shotgun. That same day, similar raids were under way in eight other countries where Megaupload had servers or offices.
This was justice on an epically entertaining scale, topped by a final cherry of schadenfreude: the rich fat bad man humbled and humiliated, the boastful pirate king brought down. He was cuffed and put in jail, his booty seized, his business scuttled upon the reefs of anti-racketeering laws. If all went as planned, he and his six generals would be extradited to the US to face a Virginia judge and up to 55 years each in prison. The message was, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone. Look upon these works, ye BitTorrenters of Dark Knight trilogies, sneak thieves of 50 Cent, and despair in your pirate bays. Justice was served, the end, roll credits. Yes, it was a great story.
The only problem was, it wasn’t quite true.

At its peak, Kim Dotcom’s company Megaupload carried 4 percent of all Internet traffic. Photo: Wilk

Kim Dotcom’s head of security is waiting for me at the Auckland airport on a gray day last July. Wayne Tempero is easy to spot. Amid the limo drivers and families with Mylar balloons is one deadly serious shave-headed New Zealander with a lantern jaw—a tattooed wall of muscle wearing a tight black hoodie. Before working “close protection” for the most famous man in New Zealand, Tempero had protected other big faces and names, from David Beckham to the royal family of Brunei. He specializes in military hand-to-hand combat and looks like a very nice person who’d be very handy with a knife.
The car is waiting just outside. Not the Lamborghini or pink Series 62 Cadillac or any of the three retrofitted Mercedes CLK DTMs with extra-wide seats—the cops had impounded those. This is just a modest black Mercedes G55 AMG Kompressor with the license plate kimcom. “I think I was followed on my way here,” Tempero says. In fact, everyone in Kim’s entourage assumes everything is monitored, including all their communications. Tempero is the one facing gun charges after the raid—the shotguns were registered in his name—and he doesn’t need any more problems with the police. “Maybe we’re all a little paranoid these days,” he says with a grin as he edges up to the speed limit for the drive.
The Dotcom Mansion is impossible to miss, mostly because of the chromed industrial-park letters spelling out dotcom mansion across the gatehouse in blue backlighting. It’s said to be the island nation’s most expensive home, located in the lush hills of the town of Coatesville. The limestone drive winds up to a $24 million suburban castle with ponds, a tennis court, several pools, a Vegas-style stairstep fountain, and a hedgerow labyrinth. The surrounding 60 acres of lawn are manicured and impossibly steep.
Until just two months ago, Kim couldn’t live in his own home, as a condition of his house arrest following a month of jail time. For three months he was confined to the guesthouse, a prison of black lacquer and black leather, black Versace tables and wall-sized LCD flatscreens. The walls are adorned with poster-sized photographs of Kim and his beautiful 24-year-old wife, Mona, but mostly just Kim: Kim in front of a helicopter, Kim on the bow of a luxury yacht, Kim reeling in a great fish or in front of a European castle holding a shotgun and a limp duck, or straddling a mountaintop, eyes pinned on the distant future. The effect is more Kim Jong-Il than Kim Dotcom. Dotcom—or the iconic character of Dotcom—is everywhere here, but most of the 53 members of the household staff that once maintained the larger estate are gone with his seized fortune.
Outside the windows there are no humans to be seen or things to do. The grounds are gray and cold, winter in the southern hemisphere. The perimeter fences warn of electrocution. Closed-circuit cameras take in every angle from stations in the trees and rooftops, sending flickering images to the panels monitored by the skeleton staff still manning the distant guardhouses. My suspicion of surveillance by the FBI or New Zealand antiterror forces—or perhaps even by the millionaire former hacker himself—prevents me from logging onto Kim’s wireless network or even making a phone call. I feel like I’ve been kidnapped and held as a “guest” by a Bond villain. A Bond villain who is asleep. In fact, Tempero tells me, the boss had just gone to bed shortly before I arrived at dawn. There’s no telling when he’ll be awake.
Kim has surrounded himself with luxury, but what he prizes above all other indulgences is pure, deep sleep. He simply doesn’t always like to get up in the morning, and he doesn’t always like going to bed at night, and—here’s the kicker—he doesn’t have to. The sun is up or down—who cares? The clock is numbers in a circle, duodecimal nonsense. It is a guilt machine, a metronome for the normal lives of normal people. But it is always dark somewhere. And it is always night in the Dotcom Mansion. Great black curtains shut out the light, thick stone walls block the sound. The $103,000 horsehair Hästens bed is waiting. In his sleeping chamber there are no electronic things, no humming or beeping devices, no leaking of LED, no sigh of capacitor or fan. For sleep of the finest quality, for epicurean, luxury slumber, total silence is required and enforced.
The gardeners do not mow, the cleaners do not clean. The cooks chop quietly in other wings, the nannies tend the children in another house. When he sleeps the mansion holds its breath. Kim can’t provide a schedule. He doesn’t have to. It’s his house.
When Kim sleeps, he is flying. He’s not sweating, he doesn’t have health problems, bad knees, or a bad back. He’s not on trial or fighting for recognition. He’s not a kid afraid of his father coming home or more afraid that he won’t. He’s not being extradited to a place where jailers mark day from night with a light switch. When Kim sleeps, he is free.
“I usually just watch his Twitter,” Tempero says. “That’s really the only way to know when the boss is up.”
It’s late afternoon before Kim’s tweets start pouring forth. He tweets a lot, announcing updates on the coming court hearings, plugging his new pop single—a catchy duet with his wife called “Precious”—and a music video featuring home footage of the five Dotcom kids, including hospital shots of the arrival of his new twins only five months before. Other messages in the stream address Julian Assange or Internet freedoms or the tyranny of the FBI. A few minutes later, Tempero is at my door. The boss is up.

The $24 million Dotcom Mansion is surrounded by 60 acres of lawn and a hedgerow labyrinth.
Photo: Wilk

I find Kim behind the wheel of his golf cart, layered in his usual uniform of black vest over diaphanous black shirt and three-quarter-length pants, a black scarf and heavy black leather ball cap. He is a large man and fills most of the front seat. Despite his blue-tinted Cartier sunglasses, his eyes squint against the sunlight. Spotting me, he motors over and extends a fist bump.
“Wow, you look like a Viking,” he says, meaning probably that I’m blond and tall like him. His English is precise and tinged with a German-Finnish accent. “Cool!” Then he zips away on a golf cart that has been hacked to top 30 mph.
I follow along the limestone trail to what Kim calls his hill, where he can soak in a few minutes of precious winter sun.
At this time of year Kim and family would usually be based out of their floor-wide residence in the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, or on a rented yacht off the shores of Monaco or St. Tropez. The raid has enforced a Hotel California-style house arrest: stuck in a mansion on an island paradise, but still stuck.
“We will win the extradition trial eventually,” Kim says. “But what’s the point of that?” They’d still be stuck in New Zealand or vulnerable in any country with an extradition treaty with the US. The only real victory would be to face the charges in the States and win. But so far, the US Department of Justice has refused to allow them to use frozen Megaupload assets to relocate to the US and to pay lawyers. Their legal bills are already in the millions of dollars and rising.
But Kim has reason to hope that his adopted home might aid his cause. In a few days he will be in court for a much-expected showdown with prosecutors about the excesses of the raid on his home. It’s a sideshow ahead of the extradition hearing in March—but a sideshow that might determine Kim’s fate.
Kiwis still recall with pride their government barring American nuclear-powered warships from their harbors. Kim is not a New Zealand citizen, but many here took the FBI-instigated raid on his home quite personally, as a COPS-style American invasion.
In recent weeks, New Zealand Crown judges have pushed back against the DOJ, ruling that the search warrant on Kim and the removal of his personal hard drives under the guidance of the FBI were illegal. Still, the jeopardy is daunting—up to 55 years in jail for alleged crimes including conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, money laundering, and racketeering. “They’re treating us like a Mafia, man!” Kim says. “It’s unbelievable. It’s only because they cannot extradite us to the US just for copyright violation. If they treat us as some sort of international criminal conspiracy, they can.”
The “us” Kim is referring to are his six codefendants, his partners in Megaupload. Andrus Nomm, a resident of both Turkey and Estonia, was captured in Holland; Sven Echternach escaped to his home in Germany (which does not extradite its citizens); and Julius Bencko of Slovakia remains at large. The other three were, like Kim, nabbed in New Zealand. Two now arrive atop Kim’s hill in golf carts, young men in jeans and untucked oxford shirts.
First Bram van der Kolk, who oversaw programming for the Mega websites and at 30 looks something like a Dutch Matt Damon. Then Finn Batato, Megaupload’s chief marketing officer. Batato is a 39-year-old half-Palestinian, half-German from Munich, a mellow chain-smoking playboy with a taste for wine and watches. And finally, snaking up the hill on an all-terrain Segway, is Mathias Ortmann, Megaupload’s chief technical officer, cofounder, and director, the Spock to Kim’s Teutonic Kirk, and the 25 percent to Kim’s 68 percent ownership of Megaupload. Ortmann is a 40-year-old German ex-hacker and looks like it, with a dark V-neck over his thin frame and square glasses.
“He’s a genius, you know,” Batato says, lighting a cigarette. “Not because he speaks four languages, but an Einstein-type genius.”
Ortmann looks up from his iPhone and blinks.
“Mathias, please, at least admit that—it’s true.”
Ortmann just looks back at his screen, setting up a Skype call with his girlfriend back home in Germany.
“Please, tell the world,” Batato says to me, “these are normal people here.” Usually he would be in Europe, perhaps in the south of France, drinking Opus. Instead he is stuck in winter, facing jail, borrowing cigarette money, and living with van der Kolk. Batato is worried folks back home might think he is some kind of gangster.
“I mean, look at us,” van der Kolk says. He’s not some mafia pirate. He’s a programming nerd with a Filipino ex-model wife and a 3-year-old son. “It’s bullshit. We seem to be an easy target with this lifestyle. But driving around with license plates that say ‘mafia’ and stuff—it’s just our kind of humor.”
In the distance, Tempero appears in a golf cart. He works his way up the steep hill and hands a fresh bottle of Fiji water to Kim.
“Everything good, boss?”
“Yeah,” Kim says, wringing the cap off the bottle. The guys watch him as the dying sun signals the end of another day in their life in this island paradise. Their Elba.
At this point, all that stands between them and their fate are legal teams and Kim himself. Sure, the DOJ case cites a handful of seized emails that sound damning, but it was Kim who got them here. Dotcom has compared himself to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Julian Assange, and Martin Luther King Jr. He was the team’s visionary. Now he’ll need to think his team out of this jam. Kim promises he will. He has a plan.
And something even bigger and better in the works. More Mega than Megaupload. A technology nobody can touch. One that will change the world. They’ll beat the Department of Justice, humiliate them. And then, Kim promises, they shall have their vengeance.
The sun sets early in winter. The men file back down the hill to the warmth of Kim’s house-sized kitchen beside a 16-foot saltwater fish tank. A young Filipino maid brings Kim a fresh facecloth and water. Batato leaves for his usual spot on the back porch, to smoke and brood. The rest of the men stare silently into their iPhones, studying news blogs for hints of their fate.
Lately the news has been about donations Dotcom made to a New Zealand parliamentarian named John Banks—the deciding vote in the prime minister’s majority. When cornered, Banks insisted he didn’t remember the source of the donations or the ride in Kim’s helicopter or other allegations that might get him indicted. There have been calls for his resignation or impeachment.
“What do you think, Mathias?” Kim asks. “Should I give them an interview about the donations?”
“Did you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, go ahead,” Mathias says. “But I think it’s a sideshow.”
“But it would be interesting, no?”
“What, toppling a government?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s focus on toppling the bigger government.”
That government, of course, would be the United States. Kim and his associates are convinced that their company was targeted by the Obama administration for political rather than legal reasons. So, while 28 lawyers for Megaupload fight those charges around the world, Kim is taking on the Obama administration as well.
He’s starting with the music video of his single “Mr. President” and an online drive to collect promises not to reelect him.
Social media is new for Kim, but he already has more than 130,000 followers on Twitter and after only a few days has reached Facebook’s 5,000-friend limit. “Oh it’s stupid,” he says. “The interface is terrible. I’m bombed with news from people I don’t know—why does anyone put up with it?”
Kim is soliciting real friends too, inviting startled admirers to “swim at Kim’s” events at his pool and hosting Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak only a few weeks earlier in a show of Electronic Freedom solidarity. He’s reframing the issue: It’s not the DOJ versus Dotcom, it’s Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.

Kim invites admirers to events at his pool, and even hosted Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

Kim maintains that the real issue is a lack of understanding of the Internet. He was simply operating a hard-disc drive in virtual space. There’s no arguing that Megaupload wasn’t a legitimate cyberlocker, storing data for millions of individuals. Megaupload server logs show addresses that trace back to Fortune 100 companies and governments around the world. It’s also obvious that Megaupload was one of many Internet sites that stored, and profited from, copyright-infringing material. The only question is whether Kim and company bear criminal responsibility for that duality.
The law addressing this balance between the rights of copyright holders and Internet service providers was signed by President Clinton in 1998. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides ISPs with “safe harbor” from liability, so long as the provider doesn’t know for certain which, if any, of its stored material is copyright-infringing and “expeditiously” removes infringing material following a takedown notice.
The act was tested in June of 2010, when a US district court ruled that YouTube was protected by safe harbor against a $1 billion suit by Viacom; Google employees simply could not be expected to make tough, and often impossible, calls as to which clips of, say, Jersey Shore, had been uploaded without permission.
The DMCA was intended to clear up the gray areas of Internet law. But by making ignorance of its own business a cloud storage provider’s only defense, the law created a brand-new gray area, leaving in place an Internet where piracy was blatant big business. The world still hadn’t worked out how to have data storage that was both private and policed. Lawmakers attempted to tackle that issue this year with the antipiracy SOPA/PIPA measures, but millions of Internet freedom advocates shouted it down and on January 20 the legislation died; Kim was raided that same week. “The US showed the world they don’t need SOPA or a trial to control the Internet,” Kim says. “They did it with guns.”
The DOJ claims Megaupload was anything but ignorant of the pirated material on its site. In fact, the indictment claims, Megaupload’s generals engaged in illegal file-sharing themselves, encouraged it with an incentive program that paid cash for popular content, and were slow and selective in complying with takedown notices, only pulling infringing content and dropping the incentive program when the company was at the peak of its power. Megaupload counters that policing the billions of files on its service would be both impossible and a violation of their customers’ privacy, that they did their best to comply with takedown notices as the law required, and that they had reasonable expectations of the same DMCA safe harbor afforded to YouTube.
But unlike the Viacom versus YouTube case, the charges against Megaupload are not civil but criminal; the key players aren’t being sued, they’re facing jail. Not for the first time, Kim finds himself embroiled in a criminal case based on uncertain tech precedent. Does safe harbor even apply in a criminal case? It’s not clear that a criminal statute against second-party copyright violation even exists. Welcome to the grayest gray zone on the Internet.
At the heart of the DOJ’s case is the concept of “willfulness.” It’s a question of whether the Megaupload boys knew they were criminals. And for that reason, much of the focus has been on the character of Kim Dotcom himself.
Dotcom does have several criminal convictions in Germany, a history of working at the edges of the technologically possible and legally permissible, and a bad-boy reputation. What’s less clear is whether this patchwork description makes Dotcom a Don Corleone or a Da Vinci.
“They probably thought, this guy’s fucking crazy and illegal, and we will find so much shit on him once we open it up,” Kim says. “They thought I was an easy target. They thought I was a joke. But they underestimated me, man. Everything they’re saying about me is 10 years old. What they didn’t know is, I’m the cleanest guy out there.”
Dotcom wipes the sweat from his forehead and refolds his black facecloth. “That’s the funny part of all this,” he says. “Everyone thinks they know me. But nobody really knows me at all.”
Kim was 19 the first time he was sent to jail. The charge was “handling stolen goods,” but it wasn’t as simple as that; the German court simply didn’t have a word for this new crime of hacking.
Growing up in the northern German city of Kiel with his mother and alcoholic father, Kim was in trouble before he even discovered computers. As he sits with me at the table long after the maids have cleared the plates and his wife and business partners have gone to bed, Kim speaks haltingly of a childhood “filled with fear” and a father who would beat his mother while drunk or dangle young Kim over the balcony, Michael Jackson-style. “I wanted to be the one who would fix everything,” Kim says. “I thought if I tried hard enough, I could reengineer my father or, later, convince my mother to get back with him.” His stratagems didn’t work, but the trauma imprinted on his personality. “I had all the fear I could handle by the time I was 6,” Kim says. “It made me strong.”
The kid who emerged from this childhood was smart and willful, unafraid of adults and unimpressed with their authority. He didn’t have much interest in their schools either, the arbitrary courses or the magic supposedly conferred by a degree. Kim preferred to sleep late and skip class;
his inattentiveness got him sent from high school back to middle school. He says his difficult behavior landed him in a psychiatrist’s office. The man gave him some tests; Kim stole the doctor’s wallet and took his friends out for ice cream.
He was around 11 when he saw his first Commodore C-16 in a shop window, running a demo of some pixelated game. He hectored his mother until she finally bought it for him. It sat on his desk, a puzzle asking for his solution in BASIC, interesting in a way school never could be. A friend in school had a tool called ICE on a floppy disk. It allowed him to make copies of games, simply by removing a line of code.
Nobody called that piracy. The point was unfettered access. The point was the possible. One of Kim’s schoolmates had described an online Shangri-La called X.25—basically a pre-Internet closed network. Kim bought himself a 2400-baud modem, the kind where you stick a phone handset into a rubber coupler. “I was in my new world.” He didn’t want to be anywhere else.
“X.25 was quite hard to get into—you needed the code—but once you got in, the people there were very open about how to hack various things, sharing access numbers, speaking freely.” Kim sat silently lurking, absorbing the information. But before long he started his own attacks.
One of the recurring hacks was a backdoor attack on corporate PBX systems—a company’s internal phone and data exchange. “Back then, there really was no concept of a system administrator,” he says. “Very few admins even knew how to change the default passwords. It never occurred to them that a kid might try to break in. It was like moving to some little Swedish village with no locks on the doors. You got in, became a super-user, and basically owned the network. It was a bonanza.”
Most of the early PBXs were across the ocean, in Manhattan’s 212 area code, and required an expensive long-distance call. Luckily Kim had access to a hacker BBS forum for exchanging stolen calling-card numbers too.
He loved crawling through a new company’s data, paying special attention to outgoing modem calls, which would lead him to even more PBXs. Kim wrote a little script and set it running at night, dialing up numbers, jiggling the knobs of the back doors; the next day he’d have access to 800 accounts, complete with usernames and passwords. He was building an army. “You find this world as a teenager, 14, 15 years old? You don’t even think about going to school now, man. Who gives a shit about that?” Kim just wanted to stay inside, controlling a virtual world as he’d never been able to control his own. His exploits made him seem dangerous and cool to his friends, a hero. And the hacker scene fed perfectly into his sense of the world as being us-versus-them.
The scam that got him arrested focused on the pay-by-the-minute phone chat lines popular in the early ’90s. These were the German equivalent of 1-900 party lines that the phone company charged as a long-distance call, usually at around $1.20 a minute. The operator of the line received a percentage from the local telecom, about 15 cents a minute per caller; the more callers, the more money the party line owner made. So Kim set up his own party line in the Netherland Antilles. Then he generated massive caller traffic using stolen calling-card numbers from the hacker bulletin boards.
“It worked really well,” Kim says. He says he made more than 75,000 Deutschmarks (or about $195,000 today)—”which at the time was a huge amount of money, because I was a kid. I wanted to buy more modems for my BBS, a better computer—nice stuff to advance my capacity.”
In 1993, three years into the scam, Kim got caught. He was arrested and spent four weeks in jail as a juvenile. Kim says he was “scared to shit” in jail but found it interesting too. “I had all these visitors, grown-ups from MCI and AT&T, coming just to talk to me.” He was shocked that these so-called experts from major corporations had no idea how a PBX operated, much less how it could be hacked. “It was like I was speaking Chinese,” Kim says. “It was unbelievable.” It was also a potential business.
He partnered with fellow hacker and coding genius Mathias Ortmann to form Data Protect, one of the world’s first whitehat consultancies, charging hundreds of dollars an hour to tell businesses how to protect against people like themselves. Their former colleagues in the hacker community thought of them as traitors. Kim and Ortmann thought they were growing up.
The German media quickly discovered the teenage wunderkind, and Kim discovered he enjoyed the spotlight. “The hacker was the new magician,” Kim remembers. “They treated you like you must be a fucking genius, man. But all I did, I scanned message boards. I got passwords. Any monkey could do that. There was nothing genius about it. But you get addicted to the headlines, people saying nice things, telling you you’re smart.”
The gun was loaded: Kim had the needs of an outsider and the cred of a rock star. He had contempt for the system and the tools to beat it. He felt powerful and reckless and was being told he was smarter than the rest of the world. He was in his early twenties and getting paid, buying expensive custom cars and fine suits, renting yachts, throwing money around nightclubs, swaggering. Growing up he’d never felt particularly special. Now he had girls. He had a posse. He was featured in German magazine spreads.
By 1997 Kim took it upon himself to make his own headlines, launching a website about his life and philosophy. He called it Kimble.org, for his hacker name, Kimble—as in The Fugitive’s Richard Kimble. Kim liked that his real name was inside it, and he identified with the movie about a good guy misunderstood and persecuted.
A decade before Facebook made online oversharing the norm, Kim used Kimble .org to showcase his life. It was also one of the first websites to incorporate Flash. “The Internet was just ugly fonts with underlined blue links,” Kim says. “People would come to my site, see it moving and animated and colorful, and think—what is this? They’d never seen anything like it.”
There were videos of Kim, photos of Kim. Kim as an icon of success, an inspiration.Kim with women. Kim on a mountaintop.
Kim in a black suit. Kim in a white suit. Kim on a jet. He rounded out the site with motivational lists like “10 Rules of Success.”

“This wasn’t a normal jail. I’ve got mosquitoes eating me, the food comes in a bucket.”

“People thought I started the site to promote my ego,” Kim says. “But it was to motivate people.” He knows it sounds silly, but that’s what he was, or wanted to be anyway—a motivational figure, a Gates, a Jobs, a Branson, Tony Robbins, and Donald Trump. The photos and videos, the posing and bragging and clowning—these were a clarion call for nerd confidence, an enticement to take a risk and achieve. As he was doing.
By 2000, Kim had sold most of his stake in Data Protect and started a private capital investment fund. He had particular interest in a company called LetsBuyIt .com—a sort of proto-Groupon, 10 years too early. Kim invested in shares of the company, believing that he could simplify its interface and make it a success. Then he announced his plan to raise another $50 million to fund it. The company stock jumped 220 percent, and Kim sold some shares at a profit.
“I was chilling in Bangkok when I heard the news,” he says. He was being accused of insider trading. He says he didn’t consider acting on his own plans to be insider trading and was committed to the company; apparently, the securities regulators were less sure. The story of yet another crazy caper by the flamboyant Kim Schmitz created a media frenzy, and a German TV station sent a team to interview the famous genius in his presidential suite at the Bangkok Grand Hyatt. “I was really angry and a little cocky,” Kim concedes. “I told them that if this is how Germany treats their entrepreneurs, I don’t know if I ever want to be in Germany again. And that was a mistake.”
German television replayed the images of the rich young troublemaker talking smack from a luxury suite in Thailand, acting like he was beyond the reach of German laws. A German prosecutor set out to prove him wrong and asked for Kim’s arrest; the German embassy in Bangkok revoked his passport. Now Kim was in Thailand as an illegal alien. Thai police cuffed him in his suite and led him to an immigration prison. “This wasn’t a normal jail,” Kim says. “This was fucking crazy. I’m wearing a custom suit. I’m thrown into a place, 18 guys sleeping on a concrete floor, everyone in sweaty shirts, it’s 40 degrees Celsius and smells like shit. I’ve got mosquitoes eating me, the food comes in a bucket.”
Kim’s lawyer told him he could fight in court and win—he’d be out in a month. Kim hoped he was kidding. Germany was offering a two-day travel document if he’d agree to come home. Kim said, “Let’s go.” He was escorted onto a plane by two German policemen. The press were waiting.
This was big news in Germany—the biggest insider trader in history, accused of violating a law that was only a few years old. “The headlines all said something about me being fat, ‘the downfall of the loudmouth,’ like that,” Kim says. “My lifestyle and Kimble.org had painted a target on my back.” They called him a megalomaniac, a swindler, the “hacker king.”
Kim was considered a flight risk and spent five months in jail before being offered probation and a small fine if he’d plead guilty. “I was just tired,” Kim says. “I knew I was finished in Germany anyway.” And he knew Kimble.org was finished as well—there was no chance of his being an inspiration to anyone now. “So I took the deal. And there’s nothing I regret more. Because if I hadn’t pled, I wouldn’t have had that ‘career criminal’ label. And I wouldn’t be here today.”
There is only one area in which Kim embraces an illicit identity: He has a rabid need for speed. He doesn’t drink or do drugs, but he drives unapologetically fast. Driving is his vice, an addiction to the rush of velocity and control of a graceful machine. Kim says that before he left Germany he tried to set a record for points against his license, “speeding past red-light cameras, flashing thumbs-up, getting off the exit, and doing it again.” In road rallies, he’s been known to bump cars or use the sidewalk to take the lead. His style is described by some as fearless, by others as reckless, and by all his competitors as truly good.
Beginning in 2001 he and his computerized Mercedes “megaCar” were a regular in the Gumball 3000 rally, a quasi-legal rich man’s Cannonball Run. Videos from the time show an outrageous Kim, often in the company of scantily clad women and sometimes sporting a replica Nazi helmet and the trophy. In 2004 he wanted to start his own rally, at a more mega-ultimate level.
“The Ultimate Rally was supposed to be Gumball on steroids,” Kim says. He’d host it somewhere like North Korea and attract professional drivers from Formula One with a million dollars cash awaiting the winner. Kim saw a business based on video rights, films, and sponsorship.
Kim and his new partner, Bram van der Kolk, drummed up interest by sending out videos of Kim’s racing exploits, often by email. The problem was, the video attachments were too big, and the emails kept bouncing. Clearly, there had to be a better way to share large files online.
They called their solution Megaupload. The charges against the company describe their technology concisely: “Once that user has selected a file on their computer and clicks the ‘upload’ button, Megaupload.com reproduces the file on at least one computer server it controls and provides the uploading user with a unique Uniform Resource Locator (‘URL’) link that allows anyone with the link to download the file.”
“It was a little idea,” Kim says. “At that point we honestly never expected to do anything more with it.”
At first Kim used Megaupload to generate buzz around the Ultimate Rally, offering $5,000 for the best street-racing videos. “All of a sudden you have all these car people uploading videos and linking to them to share with friends,” Kim says. Soon they were pushing the limits of their servers.
This had potential beyond racing videos, he began to realize. File sizes were getting bigger; HD had gone mainstream. The future was obvious. He never would have seen it if he was still in Germany, if his old business hadn’t been destroyed. The cloud was the future. “I decided, fuck Ultimate Rally,” Kim says. From then on, he would be all Megaupload. But he would no longer be Kim Schmitz.
Schmitz was his father’s name. The last time he’d seen the man, he was being interviewed by a German television station. He seemed to be living in a garden shed, weathered and ravaged by drink. He told the interviewers that his hotshot son never came to see him. “How could they let him just say that, man?” Kim asks. He looks away. “It wasn’t right.” Kim got some letters after that but never responded. “I don’t know, maybe he’s dead now,” he says, blinking hard.
Kim had left that world behind. His new business was a fresh start that promised to rebrand him as a dotcom giant.
Why shouldn’t the world know him as a giant Dotcom? A URL was just a location, a phone number was too. But what was a name? He was honestly surprised nobody had thought of doing it sooner.
As Dotcom, his name was his website, his presence, business, and legacy. How stupid and inefficient to be Kim Schmitz of Megaupload whom you could find online at Kimble.org—what a mouthful, what a bulging pocket of tiny keys. Who listens that long? But “Dotcom”—it was the Megakey. The rights to the Kim.com domain cost a small fortune, but it was worth it. It would pick up where Kimble.org had left off, a source of worldwide inspiration. You might laugh when he compared himself to the great innovators, but once Kim revolutionized the way we bought and shared and thought and knew, Kim.com would be the stuff of legend. Kimble.org had made him a joke. But with Kim.com, Kim could still be a hero. All he needed now was a mega-success story.
The idea was simple, and the team was small. Ortmann and van der Kolk alone controlled access to the servers. To generate buzz and draw advertisers, they needed volume, high traffic. To build it, they offered cash rewards to anyone who uploaded popular content.
Megaupload users had quickly graduated from sharing racing videos to sharing everything else—including porn and copyright-infringing material. Kim says they realized early on that their service was being used that way and looked at what they needed to do to deal with it. According to their lawyers, Kim says, the answer was simple: Take it down when asked. Kim says they did; the indictment from the Department of Justice says they did so only on a “selective basis.”
Kim says they did their best to comply with the law, better than most, even putting the power to take infringing material off their servers directly into the hands of the studios themselves. “All the major studios had direct access,” he says. “Nobody else did that.” He says they believed they had done enough. They never imagined they were risking jail time.
The truth was that by 2010, Kim and his partners had more to lose than ever. Kim had met a young woman named Mona Verga in the Philippines; they’d married and started a family. Kim said he chose New Zealand because it was clean and green and the most likely to survive an uncertain future. It was an ideal place from which to run a legal and successful Internet company with more than 100 employees.
It’s the legality of that success that will play out in the court system. The DOJ cites several Megaupload emails as evidence of criminal “willfulness” (van der Kolk: “We have a funny business … modern-day pirates :).” Ortmann: “We’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates :).”). Kim says the FBI can’t take a joke and points to the 45,000 seized emails they didn’t cite. “They’ve read our internal correspondence,” Kim says. “They know we were good corporate citizens.”
Certainly the Megaupload technology itself wasn’t criminal—depending on how it was used, the service had the power to connect pirates with illegal downloaders or major artists directly with a major audience. With the site attracting some 4.9 billion annual visits by 2011, Kim was charging premium ad rates and making legit deals for the backing of premium stars like Kanye West, will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Alicia Keys, and Chris Brown. It was all leading up to the launch of a service called Megabox, which would allow musical artists to make money from ads attached to free downloads of their songs. Free downloads with permission wasn’t piracy, it was a new media model that would kill the incentive for most illegal downloaders and get everyone paid. He had a similar product ready for Hollywood movies and TV shows. Dotcom was ready to go super-mega. But by that point, though he didn’t yet know it, it was too late.
On January 5, 2012, a federal grand jury filed its sealed 72-page indictment of Megaupload, based on a two-year FBI-led investigation. A few days later, members of the FBI contacted officers from the New Zealand fraud and antiterror forces and began planning what they then called Operation Debut.
By January 18, two American special agents and an assistant US attorney were in New Zealand. On the 19th, a local constable was sent into the Dotcom Mansion with a camera pen to secretly record the layout and security features. The next day, two sections of New Zealand’s Special Tactics Group and four sections of the elite antiterror Armed Offenders Squad were mobilized to Coatesville. Operation Takedown was a go.
Rich men hire security for the same reason that banks do; they’re where the money is. Robbery, gang attack, and kidnapping were always within the range of possibility for Kim’s family. They had never imagined a raid by a tactical antiterror team.
The morning of the raid, Kim heard the noises and, remembering Tempero’s security protocol, reached for the panic button at the side of his work bed. It looked like a Jeopardy buzzer in black lacquer, protected from accidental activation by a clear, hinged safety. Kim pressed the button, sending a security SMS alert across the compound.
The door behind him was cracking now. Kim moved away from it, heading toward a hub for the staircase and various wings. Ahead lay a supersized bathroom and the blue-lit atrium of a one-lane, 30-meter swimming pool. Towels for both were stored in a closet. The shelving hid a secret door to a hidden staircase.
This was what Tempero called the Red Room. It was a simple carpeted attic following the curved roofline. Kim went to the far end and placed himself behind a pillar. He heard crashes and booms and shouts filtering through the corridors and up the stairs. One was the word “Police!”
Kim knew what was happening then. He could stop. He could head down the stairs, emerge into the noisy scene. But that seemed unsafe. He wasn’t going to pop out and surprise them. He’d follow the protocol.
News reports would later claim that he was found hiding near, or even clutching, a sawed-off shotgun. There was, in fact, a shotgun stored there, but in a safe on the opposite end, about 30 feet away. And Kim wasn’t hidden—his frame was easily visible behind the pillar—but at least his head was protected. He’d wait there.
Kim waited for what felt like a long time. The noises grew louder. Within minutes of the tactical team’s arrival, dozens more men arrived in a second helicopter and several black-windowed vans, fanning across the gated suburb in the dawn light. A small army was combing the property now.
But the police were having a rather difficult time locating Kim. They knew there was a safe room—somewhere. But they didn’t know exactly where the door was located. So the special forces men zeroed in on a dumbwaiter.
Gonglike booms echoed through the mansion as the police labored against the metal doors with sledgehammers. Finally a member of the house staff opened the dumbwaiter from the kitchen. Kim wasn’t inside. The elite antiterror squad was losing a game of hide-and-seek against a giant computer nerd. The man supposedly armed with the doomsday button had been missing for a full 10 minutes.
Tempero had heard the commotion when the first helicopter landed. He headed outside and was met by a guy in black tactical gear who put a gun in his face. “That’s good as gold, mate,” he said, and got on the ground. He was still there when the police came back to question him. Tempero was worried for his boss. He showed them the hidden Red Room door. It was still unlocked.
Kim says he was kneed in the ribs, punched in the face, and his hand was stepped on until his nails bled. (Police dispute this.) He was then laid out and briefly cuffed before being led back to the main stairwell. When he passed the windows, Kim finally grasped the full scale of the operation.
Cops were everywhere. In uniform, out of uniform, some with body armor, most with Bushmaster rifles or tactical semiautomatics. They had a dog unit and guys on the roof with binoculars. There were so many people involved in the raid that the cops had brought in chemical toilets and a craft services truck. Kim couldn’t believe it. Guys were hanging around, having coffee and sandwiches, high-fiving.

Gonglike booms echoed through the mansion as the police labored with sledgehammers.

The impound inventory would read like a Robb Report shopping list, including 15 Mercedes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, two Mini Coopers, a ’57 El Dorado, the pink Series 62 Cadillac convertible, a Lamborghini LM002, a Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe, Harley and Von Dutch Kustom motorcycles, eight TVs, and works of art of obvious value—including a towering Planet Hollywood-style statue of the Predator.
But the real prize would be the cash—millions from more than 50 bank accounts around the world. If the Mega-Conspirators were going to defend themselves against the might of the US legal system, they’d have to do it on credit.
Police led Kim to the lawn, where most of the household was gathered. “I was so worried about Mona—she was pregnant with the twins. I kept asking where she was, where the kids were.” Kim couldn’t see the kids, but he saw Ortmann. He and Batato had flown in for the birthday Kim shared with his son, Kimmo. It promised to be an epic event, complete with A-list entertainers from the US. The bouncy castle hadn’t even been blown up yet.
The police found Batato by the back of the house with his laptop; he was still in his robe. Ortmann was in bed when the tactical team burst in. He looked freaked out and shattered. He wasn’t the sort who pretended at the gangsta stuff. He didn’t even play shooter videogames.
Kim asked a police officer, “What are the charges?” He imagined that, with more than 50 staff members from around the world, maybe one of them was mixed up in something.
The answer surprised him: “Copyright infringement.”
As the cops led him to a police van, Kim passed Mona. She seemed frightened. “All this for copyright?” he said to her. “Bullshit.”
In the police van, Kim was given a copy of the charges. He saw the copyright infringement and, more surprisingly, conspiracy to commit money laundering. The first charge on the list he didn’t understand. “Racketeering?” he asked an officer.
“That’s a criminal organization charge, like Mafia,” came the reply.
That didn’t sound right. Kim had a license plate that said mafia—but then he had ones that said god and police and evil too, and they didn’t accuse him of being those. There had been some sort of mistake. They’d spent a lot of money and time to understand every facet of the business—including the DMCA. “That’s why we bothered putting servers in Virginia,” Batato says. “To be protected by safe harbor.” They were prepared for all sorts of claims in civil court. But they’d never prepared for criminal charges, or jail.
The Megaupload boys were brought down the road to the North Shore Policing Centre for processing, then driven to the Mount Eden Corrections Facility. It was nearly dark by the time they entered the induction unit. Kim’s cell had a concrete-block bed with a 3-inch mattress. “Which, for me, with my weight, it’s nothing,” he says. Within a few days he was immobilized with back spasms. They gave him ibuprofen and a wheelchair and put him on suicide watch. “The shrink had talked to me. He asked, did I feel like killing myself, and I said no. I didn’t, you know?” Kim says. “But they put me on the watch list anyway, so they could come back to my cell every two hours, see if I moved.”
The Mega crew were all on the same cell block. During open cell hours, they could sit together and pore over the indictment. The more Kim read, the more bullshit it appeared.
They’d win, Kim promised. Then they’d get their lawyers to recoup every penny taken from them, every penny of lost revenue, and even more for pain and suffering. He told Ortmann, “I’m going to name my boat Paid For by the FBI.”
The Americans were the enemy here. Hollywood had backed Obama; maybe the mega-takedown was mega-payback. Trying to make a difference in the election would be part of their comeback, but as hackers they needed something bigger. Hollywood hadn’t taken the hand Kim had offered them. Now he would offer something else.
Hollywood had busted them as pirates on the grounds that they were aware of and responsible for what their Megaupload customers uploaded and downloaded. But what if they created a cloud storage locker that nobody—including themselves—could look into? That would be the ultimate safe harbor. And it would entirely change the conversation about data policing.
Once again, jail forced Kim to think creatively. He sat with Ortmann, van der Kolk,
and Batato in a cell; they puzzled over the problem, building a new technology from scratch in their heads. The idea was simple: One click and a file would be encrypted and uploaded. Only the uploader had the key to unlock the file. If the uploader shared the key, that was his business. Because the data was encrypted, you couldn’t search it. Even if you raided the servers, they’d be meaningless without the key. Welcome to the newest gray gray area on the planet.
They called it Mega. Like Megaupload, it would combine off-the-shelf technologies into a user-friendly app. It might not enrich them quite as much as Megaupload had, but they still believed that corporate subscriptions would make it a profitable business. More important, it promised to offer Internet citizens an unprecedented level of private data-sharing while sparing the provider most legal headaches and liabilities. In other words, Mega was beyond takedown.
Kim had been worried about Ortmann. He’d seemed so fragile when he entered jail; now he seemed energized by the challenge. The tough talk wound up all the Mega boys, and Kim was genuinely enthusiastic about their new project. But privately he feared that the larger dream was dead. He might become a dotcom millionaire again. But he’d never be a dotcom hero.
As I wait for Kim on my seventh day at the estate, Saturday morning becomes afternoon becomes evening, and frost reglazes the sweeping lawn. Finally, there is a tweet, then a text. “Come.” It’s 9:45 at night and Kim is having breakfast.
When I arrive in the kitchen, one of the Filipinas has laid out waffles, pancakes, fruit, sliced bologna of various types, as well as pickles, fruit juice, and a glass of Fiji water, which she refills from tiny plastic bottles.
“I’m going to give all this food up soon,” Kim promises, smearing steak tartare across another hunk of bread. “Either I lose 30 kilos or I lose the case.” This was Kim the motivator, imagining himself transformed for his American debut in a tailored black suit. It was a nice image, like being dressed well for your own funeral.
Kim is a large man, but tonight he seems as vulnerable as a child beyond rest. He’s in a reflective mood and wants to talk, long into the night. He remembers so clearly how difficult it was to rise again after his takedown in Germany, the effort it had taken to emerge with a new dotcom business and a new Dotcom name. Megaupload was to be a dynasty for Kim Dotcom’s children to build on; Kim.com would provide the legacy of Kim Dotcom himself. He’d rekindle the ashes of Kimble.org to debut a site that revealed Kim as a self-made Ozymandias of a digital empire, an inspirational builder of worlds. After years of work, his mega-monument was nearly complete.
“But what sort of inspiration could I be now?” Kim asks. He will win the case against him and get his money back too. And then?
His wife is young and beautiful. “And me?” Kim says. I’m …” He gestures to himself. If the case drags on, if they are stuck for years in this dull empty mansion, Kim worries about the strain on his marriage. He isn’t so keen on his prospects either.
He’s 38 years old. His kneecaps are shot, his back is in spasm, and he’s perhaps 150 pounds overweight. He’s exhausted. It would take a decade to build another empire with the next Big Idea. He doesn’t think he has it in him.
“But the mistake I made in Germany was, I gave up,” Kim says. It cost him his name. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. There would be no plea deals. He’ll stand and fight the DOJ. Even if it costs him everything.
It is 5:30 in the morning, and Kim Dotcom is just getting started.
Kim sleeps through the next day, resting up for three days of hearings. By midday Monday I find him at breakfast already on his new health regimen—500 milligrams of vitamin C, fruits and berries, eggs and yogurt. His wife sits next to him looking calm and radiant, her long dark hair freshly washed. “OK,” Kim says. He slips on the blue-tinted Cartiers and a scarf laid out for him on the counter. “Let’s kick some ass.”
The courthouse is a simple brick civic building near the park. There’s a metal detector nobody is much bothering with and a few TV crews waiting with fuzzy microphones. Mona and Kim file into the benches with his American lawyer, Ira Rothken, and codefendants Ortmann, Batato, and van der Kolk. Tempero and another security man wait protectively behind them.
Kim takes the stand, telling the story of the raid. “Our beautiful home was turned into a haunted house,” he says. Across the courtroom, reporters bend to their notebooks. That sets the tone. “I want to go again!” Kim says during a recess. He balls his fists like a kid at an amusement park. “That was so much fucking fun!” Over the next two days the raid will be dissected in detail, and judge Helen Winkelmann will interrupt the officers frequently. In New Zealand, police usually don’t even carry guns; the raid was viewed as an unprecedented use of armed antiterror forces on a civilian home, based on a faulty search warrant and misleading intelligence. On the stand, the head of New Zealand’s anti-organized crime agency is asked whether the Dotcom Mansion was being monitored by any other agencies not yet disclosed to the public. He answers no. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite true.
In fact, the compound had been under surveillance for weeks by New Zealand’s spy agency. What exactly they tapped—email, phone calls, text messages—remains a secret, but there is no gray area in the law. The Government Communications Security Bureau is forbidden from spying on legal residents. In the coming weeks, Kim Dotcom will become the center of New Zealand’s own Watergate. Even New Zealand’s prime minister will issue Kim Dotcom a flat-out apology.
This court will eventually give Kim some of his money back—$4.8 million for his legal defense and living expenses. But before that decision can be rendered, there is evidence to go through. Some video. A bailiff dims the lights and starts showing footage.
It’s from one of the police helicopters, a beauty shot at dawn on January 20. We rise over the green New Zealand hills, over power lines, over a last hill, and, as police chatter comes crackling across the microphones, we see the Dotcom Mansion, a regal white U against the green lawn, where the helicopter lands, and we see the legs of armed men, running to the front door before the helicopter lifts again to circle.
“The media will be presented with a copy of this recording,” the judge promises. But how, she wonders, will they be able to distribute multiple copies at once, so that each TV station and paper has an identical copy at the same time?
Across the courtroom, the Megaupload boys begin to giggle.
Charles Graeber (charlesgraeber.com) is the author of The Good Nurse: America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, the Hospitals That Allowed Him to Thrive, and the Detectives Who Brought Him to Justice, which will be published in March by Twelve Books.