Many US Government employees included in MegaUpload’s user base

Among the many former Megaupload users anxiously awaiting the release of their seized files by the Department of Justice, are more than a few high ranking US government officials, says site founder Kim Dotcom.

“Megaupload’s legal team is working hard to reunite our users with their data. We are negotiating . . . to allow all Mega users to retrieve their data,” Kim Dotcom said to TorrentFreak. As Megaupload and Dotcom’s representatives sifted through the archives of lost user data, they came to note a less-than-surprising situation.

“Guess what,” said Dotcom, “we found a large number of Mega accounts from US government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate.”

Megaupload’s collapse has coincided with the arrest of its founder Kim Dotcom in New Zealand, and the United States officials are investigating the German born entrepreneur for what they believe is wide scale software and digital media piracy. The USA is even attempting to enact an extradition on Dotcom, forcing him to face charges on American soil.

But it would seem that many of the US politicians and legislators that have taken up the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) crusade against Internet file sharing, and the piracy of copyrighted files, were actually active members and participators in the Megaupload site themselves.

The brevity of the users of legal file sharing is this: do not attack cloud computing and file sharing services.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has begun a comprehensive strategy to get Megaupload users’ data returned to them, including the EFF’s MegaRetrieval campaign to make an inventory of disadvantaged users.

Speaking on behalf of EFF, staff attorney Julie Samuels addressed the severity of the blanket terms and charges of piracy that have been thrown around by US government officials.

Samuels calls upon “people who have lost access to legitimate personal files” to contact the EFF at megauploadmissing@eff.org.

“In general,” said Samuels, “we are very concerned about the implications the ‘Mega conspiracy’ indictment has for the future of cloud computing and file-hosting services, and innovation more generally. It’s hard to imagine how the nature in which this went down won’t have a chilling effect going forward. We hope to come up with processes for future cases that will counteract that.”