The High Court of New Zealand just ruled that the FBI has to give slews of Kim Dotcom’s digital property back to him. The agency — along with officials in New Zealand — screwed up pretty bad indeed.
When New Zealand authorities brutally ransacked Kim Dotcom’s mansion back in January 2012 at the behest of the US government, they picked up all sorts of material that had nothing to do with the matter being investigated; namely, the alleged improprieties of Megaupload. It was illegal, but before the courts could do anything about it, the New Zealand police cloned drives containing 150TB of data and shipped it all to the FBI in the United States.
TorrentFreak reports that according to the new order, both the New Zealand police and the FBI must review everything not related to the prosecution’s case against Kim Dotcom. Additionally, the FBI must return the cloned drives and delete any copies it might have lying around. No word on how exactly that will be enforced. [TorrentFreak]