14 DAY TRIAL // The MegaUpload drama continues to unfold. While the extradition hearing is not until August, there's still plenty of legal maneuvering to do. In a move that the US government is likely finding outrageous, as it's wont to do, a New Zealand judge had the audacity to ask the prosecutors to prepare a copy of the 150 terabytes of data found on computers it seized during the raid on Kim Dotcom's mansion.
To be clear, the data has nothing to do with the user data stored by MegaUpload, which the US government is also washing its hands off; this is data solely coming from Dotcom.
Granted, 150 terabytes is a huge amount of data for a single person, but it comes from some 130 computers Dotcom had lying around the house.
Plenty of that data is relevant to the case and may be useful in the extradition hearing. Apparently there are some 10 million emails in there, as well as a lot of financial data, the FBI, who holds it, says.
The judge ordered it to make a copy of everything it seized and have it ready in 21 days, so that Dotcom's defense may have a chance to look over it before the August hearing.
However, the judge has not decided whether Dotcom will have access to the data, but wants the US government to have it ready just in case.
Unsurprisingly, the government says it just can't be done. It says it took 10 days to copy just 29 terabytes and believes it is going to take some two and a half months to copy it all. But the judge is not impressed, he believes the mighty US government surely has the financial and technical capability to make it happen.
The FBI also argues that there is encrypted data in there that just can't be copied. Which is not really true, it can be copied, prosecutors just can't see what it is.