Okay so yesterday the internet went dark to protest SOPA, and I figured that'd be the big story of the week. Wikipedia blacked out for 24 hours, Reddit did its thing, Google slapped a black bar over the logo. I wrote about it, you probably read about it, everybody moved on with a vague sense that maybe, just maybe, Congress got the message.
And then today the DOJ blew that whole news cycle out of the water by taking down Megaupload.
Like, the timing here is almost too on-the-nose. One day after the biggest anti-SOPA protest in the history of the web, the Justice Department and the FBI seize megaupload.com, shut down basically the entire operation, and unseal an indictment against Kim Dotcom (yes, that is legally his name now, he changed it from Kim Schmitz a while back) and six other guys tied to the site. New Zealand police raided his mansion outside Auckland this morning — apparently he locked himself in a "safe room" and they had to cut through it to get to him. He's sitting in custody right now facing racketeering, conspiracy, and copyright infringement charges, and the indictment claims the whole operation made something like $175 million and cost copyright holders half a billion. I have no idea how they arrived at that second number and I'd bet money nobody else does either, but that's the figure that's going around.
And here's the part that makes my head spin a little: this wasn't even a SOPA thing. SOPA hasn't passed. It's not law. The DOJ did this entire takedown under existing law, which kind of undercuts the "we desperately need SOPA to fight piracy" argument some of the bill's backers were making all week, and I don't think that's a coincidence anyone should ignore.
Within a few hours Anonymous was already retaliating. They took down justice.gov and fbi.gov with DDoS attacks, then went after the MPAA and RIAA sites, and Universal Music's site too (Universal's been in an ongoing beef with Megaupload over a takedown dispute from a while back, so that one's not exactly random). They're calling it Operation Megaupload, and last I checked mid-afternoon there were something like 5,600 people in the IRC channel coordinating it with the LOIC tool. I refreshed fbi.gov around 3pm my time and it was just sitting there timing out.
I'll say the obvious thing since somebody always has to: I'm not a fan of DDoS-as-protest. It doesn't actually argue anything, it just makes a government website slow for a few hours and gives cable news a scary headline about "hackers." It feels less like activism and more like flexing. But I also get why people are furious right now, because the optics of "we just protested a bill about government overreach on the internet and the government responded by seizing an entire internet company overnight" are genuinely wild.
I want to be a little careful here too, because I know a bunch of people are already treating Megaupload as some kind of martyr for internet freedom, and it wasn't exactly that. This was a site with actual big-name artists (Kanye, will.i.am, a bunch of others) in a cheesy promotional video for it, and the indictment lays out some pretty specific internal emails about employees knowing infringing files were up there. That's different from, say, Wikipedia going dark. Megaupload was a business, and a genuinely shady one by the sound of it, not some free-speech martyr. Doesn't mean I think the DOJ's move was clean or that the DDoS response is smart, just that it's a messier story than "big bad government vs. scrappy file locker."
Kim Dotcom himself is a character too — dude legally changed his last name to Dotcom, drives around in cars with plates like "GUILTY" and "MAFIA," and threw a ridiculous New Year's fireworks party at that mansion a few weeks ago that made local news in New Zealand. None of that has anything to do with the charges, I just think it's worth knowing who we're talking about here.
Anyway. Millions of people who used Megaupload for completely legit file storage just lost access to their stuff with zero warning, which is its own mess nobody's really talking about yet. My inbox already has one friend asking where his backup photos went. That's going to be a whole thing tomorrow, I bet.