In a surprising letter sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Police officers should not interfere with a recording and should never seize recording devices without a warrant. They should also be advised “not to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise discourage an individual from recording police officer enforcement activities or intentionally block or obstruct cameras or recording devices.”

One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code.

"I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident."

"Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--"

United States district court judge Liam O'Grady said he didn't know if "we are ever going to have a trial in this matter" after being told Dotcom's file-sharing company had never been formally served with criminal papers by the US.

Dotcom's US-based lawyer, Ira Rothken, said it was the defence's understanding that it was not legally possible for Megaupload to be served with papers accusing it of criminal acts.

"My understanding as to why they haven't done that is because they can't. We don't believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States."

After the legal harassment continued even on Saturday night, when BREIN sent an email at 20:15 demanding extra measures under threat of draconian penalties, the Pirates are anxious to finally get their day in court. The penalties imposed by the court are 4 times higher than those ordered upon the large commercial ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo, demonstrating that the ideas of a (yet) small political party are deemed more dangerous than for-profit companies.

“It is time that the industry attack dogs understand that you can’t trample on people’s freedoms for your own monetary gain,” Pirate Party board member blauwbaard says.

The US government has filed papers objecting to Schapiro’s law firm working on Megaupload’s defense, citing conflicts of interest involving Google, YouTube, Disney, Fox and other movie, TV show and software companies.

The government’s complaints pose a real problem for Megaupload. Will it ever be possible for Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants to recruit a high-quality copyright specialist law firm that hasn’t ever represented any of the potential witnesses in the case? It seems unlikely.

“[I]f the Government is to have its way in this case, the only lawyers before the Court will be those representing the Government. If the Government is to have its way, the only evidence available to the Court would be that cherry-picked by the Government, for the Government, from the universe of relevant servers slated to be wiped. If the Government is to have its way, in sum, Megaupload will never get its day in Court and the case will effectively be over before it has even begun.”

In this instance, the company offered up wall posts, a list of friends (complete with Facebook IDs), detailed data of logins and IP addresses, as well as all the photos Markoff posted or was tagged in.

However, it's not like normal human spontaneity, which can dissipate and become a memory. It's recorded.

Carpathia recently complained that maintaining the servers was costing thousands of dollars per day. The hosting company asked to either be compensated for the expenses of running the servers or be given permission to re-provision them for use by other customers.

Megaupload argues that the government may have "cherry picked" the data that will cast Megaupload in the most negative possible light. The company argues that allowing the rest of the data to be destroyed will make it impossible for Megaupload to unearth evidence that could cast the company in a more favorable light.

Newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”

Those techniques included contorting a detainee’s body in painful positions, slamming a detainee’s head against a wall, restricting a detainee’s caloric intake, and waterboarding.

“We are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here,” Zelikow wrote, “even where the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.

Lawyers for the trade group told the court that they had been informed MegaUpload's lawyers had already obtained the data they needed to make their case, according to court documents. Regardless, the MPAA said that handing over the servers to the company risked enabling the resurrection of MegaUpload.

"There may unfortunately be users whose legitimate files are now caught up in the illegal activity of MegaUpload," MPAA lawyers wrote in their motion. "We are sympathetic to those users, although we do not know how many there actually are as the Goodwin brief only identifies one."

Paramount Pictures’ vice president for worldwide content protection identified Fileserve, MediaFire, Wupload, Putlocker and Depositfiles as prime targets that should be shuttered next.

Whether the Department of Justice will act on new referrals from the movie studios has yet to be seen. For now they have their hands full on Megaupload, whose founder told TorrentFreak that his defense teams is working on a killer motion in response to the “nonsense” US indictment.