- This guy is a 1 percenter and proud of it, given to nothing so much as conspicuous consumption.
- There’s more to this guy than meets the eye and there is PLENTY of him that meets the eye.
- At the time of his arrest, he had a bunch of credit cards in different names and multiple passports in various names. (Schmitz/Dotcom changes names frequently, a practice that would impede database searches for his name.)
- QUICK: How many different credit cards and passports in how many different names do YOU have?
- Schmitz/Dotcom is a “turned hacker”–a hacker who forsook his life of crime to cooperate with the authorities to develop computer security systems. Julian Assange appears to be another “turned hacker.’
- As such, Dotcommandant may be viewed as an “inside player,” at least to an extent.
- He was convicted of a number of crimes, which did not prevent relatively prestigious companies from backing some of his fraudulent undertakings.
- Convicted in what was the largest insider trading scandal in Germany up to that time, he fled Germany and was given 20 months probation and a 100,000 euro fine. The Dotcommandant allegedly earned $115,000 a day in his latest gig. A 100,000 euro fine is basically docking the guy a day’s pay. He got 20 months probation–no jail time. That altogether gentle wrist slap may indicate that he has good relations with the powers that be. It certainly was not a punishment that would deter the likes of the Dotcommandant. (Note that, in general, European sentencing in criminal cases is lighter than in the U.S. Still, that’s not much of a sentence for the largest insider trading scheme in Germany up to that point in time. Remember he fled the country to escape justice. The article below describes the punishment meted out to do Schmitz as “repeated lashes with a wet noodle.” Why?
- Food for Thought:
- With his over-the-top persona and jet set lifestyle, he’s not the best poster boy for cyber-libertariansim. Looking like a Goth Drew Carey on steroids, he presents a bizarre physical appearance to go with his “1 persenseless” behavior, making it difficult for many to feel sympathy.
- MegaUpload appears to have taken commercial product produced by others and then taken it to market at considerable profit for themselves. In essence, that’s theft. Seen by his supporters as something of a modern Robin Hood, that construct would have more validity if Our Hero were to distribute some of his evident wealth to the grips and other little folks who worked on the films MegaUpload pirates. If, for the sake of argument, one of these giant media corporations were brought down by pirated download, the Big Boys (and Girls) will float gently to earth on their golden parachutes, while the grips go into “white knuckle mode.”
- Note that pirated download, among other things, deprives governments at various levels of sales and income tax revenues, placing added strain and their budgets. Ultimately, the more those budgets are strained, the more people get laid off from their jobs–police, firefighters, DMV clerks etc . In FTR #732, we noted that the Pirate Bay case featured a clash between two right-wing views: it’s OK to steal revenue from governments but NOT OK to steal revenue from corporations. The same appears to apply in the MegaUpload case.
- The Dotcommandant has apparently engaged in a variety of criminal activities in the past.
- ‘The timing of this bust, coming so soon after the justifiable debate over draconian Internet legislation that may have seriously limited the potential for this remarkable medium, sets this observer to wonder if he actually was working to generate sympathy for SOPA. Perhaps other interests were manipulating Our Hero, running him “on a leash.”
- In the past, we’ve seen Nazi/fascist money man Carl Lundstrom financing the Pirate Bay download site. He has also allegedly been involved in financing a second free download site.
- We’ve seen the Underground Reich engage in money-making criminal conspiracies ranging in size from the short-selling that occurred before the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks to the Great Train Robbery in Britain.
- Is the Dotcommandant actually generating money for the Bormann capital network while discrediting advocates of Internet freedom? Note the money laundering charges against Our Hero, as well as the shockingly light sentence imposed on him by the German courts.
- The other people involved with MegaUpload are Germans and people from areas that were occupied by the Nazis in WWII, such as Slovakia. (Slovakia was, like Croatia, a nominally independent Nazi puppet state, controlled by the collaborationist Hlinka party.)
Have Schmitz/Dotcom been buttressed and fueled with Nazi venture capital, in exchange for part of the profits?
. . . . With insider trading charges pending over LetsBuyIt, Schmitz decided it was time to lay low (by his standards); “in fear for his life,” he fled to Thailand in January of 2002. On his website, he hinted at possible suicide, saying he would be crossing “to a new world,” Hale-Bopp cult style. But instead of offing himself, he declared that he wanted to be known as “King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire” — a label he would apply to his future projects. (It’s listed as his title on LinkedIn.)
As it turned out, Thailand wasn’t happy to see him. He was promptly arrested and fast-track deported to Germany to stand trial. However, the few nights in a Thai jail turned out to be the worst of it, as fears of prison in Germany were unfounded—he was sentenced to 20 months probation and slapped with a €100,000 fine. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to embezzlement charges over the Monkey “loan” and received another two years of probation.
After the law’s repeated lashes with a wet noodle, Schmitz left Germany and moved to Hong Kong to start the next level of Mega-insanity. . . .
The internet is dying the ‘death of a thousand cuts’. It’s appropriate that the expression is Chinese, since the intensely policed internet of China seems to be the model we’re headed for.
Kim Dotcom is throwing a party, and everyone in New Zealand is invited:
In Kim Dotcom’s defense, an ultra-rare signed copy of Mein Kampf probably is as good an investment as he claims, so the purchase of that book, while eyebrow-raising, could be a innocent interest in WWII history. The larger context of Kim Dotcom’s life and apparent beliefs is really needed to assess that decision. For instance, if Kim Dotcom was videoed wearing a Nazi helmet too that would add some context:
Again, it’s actually possible that Kim Dotcom just happens to own one of the rarest copies of Mein Kampf in existence and doesn’t normally dress up like a Nazi. Weird things happen when you’re a larger-than-life weirdo. No, while these are possible red-flags, the real test is his party’s policies. Are they far-right policies? Crypto-far right policies? That secret plans he mentioned above for ending the need for a military and oil sounded pretty nice. What are the details of those plans? Are there real ideas behind them or is this more larger-than-life hyped nonsense?
For instance, since Kim Dotcom is proposing New Zeland create its own version of bitcoin, what does his tax policy looke like since a national crypto-currency would also potentially double as a national tax-evasion service. And will New Zealand’s bitcoin have a bitcoin-like fixed supply that mandates Austrain-school/Bundesbank-style economic policies? That sounds like a pretty far-right economic policy:
An internet party founded by a hacker with crypto-far-right views that seems to be targeting disenchanted youths under a vague banner of “digital right” and promises that the internet could solve all of our problems if it was just allowed to do so? How odd. Although it’s not as odd as the fact that story like this aren’t really very surprising anymore.
That didn’t end well: