Click to Skip Ad
Closing in...

FBI believed Kim Dotcom had a ‘doomsday device’ capable of erasing all piracy evidence

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 8:32PM EST
BGR

If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.

Sane people may be wondering why the New Zealand government utilized its elite counterterrorism unit to raid Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s mansion. And now, via the NZ Herald, we have our answer: the FBI actually believed Dotcom had a Dr. Strangelove-style “doomsday device” that was capable of wiping out all evidence of Internet piracy with the flick of a switch.

During a judicial review of the raid at the High Court at Auckland on Friday, raid supervisor Detective Inspector Grant Wormald testified that the FBI told him that Dotcom “carried a device with him to delete servers around the world” that could be set off within seconds from multiple computers, laptops and smartphones within Dotcom’s mansion.

Needless to say, no such device existed and the New Zealand Special Tactics Group came up empty in their search for it. In response to these revelations, Dotcom’s attorney Paul Davison called the raid on his client’s mansion “a woefully incompetent and inept performance by the New Zealand police at all stages and at all levels.”

In other words, it seems the only doomsday machines Dotcom possesses are his music videos.

Read

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.