The coronary fluoride uptake value in patients with cardiovascular events was significantly higher than in patients without cardiovascular events.Amazingly, this is not the first report to come out on the dangers of water fluoridation; however, the United States government (along with other nations) has allowed for the continued fluoridation of the public water supply despite these key findings. In fact, the U.S. government has even gone on record stating that a reduction in water fluoridation needs to occur following the results of a massive study that found water fluoridation affected cognitive function to the point of lowering the IQ of children. It turns out that the announcement was little more than a public relations stunt to curtail the massive wave of activism that followed the findings.
Instead of rewarding home-owners for making use of a rainwater collection system and even offer a tax deduction for doing so, it is ILLEGAL ?
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One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content.
A federal indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.
Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.
The Justice Department said in a statement said that Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other employees were arrested Thursday in New Zealand at the request of U.S. officials. Three other defendants are at large.
| U.S. Department of Justice January 19, 2012 |
WASHINGTON—Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced today.
This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.
The individuals and two corporations—Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited—were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.
The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.
In addition, the following alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:
Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann, and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach, and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets, and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands, and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.
According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies—often before their theatrical release—music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale. The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors, and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.
The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. The conspirators further allegedly offered a rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites. The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world.
In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.
As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.
The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the infringing content.
The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.
The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand,and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines also provided assistance.
This case is part of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force) to stop the theft of intellectual property. Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation’s economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation, and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce.
Time magazine called the protester the person of the year for 2011, but if the US government continues with its campaign against American freedom, defying corruption with demonstration as such will be outlawed in only a matter of time.
Concerned over how very real the collapse of the US Constitution is because of Congress’ passing of the National Defense Authorization Act, activists with the online collective Anonymous have proposed a national day of action against the controversial legislation to occur next month.
Hacktivists had initially proposed a massive campaign against the act for January, but have now moved the protest to launch on February 3.
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA, was recently signed off by US President Barack Obama. Under the legislation, the Department of Defense is guaranteed spending appropriations for a 12-month span. Thanks to certain provisions snuck in, however, the US government is granted the powers to indefinitely detain and torture American citizens without charge, essentially creating Guantanamo Prison-style detention possibilities for anyone deemed a threat by American authorities.
US President Barack Obama insists that he will not abide by such provisions, although the laws are still written and approved under his own name. Although he could abide by his word and remove himself from endorsing any of the provisions, the fact that the legislation does still for such enforcement does not negate its existence.
"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield,” says ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero of the dangerous realities promised under NDAA. Even if the president says he will not abide by the powers he has now been bestowed with under the legislation, Romero says that Obama “will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.”
Activists against the legislation have rallied in opposition since it first moved through Congress. Following Obama’s New Year’s Eve signing, however, widespread disbelief and concern has only increased and now Anonymous is urging Americans to take it to the streets before Congress begins to act on the damning bill
“While we cannot force the American people to protest, we must tell them that this law will trip away any rights they thought they had including but not limited to free speech, free press, free access to information and the right to protest, assemble and bear arms,” recites a digitzed voice in a recent YouTube clip uploaded by an account alleging to be affiliated with the Anonymous collective. The narrator describes that NDAA allows for the government to detain suspects, “even American citizens, without trial” for any allegedly belligerent acts.
“What is a belligerent act?” asks the speaker. “Is protesting a belligerent act? Is being Anonymous a belligerent act? This is where we draw the line.”
“This is when we revolt.”
In a written message that appears in the video, the operative says that the protests will spawn nationally. “Everyone will flood the street. The street is now your place of protest.”
Since NDAA first entered Congress, protests have occurred across America although they have attracted relatively small numbers of participants and have almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.
Demonstrations were staged outside the White House for several days in a row with a handful of protesters being arrested for their actions.
"We are trying to get word out to the people that they need to petition laws like this," one Anonymous operative participating in the campaign, Operation Blackout, tells RT. "NDAA was passed with minimum media attention, so 'Anons' and [those with the Occupy Wall Street movement] have been dedicated to raising awareness. So far word has spread pretty fast. Now we have to convince those who "represent" us to actually do what they were elected to do."
Even people who've come to me trying to defend NDAA have quickly backed off when they realized exactly what this law means to US citizens," adds the operative.
Previously, hacktivists aligned with the Anonymous collective attempted to wage cyber attacks on the creators and signers of NDAA, going after lawmakers involved in the bill by posting private information on the Web.
“No longer will you enslave the people. The world will know of your violations against the rights of the citizens you were elected to represent,” read a statement from one Anonymous operative at the time.
In recent weeks, a similar online-organized attack against supporters of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, forced in part several major corporations from withdrawing support of the legislation.
A lot of good those Wednesday blackouts did for the Internet. Not.
One day after thousands of websites temporarily shut-down to highligt the dangers of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), federal prosecutors have pulled the plug on Megaupload.com, a website that was at one time among the top 20 most popular sites in the world.
American authorities helped issue arrests on Thursday for four people in New Zealand that they say are responsible for the website. According to the official indictment, unsealed the same day, Megaupload is being accused of costing copyright holders upwards of $500 million in lost revenues because of content illegally uploaded to its servers.
Megaupload is one of many highly visited websites that allows users to upload any media of their choice that might be too large for traditional online distribution. In lieu of email and instant messaging, users of Megaupload and similar sites can upload massive digital files and then pass the link to others across the world for easy download. The website claims that it has always been diligent in handling complaints regarding pirated material, but authorities have taken Megaupload offline while they investigate.
In a statement published by the US Department of Justice on the website for the Federal Bureau of Investigation Thursday afternoon, they call the charges “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”
The news comes only hours after thousands of sites repealed a temporary blackout in opposition to SOPA and PIPA, which garnered support from sites including Wikipedia, Reddit and Google.
Kim Dotcom, formerly Kim Schmitz, was among the four in New Zealand that were arrested on Thursday for violating piracy laws. The company itself is listed as being based out of Hong Kong and names musician Swizz Beatz, husband to Grammy winner Alicia Keys, as its CEO. Dotcom is being pegged by authorities as the founder of Megaupload Limited and is among a roster of other persons accused of being affiliated, which includes citizens of the Netherlands, Estonia, Germany and Slovakia.
Back in America though, law enforcement officials conducted search warrants related to the charges, and seized, internationally, $50 million in assets.
While Megaupload is traditionally a free service, users are granted added incentives for purchasing subscriptions to the site. Advertisements are sold on its pages as well.
The Department of Justice writes that “for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies — often before their theatrical release — music, television programs, electronic books and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.” The site has advertised on its own that it is visited by around 50 million users each day and constitutes for four percent of the Internet’s traffic. The DoJ believes those running the operation have netted more than $175 million in illegal profits by selling ads and subscriptions on the site.
According to the DoJ statement, “conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download.” Before going dark, however, Megaupload posted a statement on its website shunning allegations of wrongdoings.
"The fact is that the vast majority of Mega's Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch," wrote the administrators.
Hacktivists with the collective Anonymous are waging an attack on the website for the White House after successfully breaking the sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.
In response to today’s federal raid on the file sharing service Megaupload, hackers with the online collective Anonymous have broken the websites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America and Warner Music Group.
“It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org,” Anonymous operative Barrett Brown tells RT on Thursday afternoon.
Only hours before the DoJ and Universal sites went down, news broke that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe.
The latest of sites to fall is FBI.gov, which finally broke at around 7:40 pm EST Thursday evening.
Less than an hour after the DoJ and Universal sites came down, the website for the RIAA, or Recording Industry Association of America, went offline as well. Shortly before 6 p.m EST, the government's Copyright.gov site went down as well. Thirty minutes later came the site for BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc, the licensing organization that represents some of the biggest names in music.
Also on Thursday, MPAA.org returned an error as Anonymous hacktivists managed to bring down the website for the Motion Picture Association of America. The group, headed by former senator Chris Dodd, is an adamant supporter of both PIPA and SOPA legislation.
Universal Music Group, or UMG, is the largest record company in the United States and under its umbrella are the labels Interscope-Geffen-A&M, the Island Def Jam Motown Music Group and Mercury Records.
Brown adds that “more is coming” and Anonymous-aligned hacktivists are pursuing a joint effort with others to “damage campaign raising abilities of remaining Democrats who support SOPA.”
Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don’t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a blow to the Web.
Brown adds that operatives involved in the project will use an “experimental campaign” and search engine optimization techniques “whereby to forever saddle some of these congressmen with their record on this issue.”
This post has been updated. See note below.
The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it has conducted a major action to shut down MegaUpload, a popular file-sharing site widely used for free downloads of movies and television shows.
After receiving indictments from a grand jury in Virginia for racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and other charges on Jan. 5, federal authorities on Thursday arrested four people and executed more than 20 search warrants in the U.S. and eight foreign countries, seizing 18 domain names and an estimated $50 million in assets, including servers run in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
MegaUpload is a "digital locker" that allows users to store files that can then be streamed or downloaded by others. Its subsidiary site MegaVideo became very popular for the unauthorized downloads of movies and TV shows. Users whose uploaded content proved particularly popular were paid for their participation.
DOCUMENT: Read the indictment against MegaUpload
In a joint statement, the Justice Department and FBI called the action "among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States."
Ira Rothken, an attorney for MegaUpload, said in an interview that he only learned of the actions in a press release this morning and had not yet read the entire indictment. "Our initial impression is that the allegations are without merit and MegaUpload is going to vigorously contest them," he said. "We have deep concerns over due process and assets being taken without the opportunity for a hearing."
According to the indictment, the operators of MegaUpload earned more than $175 million in illegal profits and caused an estimated $500 million in harm to copyright holders.
The site is advertised as having more than 50 million daily visitors, according to federal authorities.
Four of MegaUpload's operators have been arrested in New Zealand, while three more remain at large. The seven each face a maximum of 55 years in prison.
Not listed on the indictment is rapper Swizz Beatz -- real name Kasseem Dean -- who, according to a report in the New York Post, is the CEO of MegaUpload. Beatz is married to pop singer Alicia Keys.
Rothken said that Beatz had not been running the site but that recently there had been "a transition period going on."
The news is sure to be welcome in the entertainment industry, whose leaders have faced a recent setback in their push for the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act. The proposed bills, if passed, would make it easier for U.S. courts to go after piracy sites that, unlike MegaUpload, operate entirely overseas.
Critics who believe the bills are heavy-handed and don't adequately protect civil liberties conducted a U.S. Internet "blackout." As many as 10,000 websites went black Wednesday, among them Wikipedia, Craigslist and Reddit. The protest helped to pressure lawmakers to oppose SOPA and PIPA.
The Obama administration announced its opposition to the bills in their current forms Saturday.
[Update, 2:55 p.m.: The websites of the Justice department and Universal Music Group, which had been involved in litigation with MegaUpload, were down on Thursday. The sites were attacked by members of the hacker group Anonymous in response to the actions against MegaUpload, according to a report on CNET News.]
The U.S. Department of Justice shut down MegaUpload.com, one of the world’s largest file-sharing websites, on Thursday after charging the site and its executives with violation of piracy and copyright laws.
In an indictment, the Justice Department alleged that MegaUpload was a “mega conspiracy” and a global criminal organization “whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale.”
The Department also said that MegaUpload, which had about 150 million users, tallied up an estimated harm to copyright holders in excess of $500-million by allowing users to illegally share movies, music and other files. In addition, prosecutors also said in the indictment that those who operated the site racked in an income from that topped $175-million.
