I did read the article. I should articulate myself better: would it not have been easy for the us to use it's (nsa) powers to gather email and chatlogs?
Why bother when New Zealand's pathetic politicians, police and spy apparatus are more than happy to try and impress with Hollywood theatrics. Even the PM is involved is the bs that happened. Just the idea that the US might like an arrest or some data gets the current crop excited enough to break several laws.
Because the NSA would rather use the data for more important things, like terrorism, war, and espionage of foreign governments. Even if just for public perception, I don't think anybody, NSA included, really wants the NSA to use its dragnet surveillance to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar.
True, but this went all the way up to the vice-president. I don't think anybody, NSA included, really want the vice-president to use his powers to prevent people from downloading DVD rips of Avatar...
Federal agencies are limited by the scope of their mission. The scope of the NSA's mission is defense, not criminal investigation and prosecution.
And even if the NSA did collect the info, it's not clear that they could do so in a way that would allow it to be admissible in a federal court--making it effectively useless.
Is it legally possible to FOI / subpoena / sue the NSA for records the NSA has? That could be a good weapon in the copyright infringement cases they like to throw out - probably a lot stronger link than just IP.
Except hasn't the NSA provided information to bust very small levels of drug dealing via parallel construction? Why wouldn't they help out in taking down someone who is causing a problem for a multi billion dollar industry?
In all likelihood, that's exactly what happened: The FBI, or some other US agency illegally obtained information from the MU servers without a warrant. They ordered the raid to seize information that could be used to prove the crime after the fact.
