Retired judge joins fight against DoJ's "outrageous" Megaupload seizures

Abraham David Sofaer, a former New York federal judge, recently was presenting a paper at the National Academy of Sciences about deterring cyberattacks when he learned the feds had shut down Megaupload, seizing its domain names, in a criminal copyright infringement case. Troubling him more than his paper on global cybersecurity was learning that the government had seized the files of 66.6 million customers as part of its prosecution of the file-sharing site’s top officers, and was refusing to give any of the data back to its owners.

“It’s really quite outrageous, frankly,” the 74-year-old President Jimmy Carter appointee said. “I was thinking the government hadn’t learned to be discreet in its conduct in the digital world. This is a perfect example on how they are failing to apply traditional standards in the new context.” A former State Department legal adviser, Sofaer has teamed up—free of charge—with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in urging a federal court to set up a system to allow Megaupload users to get back their legal content.