Reports of the death of the Dotcom case appear to be greatly exaggerated. From the NZ Herald report:
Quote:
Justice Winkelmann's judgement released a short time ago found the warrants were far too wide in terms of the scope of the search and the amount of items they gave police authority to seize.
"These categories of items were defined in such a way that they would inevitably capture within them both relevant and irrelevant material. The police acted on this authorisation. The warrants could not authorise seizure of irrelevant material, and are therefore invalid.''
The cloning of Dotcom's hard drives by the FBI, who took the copied disks back to the US was also ruled as invalid because Dotcom had never given consent.
The court ordered an independent lawyer to review everything seized in the raid to determine what is relevant to the investigation and what is not.
Relevant material is to be released to US authorities and everything else is be returned to Dotcom "forthwith''.
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What I get from this is that the FBI gets to keep (and use in its case) RELEVANT material seized under the warrant. IRRELEVANT material is to be returned to the defense, with independent counsel making the call as to what is relevant and irrelevant. A setback for the FBI perhaps, but not a fatal setback.