The US government is trying to "run out the clock" by denying Kim Dotcom's legal team access to the materials it needs to prepare for key court appearances. So says Ira Rothken, a lawyer for the Megaupload founder.

Ars Technica talked to Rothken on Thursday afternoon, shortly after he returned from a trip to New Zealand, where courts are considering whether to extradite Dotcom to the United States to face criminal copyright infringement charges. The latest example of the government's obstructionist tactics, Rothken said, is the handling of data seized from the Dotcom mansion.

Seized data

When law enforcement agents raided Dotcom's mansion in January, they seized dozens of computing devices and hard drives. Rothken says the seized materials include data from surveillance cameras that could shed light on whether excessive force was used in the raid. The hard drives also contain personal files belonging to Dotcom and his family.

Rothken argues that the search warrant was overly broad, effectively allowing the police to seize all digital media in the Dotcom residence regardless of its relevance to the Megaupload case. And the defense recently learned that some of the hard drives have been transferred to the United States without the approval of the New Zealand courts.

"The question for New Zealanders," Rothken told us, "is whether they ought to put up with a foreign country like the United States requesting that the New Zealand police go break down the door to a New Zealand resident's house, take almost anything they wanted related to a broad category of copyright, and then ship it off to the US without anything the New Zealand resident can do about it."

He argued that the New Zealand judiciary should have implemented safguards that "allow for a court-mediated filtering of data to, among other things, ensure fairness, relevance, and proportionality." Dotcom's lawyers have objected to the US government's conduct, and Rothken said his team is "eagerly waiting for the New Zealand judiciary to weigh in on the government's conduct."

"Pattern of delay"

Rothken also faulted the government for the lengthy delay in supplying Dotcom with a copy of his own data. The defense team still hasn't gotten copies of Dotcom's own hard drives more than 4 months after the raid. "They're making an argument that they still haven't made copies of the rest of the hard drives because it's too burdensome to do it in New Zealand and they have to bring them back to the US," he told us. Rothken called that "hard to believe."

"They could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on helicopters and raids," he said, "but they can't use the 800 number to Best Buy to buy the computer equipment they need to make mirror copies of hard drives."

Dotcom is facing a key extradition hearing in August, and Rothken told us that materials on the hard drives from the Dotcom residence could prove essential in preparing Dotcom's arguments for that hearing. He argues that the foot-dragging on those hard drives, along with the government's efforts to delete data from the Megaupload servers, reflects a "pattern of delay and prevention of allowing Megaupload and Kim Dotcom to have access to data for their defense."

The government and Dotcom have also locked horns over the disclosure of passwords required to decrypt some of the data on the hard drives seized from Dotcom's residence. Rothken told Ars that Dotcom had originally offered to disclose the passwords to allow relevant data to be made available, under a court-supervised process, to both the prosecution and defense. But Rothken said that offer was withdrawn when the Dotcom team discovered that the hard drives had been transferred out of New Zealand jurisdiction.

"To the extent that there is any encrypted data on the drives being brought back to the United States," Rothken told us, "the encryption is Dotcom's only protection against unlawful intrusion."

Rothken refused to say how Dotcom would respond if a court ordered him to disclose the passwords while the hard drives were still in American hands, saying he didn't want to "prejudge what the court's going to do." But he emphasized that Dotcom had no objection to disclosing relevant materials to the prosecution. He merely wished to ensure that irrelevant and legally privileged data wasn't unlawfully disclosed.

"The US is trying to run out the clock on handing the data over to Mr. Dotcom and our legal team so we can put up a robust defense," Rothken told us, speculating that "the United States is very happy to have delay because it prefers the status quo where the Mega site is down and Mega is impaired" to actually arguing the case on its merits.