Eight key members associated with Megaupload have been charged with criminal copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and engaging in a racketeering conspiracy. Four arrests took place in Aucklund, New Zealand this morning, and included Megaupload's director Kim Schmitz, otherwise known as Kim Dotcom.

The accused can face up to 20 years in prison for racketeering, five years for conspiring to commit copyright infringment, 20 years for laundering, and five years on each substantive charge of copyright infringement.

Over 20 search warrants have been issued by the Department of Justice as a result of highly coordinated actions by the FBI with help from New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia and the Philippines. The government also seized about $50 million in assets and targeted sites, as well as 18 domain names associated with the service.

I've been trying to read the indictment that they link to in the article, but the page keeps timing out. I wanted to see exactly when they were raided/arrested. Was it during the SOPA blackout?

Read on

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/01/19/government-arrests-megaupload-executives

Damn. Wonder how long they've been settin this up and what triggered the bust now?

strange timing.

And within hours justice.gov and universalmusic.com are both down

Anonymous has openly admitted to the act...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399116,00.asp

https://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/160129893580013568

[edit] Holy crap... There has to be over 20+ website that have been taken offline by them....

https://twitter.com/#!/AnonDaily

Your links are truncated and not working. First two, actually. Bottom one is fine.

Fixed... edit must have screwed them up....

Awesome. Thank you.

Megaupload users are planning to sue the FBI:

http://www.maximumpc..._over_lost_data

Obviously making an example of these guys..