Global policing and the case of Kim Dotcom

In early 2012, 76 heavily armed police conducted a raid on a house in Auckland, New Zealand. The targets were Kim Dotcom, a German national with a NZ residency visa, and several colleagues affiliated with Megaupload, an online subscription-based peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing facility. The alleged offences involved facilitating unlawful file sharing and United States federal criminal copyright violations. Following the raid, several court cases provide valuable insights into emerging ‘global policing’ practices (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012) based on communications between sovereign enforcement agencies. This article uses these cases to explore the growth of ‘extraterritorial’ police powers that operate ‘across borders’ (Nadelmann 1993) as part of several broader transformations of global policing in the digital age.