You and many Americans. Helpfully aided in that belief by TV programs like Beyond Borders where US authorities act as the World Police jumping into other countries and taking over investigations and rescuing US citizens from any and every scrape they get themselves into.
Outside your own country, your local authorities have very little ability to do much and certainly won't help you in any relatively minor scrapes (nor in most major ones either). Although the US exerts more external influence than it really should, that's limited to guarding US interests (like copyright protection or drug related things).
Unless you happen to be key to US national interest, you'll be on your own, apart from a visit in prison from the embassy staff to let you know that they know you're there - just like the citizens of every other country, as Andrew Nõmm found out.
Oh, they have the ability, c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Perdicaris#Perdicaris_inci... (threat of war if an American citizen were not released) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins'_Ear (war over abuse of an English subject) or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars (wars to prevent enslavement of American sailors).
'Release our citizen or we start shelling' can be a very effective diplomatic tool. It's just that they normally don't bother.
And there were still "national interest"/"political" reasons in most of them.
They will send a consular to make sure you aren't being mistreated while being detained. They will give you a list of english speaking attorneys you can retain for your trial. They may even call your family back home to wire money to your english speaking trial lawyer.
That is about all the help you will get. For this "service" you are expected to file taxes to the US no matter where you work.
During the Yemen civil war while every other country was frantically evacuating their citizens the US did nothing. They did issue a warning saying you should probably leave. A lot of US Citizens, working in foreign aid, found out exactly how far the US was willing to go, not very far at all. Not like how the movies portrays it at all.
But IT helps the company do what it decided to do (not that I think Megaupload did something bad).
Stewart BrandNitpick: The FBI confirmed that according to their opinion one piece of evidence was a fake.
Throughout three decades of US hearings, an extradition, a death sentence followed by acquittal in Israel, a deportation and now a trial in Munich, the arguments have relied heavily on the photo ID from an SS training camp that indicates Demjanjuk was sent to Sobibor.
Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by Demjanjuk's defense attorneys. However, the FBI report provides the first known confirmation that American investigators had similar doubts.
Where did the FBI confirm his innocence?
In 2011 the Associated Press had uncovered a secret 1985 FBI report which indicated that a Nazi ID card showing that Demjanjuk had served as a death camp guard was a Soviet-made fake.
He survived the ordeal, and volunteered to be sent to the Trawniki concentration camp division utilized for the training Hiwi guards recruited from Soviet POWs
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/04/fbi_secret_repor...
https://www.google.com/search?q=FBI+thought+Demjanjuk+eviden...
The terrible part is that Kim Dotcom has been able to avoid jail for the same crime this guy committed just because he has the money to fight.
If someone told me to build some filesharing software and give it to them, making me responsible for the content is absurd. Its basically the legal equivalent of holding Dropbox developers responsible for piracy.
The only difference is Megaupload was public and blatant enough in English-speaking media (of which the programmer was not a native speaker) for Americans to say "Yes, he should have known what it is for."
> I also had to sign my name to all of the evidence that had already been collected—for example, to the fact that Megaupload ignored complaints from time to time and did not remove illegal content fast enough. If anyone had any doubts about a file, Kim always calmed them down and said there was nothing to worry about.
Do we know it was actually illegal in the country he resided?
As far as I'm aware, the reason he had to be brought to the US was he was within the law in his home country.
And going after the IT staff is pretty awful. Generally speaking, we're just there to make it work. While I make a point to work jobs and clients I think do good work and are moral entities, the reality is, IT doesn't generally decide what a company does or what messes they get themselves involved with.