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A comment on From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tells his story. Parent comment

Re:From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tell... by zeveb on Friday June 24, 2016 @12:24PM (#11971056)
> Outside your own country, your local authorities have very little ability to do much

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.

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Re:From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tell... by hydrogen18 on Friday June 24, 2016 @05:50PM (#11973774)
The Barbary wars were conducted because of the economic impact of taking American sailors as slaves. Free-ing the enslaved sailors was just a value-added benefit.
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Re:From file-sharing to prison: A Megaupload programmer tell... by coldtea on Friday June 24, 2016 @09:42PM (#11974780)
The most recent of those examples is from 1904.

And there were still "national interest"/"political" reasons in most of them.

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