An Apple ID and iTunes purchases have helped investigators find and arrest Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents (KAT). The U.S. government apparently identified an iCloud email address belonging to Vaulin, and sought a court order compelling Apple to offer iTunes purchase activity for that address.
From the government's complaint against Vaulin (via TorrentFreak):
Records provided by Apple showed that tirm@me.com conducted an iTunes transaction using IP Address 109.86.226.203 on or about July 31, 2015. The same IP Address was used on the same day to login into the KAT Facebook Account. Then, on or about December 9, 2015, tirm@me.com used IP Address 78.108.181.81 to conduct another iTunes transaction. The same IP Address was logged as accessing the KAT Facebook Account on or about December 4, 2015.
Vaulin has been charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. In addition to Vaulin's arrest, the KickAssTorrents domain was seized by authorities. Until that point, KAT was the largest torrent site in the world.
Reader comments
Apple ID, iTunes purchases lead to arrest of alleged torrent site owner
Nice to see Apple is very quick to comply with warrant requests for piracy when it has an impact to their financials but not murder.
So this anti-privacy is okay, but unlocking a killer's/terrorist's phone is crossing the line and wrong.
Am I the only one confused?
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Apple has the encryption keys to iCloud which means they can comply with a court order. They don't have the keys to iPhones which means they can't comply.
^This!
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Riiight
So privacy is only a thing when they want it to be? After all at every keynote we hear about how they make their ecosystem more secure and your data safe.
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Go Apple...
The admin guy was kinda clueless... Any one knowing what they are doing would not be associating an account with *real info* like iTunes to anything else.... Maybie all he was worried about is complying with Apple's TOS :P