American government prosecutors seem to have made the same mistake as the revolutionary Benedict Arnold when he crossed the border armed with writs and expected the Canadians to surrender. Last year, the government of the United States has launched a global takedown of the famous cyberlocker MegaUpload.com, which involved arrests of the leading executives in New Zealand along with the execution of search warrants in 9 countries.

Canada took part in the shutdown, because it believed that the MegaUpload operation was a front for organized crime – that’s what the American government had told them. Now, after the, so far, failed attempt to extradite the cyberlocker’s owner from New Zealand, the government of the United States has been trying to obtain access to all its data stored on seized PCs in other jurisdictions. Apparently, the United States wrongly assumed that Canada would roll over under the weight of its hefty briefs, because it was somewhat shocked last week, when an Ontario court refused.

According to press reports, the United States believed that Canada would readily hand over mirror-imaged copies of 32 servers to authorities in the United States. Since MegaUpload never contested the seizure of the PCs, it should have been a slam dunk, but the Canadian court ruled that the volume of data investigators wanted was far too much. In addition, the court was also unhappy about the scant evidence which connected those servers to the crimes alleged by the US prosecutors. The judge asked the two parties to refine the order by limiting what is disclosed to what is relevant to the case in question.

The only thing that seems to worry the Canadians is the MegaUpload’s customers’ privacy. The matter is that the servers had a significant amount of private information on them which obviously had nothing to do with the court case. Nevertheless, if Canada handed this data over, then it was effectively allowing the American government to read everything in the files, including secret business plans of millions of MegaUpload customers.

In other words, if the government of the United States is going to use the server information as evidence, it will have to go through each file and prove that it needs to take a copy to the court.