In one of the first ever extraditions for an intellectual property offense, the leader of one of the oldest and most renowned Internet software piracy groups was arraigned today in U.S. District Court, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg for the Eastern District of Virginia announced today.

Hew Raymond Griffiths, 44, a British national living in Bateau Bay, Australia, appeared today in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., before Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz. The defendant was extradited from Australia and is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement. If convicted on both counts, Griffiths could receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Prior to his arrival in the United States, he had spent nearly three years incarcerated at a detention center in Australia while fighting his extradition in Australian court.

“Griffiths claimed to be beyond the reach of U.S. law, and today, we have proven otherwise,” said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher. “This extradition represents the Department of Justice’s commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe.”

“Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders,” said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.

The indictment, which was returned in March 2003, charges Griffiths with violating the criminal copyright laws of the United States as the leader of an organized criminal group known as DrinkOrDie, which had a reputation as one of the oldest security-conscious piracy groups on the Internet. DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. The group was dismantled by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of Operation Buccaneer in December 2001, with more than 70 raids conducted in the U.S. and five foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Australia. To date, Operation Buccaneer has resulted in 30 felony convictions and 10 convictions of foreign nationals overseas. Prior to its dismantling, DrinkOrDie was estimated to have caused the illegal reproduction and distribution of more than $50 million worth of pirated software, movies, games and music.

“Counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property are global parasites estimated to rob the legitimate world economy of more than $400 billion annually,” said Assistant Secretary Julie Myers. “The indictment charges that Griffiths was co-leader of DrinkOrDie, which was part of an underground online community that consisted of individuals and organized groups who used the Internet to engage in the large-scale, illegal distribution of copyright protected software, games, movies and music worth $50 million.”

According to the indictment, Griffiths, known by the screen nickname “Bandido,” was a longtime leader of DrinkOrDie and an elder in the highest echelons of the underground Internet piracy community, also known as the warez scene. He held leadership roles in several other well-known warez groups, including Razor1911 and RiSC. In an interview published in December 1999 by an online news source, he boasted that he ran all of DrinkOrDie’s day-to-day operations and controlled access to more than 20 of the top warez servers worldwide. In fact, Griffiths claimed to reporters that he would never be caught.

According to the indictment, Griffiths oversaw all the illegal operations of DrinkOrDie which specialized in cracking software and distributing the cracked versions over the Internet. Once cracked, these software versions could be copied and used without limitation. Members stockpiled the illegal software on huge Internet computer storage sites that were filled with tens of thousands of individual software, game, movie and music titles worth millions of dollars. The group used encryption and an array of other sophisticated technological security measures to hide their activities from law enforcement.

This case is being prosecuted by Deputy Chief Michael DuBose and trial attorney Jay Prabhu of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Wiechering of the Eastern District of Virginia.

The charges contained in the indictment are allegations only and the defendant is presumed innocent until convicted at trial.

Both Rodriguez and his company were indicted in November 2005 for violations related to the handling and transportation of hazardous waste. According to the indictment, Rodriguez and NAWA were hired to dispose of over of 155 gallon drums of construction-related waste. Approximately 75 of the drums contained expired petroleum-based concrete curing compound, which is an ignitable hazardous waste when disposal becomes necessary.

The indictment alleged that on or about March 27, 2002, Rodriguez and NAWA transported the drums using several Uniform Hazardous Waste Manifests that stated that the drums contained “Non-RCRA, Non-Regulated” waste. Rodriguez then made arrangements to transport the drums, for disposal, to landfills in Avalon, Texas, and Walterboro, S.C. that were not permitted under RCRA to accept hazardous waste. The drums of hazardous waster were then disposed of at unauthorized facilities.

Rodriguez faces a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison and a total maximum fine of $250,000 per count.

This case was investigated by Special Agents of the EPA, with the assistance of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and is being prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.

The Sacramento County Superior Court Tuesday struck down a plan by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to transfer prisoners to private out-of-state facilities in order to reduce prison overcrowding. The ruling by Judge Gail Ohanesian held that an emergency declaration issued by Schwarzenegger in October violated the California Emergency Services Act and the state constitution, which prohibits contracting with private companies to perform jobs usually held by state workers. Schwarzenegger announced his intent to appeal what he called the "disappointing ruling," warning that it could cause some prisoners to be released prematurely.

California has an estimated 174,000 prisoners held in facilities designed for 100,000. Last year, a federal judge ordered California to solve the crowding problem, vowing to release prisoners early if an adequate solution was not reached. Schwarzenegger issued the emergency proclamation in response. The California Department of Corrections began out-of-state transfers in November.

Federal investigators and prosecutors fudged data on the number of anti-terrorism investigations and cases for the four years after 9/11, according to an audit by US Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine released Tuesday.

In a report on terrorism-related incidents and case-loads, the inspector general found that "some of these statistics were significantly overstated or understated." According to the audit, DOJ officials used non-terror-related immigration violations and drug trafficking to inflate the number of anti-terror cases reported.

The data was collected from multiple DOJ divisions, including the FBI, the Executive Office of US Attorneys, the Criminal Division, and the US Attorney's Office , and is used to monitor the DOJ's efficiency in fighting terrorism.

Lawyers made their final arguments in the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Tuesday, with the defense arguing that Libby was a scapegoat for presidential aide Karl Rove's disclosures. In its final remarks, the prosecution argued that Libby was merely trying to a cover up a potentially illegal intelligence leak. In response, the defense said the government's witnesses were not credible and to accept the testimony of Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert as truth "would just be fundamentally unfair."

Libby's defense team rested last week, one week after the prosecution finished presenting its evidence against Libby. Also last week, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak testified that Libby did not leak Plame's identity to him. It was Novak's July 2003 column that publicly outed Plame, thus igniting the CIA leak scandal. Libby is not charged with leaking Plame's identity, but instead faces perjury and obstruction of justice charges in connection with the investigation into the leak.

In the Oregon case, Mayola Williams, widow of Jesse Williams, a Portland janitor who died of lung cancer in 1996, sued Philip Morris, maker of Marlboros, the brand of cigarette her husband had smoked for 45 years. The jury awarded Williams $821,000, then added a $79.5 million punitive award. Philip Morris, which is now owned by Altria Group, had denied that its cigarettes were addictive, and lawyers for Williams' estate had told jurors to consider the damage done to other smokers in Oregon in their verdict.

In Tuesday's ruling, the justices countered that the Oregon court should not have allowed consideration of any harm done to smokers, except Williams.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said the Constitution bars courts from using punitive awards to penalize companies for injuries they inflict upon others who are "essentially, strangers to the litigation."

Robert S. Peck, the Washington lawyer who represented Mayola Williams, told the Washington Post that the Supreme Court decision "slays a dragon that didn't exist," and predicted that further litigation in Oregon would "reaffirm" the jury's punitive verdict. Peck noted that contrary to the justices finding, the jury had based the award on Philip Morris' profitability and not on the number of victims harmed by smoking.

Exactly how the jury reached the award amount remains unclear and that uncertainty was a key factor in the decision of the high court to overturn the punitive award and send the case back to Oregon for further litigation.

Despite the court's refusal to use the case to set a firm limit on how much can be awarded in punitive damages, as some in the business community had hoped, Tuesdays ruling is being viewed as not only a victory for Philip Morris, but for corporations weary of what they view as run-away punitive awards in state courts.

The New York Times reports that in a note to investors, Christopher R. Growe, an analyst at A. G. Edwards and Sons hailed the ruling as "a positive," that "effectively limits the size of punitive damages in future cases."

Roberts and Bryan were joined in the majority opinion by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and Samuel A. Alito. Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Writing for the minority, Stevens said he had no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions limiting punitive awards were correct, but said the Oregon case was different because that state's supreme court had "faithfully applied the reasoning in those opinions to the egregious facts disclosed by this record...no procedural error even arguably justifying reversal occurred at the trial in this case."

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled Tuesday that provisions in the Military Commissions Act stripping foreign nationals held as "enemy combatants" of the right to file habeas corpus petitions challenging their detentions do not violate the Suspension Clause of the US Constitution. The ruling came in the consolidated cases of hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The court also held that Congress was clear in its intent to strip federal courts of habeas jurisdiction even in pending challenges. The DC Circuit vacated the lower court decisions in the cases and dismissed the detainees' petitions for lack of jurisdiction.

President Bush signed the MCA into law last October and shortly thereafter the the US Justice Department sent letters to the DC district and appeals courts, notifying the lower court that it no longer had jurisdiction over some 200 pending cases filed by Guantanamo detainees, and urging the appeals court to reach the merits in the present cases. Tuesday's appeals court ruling is expected to be appealed to the US Supreme Court.