📸

Davison: Was there any other surveillance undertaken here in New Zealand to your knowledge?

Wormald: No there wasn’t.

As it turned out, there was. And the way it was done meant there was enough truth to go around for everyone.

It emerged in the weeks to come that the Government Communications Security Bureau, the secretive organisation that dealt with external spying threats, had been called on to help. In doing so, they had broken the law, because Dotcom and van der Kolk had New Zealand residency, and the law governing the GCSB specifically forbade spying on New Zealand citizens or residents.

The illegal spying began two days after the 14 December meeting. The bureau used its “unique” capabilities to monitor the seven men marked for arrest, including the two New Zealand residents.

By asking the GCSB to assist, the FBI engaged the Five Eyes spying network which included Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. They spied and spied, monitoring emails and — it would later appear — phone calls. In doing so, they tracked who was coming to Dotcom’s home for the 20 January party.

It was the most sophisticated spying network in the world. The police “assistance” to the FBI had engaged powerful forces.

“THE LAST QUESTION of that hearing opened a whole new door to many more doors,” Dotcom says. The revelation led him to revisit every moment leading up to the January raid. Accepted quirks in life looked differently, when viewed through the lens of someone who now knew he was subject to spying by the most intrusive network in the world. “(I realised I) already knew the US spied on me.”

In the months before the raid, internet quality on the property had badly lagged. For Dotcom, the poor quality internet feed came at a time when he was investing large chunks of time into gaming, a sport which requires every millisecond of bandwidth a connection can spare. He complained, leading to internet provider Gen-I tracing the internet connection. As alluded to earlier, it found the amount of time it took information on the connection to reach the Xbox server in Australia had gone from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds. They looked further using a Trace Route search to follow the signal. They found the signal being diverted inside New Zealand. It had gone from taking two steps

161

📸