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TO VISIT DOTCOM Mansion was to enter a world of suspicion. The revelation of the spying had infected Dotcom with a heightened sense of the need for security. Phones were left in cars, or if carried into the mansion they were disabled with batteries removed. For some conversations, even this wasn't enough. One of the golf carts served as transport. Electronics abandoned, the cart zipped along the lime-covered roads cutting across the mansion to the ponds, the ridge above the olive grove or the crest of the hill overlooking the property where a giant fibreglass giraffe was the only onlooker. An expertise developed, ensuring conversations could not be monitored. Phone and email chat contain references to "you-know-who" rather than use of actual names. It carries an echo of the fear held by the characters in the Harry Potter books who dare not speak the name of the arch-nemesis Voldemort. In this case though, the arch-nemesis was alert to every name.

Unlike the Harry Potter characters, the Megaupload four were not afraid, just incredibly angry and suspicious. Batato talks of his fury growing as more was revealed about the efforts employed to destroy a job he insists he was carrying out inside the law. Twice a year he travelled to trade shows in the United States — would he really do that if he believed he was a criminal, he asks?

The discovery of the spying made, in Dotcom's mind, almost anything possible. He dismissed the information revealed so far by the New Zealand government as a distraction from the truth. His faith had been stretched too far and he believes little now. "The whole situation, the whole case, the more we learn about it . . . everything new that comes out is ridiculous. You would probably understand what kind of madness I am going through and how it makes me feel.

"I am really in the centre of a situation where you know they don't even care about the law. The other side just doesn't even give a damn. They had the objective and the mission to destroy my business and to destroy me and then we deal with it later. That was the attitude that greets me at every corner with everything new coming out.

"This is like a bad script at the movies. You watch these movies, Bourne Identity, where governments are corrupt and spy agencies do illegal things . . . and you think: 'That never happens. It is all such bullshit.' I am now in a situation where it is exactly like that. You couldn't have written more drama or more terror into a script. This whole thing is an unbelievable story."

The emergence of the spies gave Dotcom a new cause. It was no

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