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and van der Kolk. They were defended by barrister Guyon Foley, whose cross-examination had drawn the admission of spying from the police. With some cash released through the courts, his clients had fewer resources to draw on than Dotcom and less hope of creating more. While the three were carried on Dotcom's legal coat tails — and ably represented by Foley — their lawyer had schooled them from the outset to "become your own lawyers".

"He wanted to make sure we are prepared to have our own legal expertise in case something bad happens and he can no longer work for us," says Dotcom.

The fight for freedom ate money instead of making it. The group needed cash.

There was another issue, which was more about how the group actually operated. Megaupload had ceased to exist. This made Dotcom an innovator without an innovation. The accusations by the FBI and the resulting loss of the company took from them the moral imprimatur which came with running a business. In its absence, they were adrift — widely accused of being criminals and without a platform to showcase their skills. In the vacuum, there was only the US assertion the group was running the world's biggest online piracy operation.

Ortmann and van der Kolk had suffered through months without the internet, then endured legal meetings and court hearings as Megaupload faded into history. They were programmers without a programme. Together with Batato, they created the Megaupload Wiki, which, by the time the spies emerged, had deconstructed the case against them. As part of it, Van der Kolk had mined the database capturing traffic to and from the website. He saw how Hollywood and the US government were regular users of the service, and that traffic included — for example — a file labelled as an interview with Barack Obama. To see it transferred through Megaupload was a sign of hypocrisy, in van der Kolk's eyes — the so-called "criminal enterprise" had been used to the benefit of the company's tormentor in chief.

"That's the moment I really got angry," says van der Kolk. "They cannot get away with that." Ortmann says the frustration became fuel which drove the pair of programmers. It inspired them. He curled his lip and said with passion: "We turn anger into code."

And that's how Mega was born.

BY THE TIME it was finished, Mega was a service which said: "Hey, America, fuck you."

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