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people,” says Dotcom. He told Ortmann and van der Kolk: “I want you to find a way that allows you to encrypt new files on the fly while they are being transferred to or from the new product we are going to offer.

Privacy was the key. In Dotcom’s view, privacy had ceased to exist — a revelation which arrived with the realisation he had been spied on by the Government Communications Security Bureau. “What happened to us is totally wrong and totally disgusting. If they get away with this with us it will get more aggressive and more ridiculous and more censorship and more control. I want to counter that with the little means and things I can do.”

Although there were legitimate ways for countries to access information, Dotcom had been spied on illegally. He looked for a way to keep information locked away from those who could access it. As long as the data was protected, it wouldn’t matter who took it.

The NSA connection raised concerns over the extent of the interception. The United States, at the centre of the internet and the technologically capable, had developed a mastery around interception since the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11 2001. At the time the NSA had been criticised for not being aggressive enough in its interception efforts. As the intelligence agency expanded its capabilities, it created pressure on the Senate to relax legal restrictions to allow increased interception until the entire world lay bare.

In 2006, the US sensitive judiciary committee heard testimony on a further proposed expansion of surveillance from then-Central Intelligence Agency director (and a former director of the National Security Agency) General Michael V Hayden. He spoke of how the world had grown closer through the internet — and what the US was able to do: “A single communication can transit the world even if the communicants are only a few miles apart. That happens routinely. And in that transit, NSA may have multiple opportunities to intercept it as it moves and as it changes medium.”

He said the US enjoyed “a tremendous home field advantage” which had to be maintained. It was an advantage parlayed out to New Zealand through its involvement in the Five Eyes network, which brought international spying right to Dotcom’s front door.

The danger, Dotcom believed, lay in the ability for any of those agencies to look back at the material they had collected and to use it to create a narrative around a set of events which might not be true. In speaking engagements, which were growing in number, Dotcom would point to the online chat between van der Kolk and Ortmann as an example, saying the quote attributed to the younger programmer of “just providing shipping services to pirates” had been taken out of context.

When work began on Mega in September 2012, it was nine months before the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden would put truth to

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