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weeks of dealing with medium and minor issues. As January turned to February, perfectionist Dotcom was willing to declare it "99.9 per cent bug free and running really smooth". The company flaunted its encryption product, offering cash prizes to anyone who could crack it. Even months after launch, the prize remained unclaimed. When Edward Snowden's information began to emerge, Mega saw a massive uptake. His fortunes and those of the company were directly linked to the suspicion that data and personal information was no longer safe.

The discovery of the spying was a trigger to build encryption into the new business. "Where the government won't protect your rights and even the law won't protect your rights, innovation has to do it. I'm really proud I created something that can beat mass surveillance on a technological level where it doesn't require the protection of politicians or the law. It means you as a citizen can protect your communications."

Dotcom: "We are growing really fast to a point where I think this has the potential to be bigger than anything we have ever created."

The product which was released was limited. It tended to crash when used with browsers other than Google Chrome and relied on other browsers using the developing HTML5 technology. On launch, it also failed to offer mobile versions. They were launched months later.

"My goal is in the next five years I want to encrypt half of the internet," says Dotcom. "If you believe it or not, that was my initial thought when I said, 'We're going to do something new.' This is what I wanted to achieve. That was the goal I set for myself."

His ambition is huge. He talks of taking half of all email traffic, half the files being transferred around the world, voice over IP, chat logs — "everything . . . And I knew to crack that, I needed something that makes encryption so easy and available that I could achieve critical mass."

The concept of encryption as an automatic part of the site's design is "going to change the internet completely", he says. Ortmann and van der Kolk were working on an encrypted email service in mid-2013 which would extend the use of the Mega service even further. The decision to make Mega an open source product means the work of the programming team will be available to anyone to incorporate into their own work. The interface released allows — encourages — the development of applications to work with Mega and tools developed with Mega source code. Dotcom says: "We want a whole ecosystem of applications to be born out of this new innovation so that in the future you would have software like Skype, like Gmail, but not from these companies that are all under the control of the US government and their spy agencies."

Mega is the defence's Exhibit Number One. According to Dotcom, anyone who calls the Megaupload accused "criminals" can consider

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