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In the end the Megaupload team stayed — although almost two years later would receive the same type of treatment that Beshara has received since the day of her arrest. And, as would be revealed later, Megaupload knew exactly the dangers posed because it had been asked to co-operate — and did so — with the federal investigation which destroyed NinjaVideo and put Beshara in jail.

From a Texan federal jail, where Beshara was serving 22 months in prison, she emailed (as allowed under US law) about how Megaupload had come to be the backbone of the NinjaVideo service.

Initially, she had used Stage6 — a YouTube-style service which allowed users to upload content. It was shut down in 2008 over copyright issues. The NinjaVideo team ran through other file host options until it settled on Megaupload. There was no other link between NinjaVideo and Megaupload: “As far as we were concerned we provided massive traffic for Mega, they provided a fast host for us.” Beshara had believed the world of streaming video (as practised by YouTube) was “off federal radar”. But its popularity and its “social agenda” made it a target.

“Piracy as a whole is the way of my generation I think,” says Beshara. Before she was 10, she recorded music to blank cassettes. At 10, she owned her first movie — “a bootleg copy of The Lion King which I bought for 10 bucks”. Beshara said she begged her parents to let her buy the movie, putting days into making her case. Her family, she said, couldn’t afford to go to the cinema.

Big music studios and publishing houses don’t allow creators to benefit from their work, she said, so “I had no problem spreading it outside of those institutions that would keep it for a certain class.”

While the true definition of pirate might be seen as those who “encode and rip” content, duplicating it to spread it across the internet, Beshara said “the feds can stretch anything if they want you in their net”.

There were “two dozen federal agents” who crashed into her home the day she was arrested, said Beshara. One rappelled down the walls of the building and came in through the balcony. It was a “retarded over-reaction and waste of assets . . . The Feds are scary. With their windbreakers and their guns and their ability to rip your entire world apart.” The units deployed, too, seemed “psycho”. It was the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement units with agents from the Department of Homeland Security. “DHS over some bootleg movies? WTF?”

There had been benefits. NinjaVideo pulled in money from advertisters on its website — but not much. “The first year I worked 20 hours a day on the site and made a couple of thousand (dollars). Second year about $50,000. Third year about the same before the feds came in and seized it all.”

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