This article was taken from the December 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Please choose one of the following statements:
A) Kim Dotcom is not a pirate. He's a hero. The saviour of my online liberties. A visionary digital entrepreneur. His company, Megaupload, was a legitimate data-storage business used by hundreds of millions of individuals. The raid on his New Zealand home was excessive and illegal. Hollywood is terrified by the digital future, and an innocent paid the price. Kim is a martyr. But Kim will triumph. You'd like him, he's cool.
B) Kim Dotcom is a pirate. A megalomaniacal gangsta clown. His Megaupload enterprise wilfully made hundreds of millions of dollars from stolen movies, songs, video games, books and software. Oh yeah, AND he couldn't be more obnoxious about it. He wanted Wired to write a nice story about him, so he manipulated its writer by providing exclusive access and even a few tears. Like any pirate, the only freedoms he cares about are the ones he can exploit to make himself rich. If you think he's cool, you don't know him.
C) Kim Dotcom is rich enough to work however and wherever he wants. And what he wants is to work from bed.
His bed of choice is a remarkable piece of custom Swedish craftsmanship made by a company called Hästens. Each one takes some 160 hours to produce and is signed by a master bed-maker who lays out the most perfect matrix of horsehair, cotton, flax and wool.
Price after custom framing: £64,000. Kim has three such beds in his New Zealand mansion, one of which faces a series of monitors and hard drives and piles of wires and is flanked on either side by lamps that look like, and may well be, chromed AK-47s.
This is Kim's "work bed" and serves as his office. It was here that he returned in the early morning of January 20, 2012, after a long night spent down the road at Roundhead Studios, laying down beats for his album (one of many side projects) with songwriter Mario "Tex" James and Black Eyed Peas producer Printz Board. They finished around 4:30am. On the ride back to his mansion in his Mercedes S-Class, Kim noticed headlights behind them.
He said to his driver: "I think we're being followed."
[pullquote source="KeepInline]
They pulled into Kim's rented palace around dawn. His wife and children were long asleep in another wing. Kim walked to his upstairs chambers, showered and changed into his customary all-black sleeping costume, grabbed his customary chilled Fiji water from the upstairs fridge and settled before the monitors of his work bed. Then he heard the noise.
Kim guessed it was his helicopter. He didn't bother with details, he had a staff for that, but he did know that VIPs from the entertainment world were expected in from LA in celebration of his 38th birthday. Maybe they'd arrived early and Roy, his pilot, had been dispatched to meet them. The helicopter theory was confirmed by the sound of rocks from the limestone drive raining against the windows. Fucking Roy! He'd been told not to land too near -- the thought was interrupted by a boom, echoing and close.
This noise was coming from the other side of his office door. It was heavy hardwood several centimetres thick, secured by stout metal bolts in the stone casement. Kim struggled to his feet as the door shook and heaved on its hinges. Someone or something was trying to break through. Now Kim heard other noises, shouts and bangs and the unmistakable stomping of boots on stairs. Intruders were in the house. Kim Dotcom realised he was under attack.
Across an ocean, hours before Operation Takedown began, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) had already tipped off a select group of journalists about the raid's planned highlights. If you know nothing else about Kim Dotcom, about the federal case against him and his former online business, Megaupload, you've probably heard about the raid. The story played out like a Hollywood blockbuster. The scene: New Zealand. Lush and green and far away, home to the villain: Kim Dotcom, né Kim Schmitz, aka Tim Vestor, Kim Tim Jim Vestor, Kimble, and Dr Evil.
A comic-book baddie, an ex-con, expatriate German ex-hacker lording over his own personal Pirate Bay just 30 minutes north of Auckland. Kim Dotcom was presented as a big, bad man, larger-than-life, larger than his two-metre, perhaps 160kg frame.
We saw him pose with guns and yachts. We watched him drive his nitrox-fuelled Mega Mercedes, throwing fake gang signs at rap moguls, making it rain with $175 million (£110 million) in illicit dotcom booty.
His alleged 50-petabyte pirate ship was megaupload.com, a massive vessel carrying, at its peak, 50 million passengers a day, a full four percent of global internet traffic.
Megaupload was a free online storage locker for files too bulky for email. It generated an estimated $25 million a year in advertising revenue and brought in another $150 million through its paid-for Premium service.
The DOJ maintains that the legitimate storage business was a front, that Megaupload was a mega-swapmeet for some $500 million of pirated material. The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that would wipe his servers across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his doomsday button.
Operation Takedown was carried out by armed New Zealand special police and monitored by the FBI via video link. Descriptions of the raid varied from one news outlet to another, but most included the cops' dramatic helicopter arrival and their struggles with a security system fit for a Mafia don. News reports would later claim that police were forced to cut their way into Dotcom's panic room, where they found him cowering near a sawn-off shotgun. [There was, indeed, a shotgun stored there, but in a safe about ten metres away. And Kim wasn't hidden - his frame was easily visible behind a pillar.]
This was justice on an epically entertaining scale: the boastful pirate king brought down. That same day, similar raids took place in eight other countries where Megaupload had servers or offices. Kim was cuffed and put in jail, his booty seized, his business scuttled upon the reefs of anti-racketeering laws. If all went as planned, he and his six generals would be extradited to the US to face a Virginia judge and up to 55 years each in prison. The message was, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone. Justice was served, the end, roll credits. Yes, it was a great story.
The only problem was, it wasn't quite true.
[image id="eO18ZdwodML"]
Kim Dotcom's head of security is waiting for Wired at Auckland Airport on a grey day in July. Wayne Tempero is easy to spot. Amid the limo drivers and families with Mylar balloons is one deadly serious shaven-headed New Zealander with a lantern jaw -- a tattooed wall of muscle wearing a tight black hoodie. He specialises in military hand-to-hand combat and looks like a very nice person who'd be very handy with a knife.
The car is waiting just outside. Not the Lamborghini or pink Series 62 Cadillac or any of the three retrofitted Mercedes CLK DTMs with extra-wide seats -- the cops had impounded those. This is just a modest black Mercedes G55 AMG Kompressor with the licence plate KIMCOM. "I think I was followed on my way here," says Tempero. In fact, everyone in Kim's entourage assumes everything is monitored, including all their communications. Tempero is the one facing gun charges after the raid - the shotguns were registered in his name - and he doesn't need any more problems with the police. "Maybe we're all a little paranoid these days," he says with a grin as he edges up to the speed limit for the drive.
[Quote"]The FBI also believed Kim possessed a special portable device that would wipe his servers across the globe, destroying the evidence. They called this his doomsday button[/pullquote]
The Dotcom Mansion is impossible to miss, mostly because of the chromed industrial-park letters spelling out DOTCOM MANSION across the gatehouse in blue backlighting. It's said to be the island nation's most expensive home. The limestone drive winds up to a £15 million suburban castle with ponds, a tennis court, several pools, a Vegas-style stairstep fountain and a maze. The surrounding lawns are manicured and impossibly steep.
Until just two months ago, Kim couldn't live in his own home, as a condition of his house arrest following a month of jail time. For three months he was confined to the guesthouse, a prison of black lacquer, black leather, black Versace tables and wall-sized LCD flatscreens. The walls are adorned with poster-sized photographs of Kim and his beautiful 24-year-old wife, Mona, but mostly just Kim: Kim reeling in a great fish, Kim on the bow of a luxury yacht, Kim in front of a European castle holding a shotgun and a limp duck, or straddling a mountaintop, eyes pinned on the distant future. The effect is more Kim Jong-Il than Kim Dotcom.
Dotcom -- or the iconic character of Dotcom -- is everywhere here, but most of the 53 members of staff that maintained the larger estate are gone, along with his seized fortune.
[image id="N51AyR6dK6y"]
Tempero says that the boss had just gone to bed shortly before I arrived at dawn. There's no telling when he'll be awake. Kim has surrounded himself with luxury, but what he prizes above all other indulgences is pure, deep sleep. He simply doesn't always like to get up in the morning, and he doesn't always like going to bed at night, and -- here's the kicker -- he doesn't have to. The Sun is up or down -- who cares? It is always dark somewhere. And it is always night in the Dotcom Mansion. Great black curtains shut out the light, thick stone walls block the sound. In his sleeping chamber there are no electronic things, no humming or beeping devices, no leaking of LED. For sleep of the finest quality, for pure luxury slumber, total silence is required. The gardeners do not mow, the cleaners do not clean. The cooks chop quietly in other wings, the nannies tend the children in another house. When he sleeps the mansion holds its breath. Kim can't provide a schedule. "I usually just watch his Twitter," Tempero says. It's late afternoon before Kim's tweets start pouring forth. He announces updates on the coming court hearings, plugs his new pop single -- a catchy duet with his wife called "Precious" -- and a music video featuring home footage of the five Dotcom kids, including hospital shots of the arrival of his new twins only months before. Other messages in the stream address Julian Assange or internet freedom or the tyranny of the FBI.
A few minutes later Tempero is at my door. The boss is up.
I find Kim behind the wheel of his golf cart, layered in his usual uniform of black fleece over diaphanous black shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, a black scarf and heavy black leather ball cap. Despite his blue-tinted Cartier sunglasses, his eyes squint against the sunlight. Spotting me, he motors over and extends a fist bump. "Wow, you look like a Viking," he says, meaning probably that I'm blond and tall like him. His English is precise and tinged with a German-Finnish accent. "Cool!" Then he zips away on a golf cart that has been hacked to top 50kph. I follow to what Kim calls his hill, where he can soak in a few minutes of precious winter sunlight.
At this time of year Kim and family would usually be based out of their floor-wide residence in the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, or on a rented yacht off the shores of Monaco or St Tropez. The raid has enforced a Hotel California-style house arrest. But Kim has reason to hope that his adopted home might aid his cause. In a few days he will be in court for a much-expected showdown with prosecutors about the excesses of the raid on his home. It's a sideshow ahead of the extradition hearing in March -- but a sideshow that might determine Kim's fate.
In recent weeks, New Zealand Crown judges have pushed back against the DOJ, ruling that the search warrant on Kim and the removal of his personal hard drives under the guidance of the FBI were illegal. Still, the jeopardy is daunting -- up to 55 years in jail for alleged crimes including conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering. "They're treating us like a Mafia, man!" Kim says. "It's unbelievable. It's only because they cannot extradite us to the US just for copyright violation. If they treat us as some sort of international criminal conspiracy, they can.
The "us" Kim is referring to are his six codefendants, his partners in Megaupload. Andrus Nomm, a resident of both Turkey and Estonia, was captured in Holland; Sven Echternach escaped to his home in Germany (which does not extradite its citizens); and Julius Bencko of Slovakia remains at large. The other three -- Bram van der Kolk, who oversaw programming; Finn Batato, the company's chief marketing officer; and Mathias Ortmann, its chief technical officer, cofounder and director -- were, like Kim, caught in New Zealand.
At this point, all that stands between the men and their fate are legal teams and Kim himself. Sure, the Department of Justice case cites a handful of seized emails that sound damning, but it was Kim who got them here. Dotcom has in the past compared himself to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King Jr. He was the visionary. Now he'll need to think his team out of this jam. And he promises he will.
He has a plan -- [link url="https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/19/megaupload-becomes-mega"]something even bigger and better[/link] is in the works. It's more mega than Megaupload. A technology nobody can touch. One that will change the world. They'll beat the Department of Justice. They'll humiliate them. And then, Kim promises, they shall have their vengeance.
The sun sets in early winter. We file back down the hill to the warmth of Kim's house-sized kitchen beside a five-metre-long fish tank. A young Filipino maid brings Kim a facecloth and water.
[image id="AQK0oLwVbW0"]
Kim maintains that the real issue is a lack of understanding of the internet. He was simply operating a hard-disc drive in virtual space. There's no arguing that Megaupload wasn't a legitimate cyberlocker, storing data for millions of individuals.
Megaupload server logs show addresses that trace back to Fortune 100 companies and governments around the world. It's also obvious that Megaupload was one of many websites that stored, and profited from, copyright-infringing material. The question is whether Kim and company bear criminal responsibility for that duality.
The law addressing this balance between the rights of copy-right holders and internet service providers was signed by President Clinton in 1998. The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides ISPs with "safe harbour" from liability, so long as the provider doesn't know for certain which, if any, of its stored material is copyright-infringing and "expeditiously" removes infringing material following a takedown notice.
The act was tested in June 2010, when a US district court ruled that YouTube was protected by safe harbour against a $1 billion suit by Viacom; Google employees simply could not be expected to make tough, and often impossible, calls as to which clips of, say,
[i]Jersey Shore[/i], had been uploaded without permission.
The DMCA was intended to clear up the grey areas of internet law. But by making ignorance of its own business a cloud storage provider's only defence, the law created a brand-new grey area, leaving in place an internet where piracy was blatant big business.
The world still hadn't worked out how to have data storage that was both private and policed. Lawmakers attempted to tackle that issue this year with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) measures, but millions of internet freedom advocates shouted it down and on January 20 the legislation died;
Kim was raided that same week. "The US showed they don't need SOPA or a trial to control the internet," Kim says. "They did it with guns."
The DOJ claims Megaupload was anything but ignorant of the pirated material on its site. In fact, the indictment claims, Megaupload's generals engaged in illegal file-sharing themselves, encouraged it with an incentive programme that paid cash for popular content, and were slow and selective in complying with takedown notices, only pulling infringing content and dropping the incentive programme when the company was at the peak of its power.
Megaupload counters that policing the billions of files on its service would be both impossible and a violation of their customers' privacy, that they did their best to comply with takedown notices as the law required, and that they had reasonable expectations of the same DMCA safe harbour afforded to YouTube.
[pullquote source="KeepInline]
But unlike the Viacom versus YouTube case, the charges against Megaupload are not civil but criminal; the key players aren't being sued, they're facing jail. Does safe harbour even apply in a criminal case? It's not clear that a criminal statute against second-party copyright violation even exists. Welcome to the greyest grey zone on the internet.
At the heart of the DOJ's case is the concept of "willfulness".
It's a question of whether the Megaupload boys knew they were criminals. And for that reason, much of the focus has been on the character of Kim Dotcom himself.
Dotcom does have several criminal convictions in Germany and a bad-boy reputation. What's less clear is whether this patchwork description makes Dotcom a Don Corleone or a Da Vinci. "They probably thought, this guy's fucking crazy and illegal, and we will find so much shit on him once we open it up," Kim says. "They thought I was an easy target. But they underestimated me, man.
Everything they're saying about me is ten years old. I'm the cleanest guy out there."
Dotcom wipes the sweat from his forehead and refolds his black facecloth. "That's the funny part of all this. Everyone thinks they know me. But nobody really knows me at all."
The first time Kim was sent to jail he was just 19. The charge was handling stolen goods, but it wasn't as simple as that; the German court simply didn't have a word for this new crime of hacking.
He grew up in the northern German city of Kiel with his mother and alcoholic father, who would beat his mother while drunk or dangle young Kim over the balcony, Michael Jackson-style.
The kid who emerged from this childhood was smart, wilful, unafraid of adults and unimpressed with their authority. He didn't have much interest in school, preferring to sleep late and skip class. He says his difficult behaviour landed him in a psychiatrist's office. The man gave him some tests; Kim stole the doctor's wallet and took his friends out for ice cream.
He was around 11 when he saw his first Commodore C-16 in a shop window, running a demo of some pixelated game. He hectored his mother until she bought it for him. It sat on his desk, a puzzle asking for his solution in BASIC, interesting in a way that school never could be. A friend had a tool called ICE on a floppy disk. It allowed him to make copies of games, simply by removing a line of code.
Nobody called that piracy. The point was unfettered access. The point was the possible. One of Kim's schoolmates had described an online Shangri-La called X.25 -- basically a pre-internet closed network. Kim bought himself a 2400-baud modem, the kind where you stick a phone handset into a rubber coupler. "X.25 was quite hard to get into," says Kim. "You needed the code, but once you got in, the people there were very open about how to hack various things, sharing access numbers, speaking freely." Kim sat lurking, absorbing the information. But before long he started his own attacks.
One of the recurring hacks was a backdoor attack on corporate PBX systems -- a company's internal phone and data exchange. "Back then, very few admins even knew how to change the default passwords," he says. "It never occurred to them that a kid might try to break in. It was like moving to some little Swedish village with no locks on the doors. You got in, became a super-user, and basically owned the network."
Kim's exploits made him seem dangerous and cool to his friends, a hero. And the hacker scene fed perfectly into his sense of the world as being us-versus-them.
The scam that got him arrested focused on the pay-by-the-minute phone chat-lines popular in the early 90s. Kim set up his own party line in the Netherlands Antilles. Then he generated massive caller traffic using stolen calling-card numbers from the hacker bulletin boards. He made more than 75,000 Deutschmarks (or about £120,000 today) but in 1993, three years into the scam, got caught. He was arrested and spent four weeks in jail as a juvenile. Kim says he was "scared to shit" in jail but found it interesting too. "I had all these visitors, grown-ups from MCI and AT&T, coming just to talk to me." He was shocked that these so-called experts from major corporations had no idea how a PBX operated, much less how it could be hacked. "It was like I was speaking Chinese," Kim says. It was also a potential business.
He joined up with fellow hacker and coding genius Mathias Ortmann to form Data Protect, one of the world's first whitehat consultancies, charging hundreds of dollars an hour to tell businesses how to protect against people like themselves. Their former colleagues in the hacker community thought of them as traitors. Kim and Ortmann thought they were growing up.
The German media quickly discovered the teenage wunderkind, and Kim discovered he enjoyed the spotlight. "They treated you like you must be a fucking genius, man. But all I did, I scanned message boards. I got passwords. Any monkey could do that. There was nothing genius about it. But you get addicted to the headlines, people saying nice things, telling you you're smart."
The gun was loaded: Kim had the needs of an outsider and the cred of a rock star. He had contempt for the system and the tools to beat it. By 1997 Kim took it upon himself to make his own headlines, launching a website about his life and philosophy. He called it Kimble, for his hacker name, Kimble -- as in The Fugitive's Richard Kimble. "The internet was just ugly fonts with underlined blue links," Kim says. "People would come to my site, see it moving and animated and colourful, and think -- what is this? They'd never seen anything like it." There were videos of Kim, photos of Kim. Kim as an icon of success, an inspiration. Kim with women. Kim in a black suit. Kim in a white suit. Kim on a jet.
He rounded out the site with motivational lists such as "Ten rules of success".
By 2000, Kim had sold most of his stake in Data Protect and started a private capital investment fund. He had particular interest in a company called letsbuyit.com -- a sort of proto-Groupon, ten years early. Kim invested in shares of the company, believing that he could simplify its interface and make it a success. Then he announced his plan to raise another $50 million to fund it. The company stock jumped 220 per cent, and Kim sold some shares at a profit.
He was accused of insider trading (he says he didn't consider acting on his own plans to be insider trading and was committed to the company) and the story of yet another crazy caper by Kim Schmitz created a media frenzy. A German TV station sent a team to interview the famous genius in his presidential suite at the Bangkok Grand Hyatt. "I told them that if this is how Germany treats their entrepreneurs, I don't know if I ever want to be in Germany again. And that was a mistake."
The German embassy in Bangkok revoked his passport. Now Kim was an illegal alien. Thai police cuffed him in his suite and led him to an immigration prison. "This wasn't a normal jail," Kim says. "This was fucking crazy. I'm thrown into a place, 18 guys sleeping on a concrete floor, it's 40 degrees Celsius and smells like shit.
I've got mosquitoes eating me, the food comes in a bucket."
Kim's lawyer told him he could fight in court and win - he'd be out in a month. Kim hoped he was kidding. Germany was offering a two-day travel document if he'd agree to come home. Kim said, "Let's go." He was escorted on to a plane by two German policemen.
The press were waiting. This was big news in Germany. "My lifestyle and kimble.org had painted a target on my back." They called him a megalomaniac, a swindler, the "hacker king".
Kim was considered a flight risk and spent five months in jail before being offered probation and a small fine if he'd plead guilty. "I was tired," Kim says. "I knew I was finished in Germany anyway." And he knew kimble.org was finished as well - there was no chance of his being an inspiration to anyone now. "So I took the deal. And there's nothing I regret more. Because if I hadn't pled, I wouldn't have had that 'career criminal' label. And I wouldn't be here today."
There is only one area in which Kim embraces an illicit identity: he has a rabid need for speed. He doesn't drink or take drugs, but he drives unapologetically fast. Driving is his vice, an addiction to the rush of velocity and control of a graceful machine.
Beginning in 2001 he and his computerised Mercedes "megaCar" were a regular in the Gumball 3000 rally, a quasi-legal rich man's Cannonball Run. Videos from the time show an outrageous Kim, often in the company of scantily clad women and sometimes sporting a replica Nazi helmet and the trophy. In 2004 he wanted to start his own rally, at a more mega-ultimate level. "The Ultimate Rally was supposed to be Gumball on steroids," Kim says. He'd host it somewhere like North Korea and attract professional drivers from Formula One with a million dollars in cash awaiting the winner. Kim saw a business based on video rights, films and sponsorship.
Kim and his new partner, Bram van der Kolk, drummed up interest by sending out videos of Kim's racing exploits, often by email. The problem was, the video attachments were too big, and the emails kept bouncing. Clearly, there had to be a better way to share large files online.
They called their solution Megaupload. The charges against the company describe their technology concisely: "Once that user has selected a file on their computer and clicks the upload button, Megaupload reproduces the file on at least one computer server it controls and provides the uploading user with a unique URL link that allows anyone with the link to download the file." "It was a little idea," Kim says. "At that point we honestly never expected to do anything more with it." At first, Kim used Megaupload to generate buzz around the Ultimate Rally, offering $5,000 for the best street-racing videos. "All of a sudden you have all these car people uploading videos and linking to them to share with friends," says Kim. Soon they were
pushing the limits of its servers.
This had potential beyond racing videos, he realised. File sizes were getting bigger and HD had gone mainstream. The future was obvious. He never would have seen it if his old business hadn't been destroyed. The cloud was the future. "I decided,
'Fuck Ultimate Rally,'" says Kim. From then on, he would be all Megaupload. But he would no longer be Kim Schmitz (his father's surname). His new business was a fresh start that promised to rebrand him as a dotcom giant. Why shouldn't the world know him as a giant Dotcom? He was surprised nobody had thought
of doing it sooner. All he needed now was a mega-success story.
The idea was simple and the team was small. Ortmann and van der Kolk alone controlled access to the servers. To generate buzz and draw advertisers, they needed volume, high traffic. To build it, they offered cash rewards to anyone who uploaded popular content.
Megaupload users had quickly graduated from sharing racing videos to sharing everything else -- including porn and copy-right-infringing material. Kim says they realised this early on and looked at what they needed to do to deal with it. According to their lawyers, says Kim, the answer was simple: take it down when asked. Kim says they did; the indictment from the DOJ says they did so only on a "selective basis".
The Megaupload technology itself wasn't criminal -- depending on how it was used, the service had the power to connect pirates with illegal downloaders or major artists directly with a major audience. With the site attracting some 4.9 billion annual visits by 2011, Kim (now relocated to New Zealand with his new wife) was charging premium ad rates and making legit deals for the backing of premium stars such as Kanye West, will.i.am and Alicia Keys. It was all leading up to the launch of a service called Megabox, which would allow musical artists to make money from ads attached to free downloads of their songs. Free downloads with permission wasn't piracy, it was a new media model that would kill the incentive for most illegal downloaders and get everyone paid. He had a similar product ready for Hollywood movies and TV shows. Dotcom was ready to go super-mega.
But on January 5, 2012, a federal grand jury filed its sealed 72-page indictment of Megaupload, based on a two-year FBI-led investigation. A few days later, members of the FBI contacted officers from the New Zealand fraud and antiterror forces and began planning what they then called Operation Debut. By January 18, two American special agents and an assistant US attorney were in New Zealand. On the 19th, a local constable was sent into the Dotcom Mansion with a camera pen to secretly record the layout and security features. The next day, two sections of New Zealand's Special Tactics Group and four sections of the elite antiterror Armed Offenders Squad were mobilised to Coatesville.
Operation Takedown was a go.
Once again, though, jail forced Kim to think creatively. After the raid, he sat with Ortmann, van der Kolk and Batato in a cell at the Mount Eden Corrections Facility. They puzzled over the problem, building a new technology from scratch in their heads. What if they created a cloud storage locker that nobody -- including themselves -- could look into? The ultimate safe harbour. And it would entirely change the conversation about data policing. One click and a file would be encrypted and uploaded. Only the uploader had the key to unlock the file. If the uploader shared the key, that was their business. Because the data was encrypted, you couldn't search it. Even if you raided the servers, they'd be meaningless without the key. Welcome to the newest grey area on the planet.
They called it Mega. Like Megaupload, it would combine off-the-shelf technologies into a user-friendly app. It might not enrich them quite as much as Megaupload had, but they still believed that it would be profitable. More important, it promised to offer internet citizens an unprecedented level of private data-sharing while sparing the provider most legal headaches and liabilities. In other words, Mega was beyond takedown.
As I wait for Kim on my seventh day at the estate, Saturday morning becomes afternoon becomes evening, and frost reglazes the sweeping lawn. Finally, there's a tweet, then a text. "Come." It's 9.45pm and Kim is having breakfast.
[Quote"]As a child, Kim's difficult behaviour landed him in a psychiatrist's chair: he stole the doctor's wallet and took his friends out for ice cream[/pullquote]
When I arrive in the kitchen, one of the Filipinas has laid out waffles, pancakes, fruit, sliced meats, as well as pickles, fruit juice and a glass of Fiji water, which she refills from tiny plastic bottles. "I'm going to give all this food up soon," Kim promises, smearing steak tartare across another hunk of bread. "Either I lose 30 kilos or I lose the case." This was Kim the motivator, imagining himself transformed for his American debut in a tailored black suit. It was a nice image, like being dressed well for your own funeral.
Kim is in a reflective mood and wants to talk long into the night. He remembers so clearly how difficult it was to rise again after his takedown in Germany. Megaupload was to be a dynasty for Kim Dotcom's children to build on. He'd rekindle the ashes of kimble.org to debut a site that revealed Kim as a self-made Ozymandias of a digital empire, an inspirational builder of worlds.
After years of work, his mega-monument was nearly complete. "But what sort of inspiration could I be now?" Kim asks. He will win the case against him and get his money back too. And then?
If the case drags on, he's stuck there for years in this dull, empty mansion. Kim worries about the strain on his marriage. He isn't so keen on his prospects either. He's 38 years old. His kneecaps are shot, his back is in spasm, and he's perhaps 65 kilos overweight. He's exhausted. It would take a decade to build another empire with the next Big Idea. He doesn't think he has it in him. "But the mistake I made in Germany was I gave up," says Kim. It cost him his name. He wouldn't make that mistake again. No plea deals. He'll stand and fight - even if it costs him everything.
Kim sleeps through the next day, resting up for three days of hearings. By midday Monday I find him at breakfast already on his new health regimen -- 500mg of vitamin C, fruits and berries, eggs and yogurt. His wife Mona sits next to him looking calm and radiant. "OK," says Kim, "let's kick some ass."
The courthouse is a simple brick civic building near the park.
There's a metal detector nobody is much bothering with and a few TV crews waiting with fuzzy microphones. Mona and Kim file into the benches with his American lawyer, Ira Rothken, and co-defendants Ortmann, Batato and van der Kolk. Tempero and another security man wait protectively behind them. Kim takes the stand, telling the story of the raid. Across the courtroom, reporters bend to their notebooks. That sets the tone. "I want to go again," Kim says during a recess. "That was so much fucking fun!"
Over the next two days the raid will be dissected in detail, and judge Helen Winkelmann will interrupt the officers frequently. In New Zealand, police usually don't carry guns; the raid was viewed as an unprecedented use of armed antiterror forces on a civilian home, based on a faulty search warrant and misleading intelligence. On the stand, the head of New Zealand's anti-organised-crime agency is asked whether the Dotcom Mansion was being monitored by any other agencies not yet disclosed to the public. He answers no. Unfortunately, that wasn't quite true.
In fact, the compound had been under surveillance for weeks by New Zealand's spy agency. What exactly they tapped -- email, phone calls, text messages -- remains a secret, but there is no grey area in the law. The Government Communications Security Bureau is forbidden from spying on legal residents. In the coming weeks, Kim Dotcom will become the centre of New Zealand's own Watergate.
Even New Zealand's prime minister will issue Kim Dotcom a flat-out apology.
This court will eventually give Kim some of his money back -- $4.8 million for his legal defence and living expenses. But before that decision can be rendered, there is evidence to go through.
Some video. A bailiff dims the lights and starts showing footage.
It's from one of the police helicopters, a beauty shot at dawn on January 20. We rise over the green New Zealand hills, over power lines, over a last hill, and, as police chatter comes crackling across the microphones, we see the Dotcom Mansion, a regal white U against the green lawn, where the helicopter lands.
We see armed men running to the front door before the helicopter lifts again to circle. "The media will be presented with a copy of this recording," the judge promises. But how, she wonders, will they be able to distribute multiple copies at once, so that each TV station and paper has an identical copy at the same time?
Across the courtroom, the Megaupload boys begin to giggle.
Charles Graeber is the author of The Good Nurse:
America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, the Hospitals That Allowed Him to Thrive, and the Detectives Who Brought Him to Justice,
which will be published in March 2013 by Twelve Books
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
