📸

Kim Dotcom grew up in a house of alcohol and violence. His name then was Kim Schmitz and his father, Helmut Schmitz, drank and terrorised those in the house with threats and violence.

“He is an alcoholic who used to beat my mother and myself into hospital many times,” said Dotcom later. For the young Kim, his mother, Annelie Miettinen, was his salvation. She spent all hours working multiple jobs, cleaning and cooking and saving, so there would be food on the table.

When Kim was six, mother and son made their own home. He went to school, excited and smiling in one photograph that shows him holding a bundled-up mat decorated with Smurfs in his arms. Kim didn’t fit the stereotype of the alienated young genius — he was a model student, diligent and eager to learn.

Then computers came into his life, around 1985. Kim was 11 when he saw a Commodore C-16 in a shop window. He asked his mother to buy it for him, repeatedly, until she did. The machine opened doors to new worlds which excited his brain, spinning him off in unexpected, self-created directions.

This was a very different kind of learning experience from what he was expected to put up with at school. He grew bored and frustrated with traditional learning, and academic accomplishment evaded him. He was kept back a year. There was a trip to a psychiatrist — an inattentive man who failed to notice Kim had left with his wallet, using the proceeds to buy treats for his friends.

And when Kim bought his first modem, he was a geek unbound and liberated. The telephone handset sat on a cradle, squeaking and squawking down the phone line into the structured yet Wild West of bulletin board networks, which pre-dated the modern internet. It was a cornucopia of grey-market delights — largely anonymous chat rooms which stored small, text-based files containing instructions on how to connect with other networks, pushing past rudimentary security features and even offering stolen credit card numbers to leapfrog unwanted financial hurdles. The money was never the point — knowledge was the prize and the proof of owning it was tales of trespassing on other people’s cyber property. These included incursions into sectors of US government, such as NASA and the Pentagon, just to show he could do it and to build the legend.

By 15, he was electronically flitting back and forth across the Atlantic, reaching out and touching foreign networks without leaving

📸