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THE TWINS ARRIVED on March 22 in strict secrecy. Mona had her own room at Auckland City Hospital, looked after by midwives who worked around the nannies hired to care for the Dotcoms' other children. Dotcom was in regularly, taking well-wishers’ calls. Already, two months into the case, his girth and height combined with a notoriety which had people reaching out to greet him as he walked the hospital wards.

“Two healthy Kiwis were born yesterday,” Dotcom announced. Somewhat flummoxed by New Zealand’s progressive natural birth movement, he added: “When they asked me if I'd like to keep the placenta (weird question) I said 'yes' and 'please send it to the FBI for forensic analysis so they can verify there is no pirate DNA.'”

It was also a time in which the Megaupload team stopped giving ground.

The madness of disorganisation which had followed the raid, the loss of the money to which all had become accustomed and the uncertainty of any help had the group focused on little beyond the next day. The failure of the Crown Law Office to use the proper restraining order raised the possibility that the next day would take care of itself — and it soon did. Orders would be made to release some funding. It was small, in comparison with the wealth which had been seized, but it meant there would be food on the table and a roof over their heads.

In a faltering and spasmodic way, they reached out to what information could be used to build a defence. They created a Wiki, and started compiling information about their case. It was collaborative, meaning the group could be assigned tasks — led, as Megaupload used to be, by Dotcom — and tuned to draw the best from their specialities. It was an enormous task, given those they were set against had been working in opposition for 22 months.

Gathering information was key, and almost all of it was held by the other side. The efforts to get it were, at first, faltering. The police had taken as many electronic devices capable of memory storage as they could find at the mansion and stored them at the Electronic Crime Laboratory at the Otahuhu police headquarters, Harlech House. Once there, they struggled with a means to access the password-locked and occasionally encrypted information.

A deal was struck with Dotcom’s team — they wanted to access the CCTV footage of the raid and the police couldn’t play it unless they used the proprietary system.

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