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IT WASN'T UNTIL more than a year later that it became clear what the action by the GCSB really meant. The realisation came with Edward Snowden's emergence as a whistleblower — possibly the greatest intelligence leak the United States has ever suffered.

Snowden was a computer analyst who went to work as a security guard for the National Security Agency. He moved to the Central Intelligence Agency in an information technology job in 2006. Snowden was posted to Geneva, given a Top Secret clearance and able to develop the computer wizardry needed for the job. By 2009, he was contracting back at the NSA through Dell, working out of a military base in Japan.

There were, in hindsight, clues to his eventual departure. On Ars Technica, he wrote: "Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types." Despite his online musings, Snowden survived a background security check to win a role working in some of the NSA's most top secret areas. By the time he walked out with 50,000 classified documents, he was working in Hawaii for another NSA contractor.

In May, Snowden took leave from work, citing the need to seek out treatment for epilepsy. He flew to Hong Kong on May 20 and proceeded to leak, through the Guardian newspaper, details of the mass surveillance programs carried out by the United States. In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere."

The term selector emerged again in one of the documents leaked by Snowden — and almost exactly described the process by which Dotcom and the others were spied on. The document was a report by the US Office of the Inspector General into the Presidential Surveillance Program (PSP), which saw large-scale data-mining of American communications. The program inhaled massive amounts of metadata — information which describes other information — allowing lines to be drawn between those making contact, establishing connections and relationships. The program was called Stellar Wind and when revealed in 2008 was found to have operated outside legal bounds.

Like New Zealand, the US has laws protecting its citizens from being spied on and the revelation of the PSP and Stellar Wind brought fresh criticism of warrantless surveillance. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said in response to the IG's report that "no president should be able to operate outside the law". The expiring Presidential Authorisation saw laws passed which allowed the surveillance to continue.

In June 2013, Snowden leaked a draft of the classified version of the Inspector General's report. It described in detail the operation of the program, including how the NSA developed a "Metadata Analysis Centre" to exploit the information gathered. The metadata would

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