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longer just copyright; there was a battle for privacy, too. Over the course of 2013, the government changed the law to allow the GCSB to spy on all New Zealanders. It was described as a meaningless change — simply a tweaking of the legislation to allow GCSB staff to assist other government agencies. If, in doing so, the spying encountered a New Zealand resident or citizen, then it would require a warrant.

Dotcom, though, accused the Prime Minister of passing the law to make it legal to spy on New Zealanders.

For an accused criminal, he occupied an odd role in a debate which saw street protests and town hall meetings. He was an example of how it could all go wrong, he told John Campbell for the Campbell Live current affairs show. "They put in selector data into the system we all know now is Prism. They typed in my email address and phone number and they got everything that was surveilled about me in years by that massive spy cloud. It is a much greater intrusion than they have admitted."

Dotcom and co-accused van der Kolk — also illegally spied on — made a presentation to Parliament, telling a committee of political party leaders that the law change would be an unnecessary intrusion on the lives of New Zealanders.

The system used to put the data into Prism was X-Keyscore.

"We know, from the leaks that Snowden released, that X-Keyscore has been used by New Zealand, by every Five Eyes spy network partner," says Dotcom. It was "basically Google for spies", he told a meeting at the Auckland Town Hall, and it could be used on New Zealanders. "So when the Prime Minister tells all of us that there is no mass surveillance and that’s not what the GCSB is about — he is lying straight to your face."

There is a natural link between the campaign on copyright and the new struggle against mass surveillance. There’s no doubt both are sincerely held — Dotcom’s beliefs on copyright were part of what underpinned Megaupload. The views are entwined with his future and the prospect of decades in an American prison.

"When you look at the interruptions and interference into our privacy, they could also be copyright interferences," he says. The mass surveillance, described in the Snowden leaks, captures "my intellectual property, your intellectual property, the intellectual property of everyone".

"They did not agree to have their ideas, their words, their creations, copied by the government — and that is what they are doing. They are calling me a pirate and labeling me as a thief of IP when the government is the largest pirate on the planet. They are stealing the personal data of everybody. They don’t have a right to do that."

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