📸

email sites like Gmail or social media like Facebook. “There is so much data out there now.” It is a “gold mine” for a “big fishing expedition”. In the Megaupload case, he says it gifted the authorities seven years of email correspondence. “They just open up our email of the last seven years and picked a few emails out... they quoted them out of context and were able to construct the malicious indictment.”

Ortmann harked back to pre-internet days. “In the old days, your hard drive was local to your computer. The government could not just screen all hard drives of the entire population.” Cloud storage had created a change, where others were entrusted to protect data which — it turned out — the world’s governments were able to access at will.

Encryption, he says, would “reset the security back to the old days where hard drives were physically separated from scrutiny”.

The ground being broken put Mega at the edge of what was possible. Google Chrome was the only browser able to take full advantage of the technology. The product relied on other browser technology catching up to where they were taking the market.

Ortmann says the image of how it would work was already in mind from Megaupload days.

“In those seven years we had already developed the concept on how it should be done right,” says Ortmann. “That was absolutely clear — the storage end and the back end. The browser side, front and the file manager and transfer with embedded encryption — that was really unclear at the beginning. We were not even sure if it was technically feasible.”

Ortmann says he was shown a prototype for how it would work by van der Kolk and was stunned. “I never ever thought that was possible with today’s browser.”

So they set to work. Ortmann: “We had to rewrite everything from scratch. We did not recycle a single line of code, a single component or even a single concept of Megaupload. Everything was new and better and shiny and the way it should be in 2012 technology as opposed to 2005 technology.”

While Dotcom had a high-level strategic overview of the project, they not only filled in the gaps but worked out where the gaps were and why they existed. “These two people are basically doing everything other than PR and meeting investors,” says Ortmann. “The visibility and the money to work are basically the only two missing things we cannot deliver.”

Van der Kolk estimates he was aged 22 when he started working under Ortmann on Megaupload. It was an incredibly sharp learning curve which he was forced to maintain because of the “aggressive growth” of Megaupload. Now, he works alongside Ortmann.

Their approach is one which Ortmann calls “vertical integration”,

204

📸