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States. Among other areas, it looks to set rules around copyright and intellectual property. Many of those pushing for the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act are influential players in TPP negotiations.

Dotcom can't understand why New Zealand would bend to US demands on copyright.

“The internet is the biggest opportunity for New Zealand. The internet is a place where, no matter how large your population, you can become a major player. That is the only way New Zealand could become one of the richest nations per capita in the world.

“And not sign shit like the TPP, which restricts them from ever being a player in the game and allows the US to own that monopoly.”

In Free Culture, copyright reform guru Professor Lawrence Lessig wrote of “an extraordinary land grab” amid the chaos of the internet. “The law and technology are being shifted to give the content holders a kind of control over our culture they have never had before.”

It's a claim which the Department of Justice has used well. The court has seen arguments — the Assange, Megaupload and WikiLeaks cases show that. So do the prosecutions of Somalian pirates, flown into Virginia under an obscure law giving jurisdiction to the attorney in the area where the accused first touch US soil. The US attorney prosecuting the Megaupload case, Neil MacBride, shot them through the East Virginia “rocket docket” court system.

For MacBride, the Eastern District of Virginia gave him access to the world. As he said in late 2012: “I'm convinced that most emails in the world at some point transit through servers that sit somewhere in the Eastern District of Virginia, so that gives us venue.” Venue means jurisdiction — and MacBride believed he had jurisdiction over the world.

“This is really how they think,” says Dotcom. “They break their own laws and they twist their laws to an extent where you can only call it hacking. These guys are hacking their own laws.”

This is the war of a generation. MacBride told the Richmond Times-Despatch the machinery of law enforcement had turned its focus from dangers on local streets to “a focus on local, national, transnational threats … There's been a globalisation not only of commerce but of crime and terrorism, and the Internet has changed the way that criminals and terrorists do business. It allows them to sit on the far side of the country or on the far side of the globe and victimise Virginians. We are focused on protecting (these) Virginia communities from threats and crimes from not only here in the commonwealth, but from threats that come from beyond our state borders.”

The Dotcom case raises questions as to whether the system is deeply broken at a fundamental level. So big is the machine, so fast does it

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