VOICE OVER: As I look out from the studio, I can see crowds gathering for what will be a spectacular display on a scale never seen before here in New Zealand, courtesy of Mr Kim Dotcom.
New Year's Eve, 2011, an eccentric German businessman is riding high above the skies of Auckland. Kim Dotcom, in his favoured form of transport, oversees his sparkling gift to the nation that has recently granted him residency.
VOICE OVER: Happy New Year!
Just one year later, the mysterious internet billionaire would be under arrest, with choppers of a more sinister kind descending on his home.
AIRMAN: Roger. Good to go.
New Zealand's Special Forces smashing through his front door to secure him, with FBI advisers at the rear.
SPECIAL FORCES: Ground units, gates are open.
Dotcom and his company, accused of large-scale movie piracy, was taken out in a style befitting the finest Hollywood blockbuster. But the chopper rotors had barely wound down when a domestic and international storm began to billow up from this distant Auckland suburb.
This is the beginning of Kim Dotcom's mansion. Piracy headquarters, according to the Americans and the scene of last year's very dramatic Special Forces raid.
Dotcom was held for just a few days before New Zealand courts, to the consternation of the government, released him. His extradition stalled until a full hearing in August.
This must be it. Two houses, a helipad, security and a giraffe on the hill.
REPORTER: Hi mate. Mark Davis from SBS TV.
Most of his assets have been seized, but Dotcom still has the use of this sprawling mansion outside Auckland, and a large personal security detail. A fortune built on Megaupload, a cloud storage company that hosted thousands of third-party accounts. Many of which did little more than supply pirated copies of movies to the public.
REPORTER: There’s the chopper.
With his billion-dollar business wiped out in one night, Dotcom is marking the anniversary of the raid with the launch of a new cloud storage company. Not so dissimilar to the last, but completely encrypted, unable to viewed by either him or the FBI. Known as much for his privacy as for his extravagant lifestyle, this is Dotcom's first Australian interview.
KIM DOTCOM: You know, I'm an innovator, I'm a smart guy. I'm a good businessman.
REPORTER: You may be all of those things, but according to the Americans you're also a thief. Can the New Zealand government afford to harbour you if the US government and its judicial institutions regard you as a criminal?
KIM DOTCOM: Well, the problem in New Zealand is that - and everybody knows - that the Prime Minister here is such a fan boy of the US government. You know? And that's also why all of this happened in the way it happened. I mean, come on! You send armed forces in helicopters and attack dogs and people with machine guns to a guy who is alleged of copyright infringement? The reason why they went after me is because they thought no-one would sympathise with someone who lives this kind of lifestyle. They thought they can - they found the perfect scapegoat.
REPORTER: The bad guy?
KIM DOTCOM: Exactly.
REPORTER: The Bond villain, I think.
KIM DOTCOM: The Bond villain, yes. Germans are always the best Bond villains.
TRAINER: Step, step, in, in. Step, step, out, out.
Outside, the staff for the upcoming launch are enduring dance lessons, on the very spot where the police choppers landed a year ago.
TRAINER: That's it!
SPECIAL FORCES: All call signs. All call signs, copy.
This remarkable footage, which came to light during legal proceedings, shows the dawn attack, all of it being streamed live back to authorities in the US - a military-style onslaught which soon came to be viewed as serious overkill.
SPECIAL FORCES: Can't find him in either the studio...
This is the highest fence on Dotcom's property, and if that proved too hard for New Zealand's Special Forces, they could have just walked around it. Dotcom and three of his business associates were all bound for the US until matters ground to a halt in the New Zealand courts.
KIM DOTCOM: You know, we're not running away. I want to fight these allegations on a level playing field.
REPORTER: If you're an owner of copyright, you have a right to protect it, surely? You have a right to protect it.
KIM DOTCOM: I agree with that and I'm not against copyright. Don't you agree with me that every ISP that connects people to the internet is in the exact same position? That YouTube is in that same position, Google, everybody has full knowledge that the internet is being used for legitimate and illegitimate users.
ROBERT AMSTERDAM, LAWYER: This was so obviously a political contract hit...
Dotcom has engaged a big gun in London-based lawyer Robert Amsterdam. Well used to international cases, normally representing exiled presidents and high-profile political prisoners.
ROBERT AMSTERDAM: My kind of case. There's not much substance to the charges but there's a tremendous level of, um, aggressiveness, of over-reach to the behaviour of the government in this case. And, you know, one of the signs of a political case is that kind of over-reach, that kind of over-the-top conduct.
REPORTER: How do you deal with somebody like him if you're a copyright owner and you're losing many millions of dollars through a company like this?
ROBERT AMSTERDAM: Let's be clear - we're up against, uh, some of the most powerful corporations in the United States and Kim was in compliance with the law. Period. End of story.
New Zealand's Parliament took up the issue when it was revealed that the nation's international espionage agency had been illegally spying on Kim, leading to this back down by the Prime Minister.
JOHN KEY, NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER: Of course, I apologise to Mr Dotcom, I apologise to New Zealanders.
The whole event has now become a messy scandal for the government and at every turn, Dotcom's popularity seems to rise.
PAUL BRISLEN, NZ TELECOM USERS ASSOCIATION: Kiwis like an underdog, like somebody who is up against it and he is providing lots of entertainment, isn’t he.
Paul Brislen is head of the New Zealand Telecom Users Association. He's watched as Dotcom has transformed himself into something of a folk hero for many New Zealanders.
REPORTER: He's an unlikely Robin Hood. He's taking from the rich and giving to the rich, by the looks of it.
PAUL BRISLEN: At the end of the day, he's not killing people. We're talking about allowing people to download movies and watch television and listen to music. And this seems to be the natural progression of things that, it all moves to the internet and here’s somebody who is doing just that and getting in trouble for it by the old world order. I don't think anybody in government or the police realise just what a hornets nest they are gonna stir up by going in, in such a heavy-handed way.
REPORTER: His vision is quite enticing. He's saying, "I can have a huge business here and employ New Zealanders"?
PAUL BRISLEN: Yep. And run it from here and make a lot of money for New Zealand and help lower some of the outrageous broadband prices at the same time. Kiwis love that. They get well behind that.
The real Dotcom is a creature of the night. When I asked for a chance to talk about his childhood and controversial past, I get a call to see him at the best time - midnight.
KIM DOTCOM: So, that feels good. First kill.
Before his arrest, Dotcom was the world's top-ranked player in the online war game 'Call of Duty'. He's got some catching up to do now.
KIM DOTCOM: I have always played games, so, you know, when you play online against other people that are really good, then it's a true challenge. So that's fun.
REPORTER: But it is pretty extraordinary to become world number one in this game, right?
KIM DOTCOM: Yeah. It takes a lot of time. You know? You have to be quite focused, and it can also be addictive. And if I play, I sometimes spend, you know, a full day, like, 24 hours behind the screen and playing the game. I have always been ambitious you know? Since I'm a little boy. When they asked if school, "What do you want to be when you are old?" Other kids would say firemen, policemen. I said, "Millionaire." So that was almost genetically encoded in my DNA. I don't know why.
REPORTER: What was your background? Was it millionaire status or not?
KIM DOTCOM: No. I grew up in poor circumstances. My mother got a divorce from my father when I was only six years old. And she got divorced because he was an alcoholic and he would beat both of us, to a point where, you know, broken bones and nasty wounds. And, you know, often times we had to sleep, and they call it like a woman house in German, where you can stay if you have violent partners.
SONG: I just want to live my life.
Dotcom or Kim Schmitz, as he was then known, moved hard and fast to put childhood poverty behind him. Not all of it by legal means.
KIM DOTCOM: You know, I was a hacker and I needed more phone lines, I needed more modems. I wanted to expand that.
He was in the first generation of teen hackers to emerge with the birth of the internet, the skill that soon led him into a conviction for phone and credit card fraud. Ironically, his then exotic hacking convictions established his cred in the German media.
KIM DOTCOM: On the newspaper front pages was headlines, you know, "Computer genius."
And he used that notoriety to springboard into more conventional computer businesses. But perhaps flying a little high for German sensibilities, he was brought down to earth with an insider trading charge, imprisoned for six months in 2003.
KIM DOTCOM: After that happened, I actually had an allergic reaction to everything German.
REPORTER: Your reputation was gone?
KIM DOTCOM: Yes.
He left Germany for good, changed his name and quietly formed Megaupload.
KIM DOTCOM: As I said, I'm going to be a no-public person anymore. I will be below the radar.
After a stint in Hong Kong, he ended up on the outskirts of Auckland. While he became a family man, Megaupload truly hit the jackpot and the millions began rolling in. It's back to business at the mansion, as guests arrive for the launch of his new company. Promising, he claims, not piracy but a new dawn in internet privacy.
KIM DOTCOM: There is really no privacy anymore in the world, you see? I mean, the US is spending billions on these spy clouds where they basically capture all internet traffic, all the time. You see? Your emails are all in there and whenever they look up your name because they don't like you or they want to find something about you, it's all there, your whole life is out in the open. These privacy invasions have to stop. And, you know, Mega is going to make that possible.
Many of the assembled guests are here for a chance to meet Dotcom face to face. But first they face up to the big-screen version of the big man.
KIM DOTCOM: The war for the internet has begun! Hollywood is in control of politics! The government is killing innovation! Don't let them get away with that!
The internet belongs to nobody. No man, no corporation, no government. And that's what these people need to understand. You know, the internet is there for everybody, for society, to evolve faster, to share knowledge and to accelerate our development as, you know, a race.
REPORTER: A cynic would say you're profiting to the tune of billions of dollars by expressing that view when, in fact, it's a fairly cynical business practice you profit from.
KIM DOTCOM: I'm a businessman. YouTube profits, you know? ISPs profit. In the internet, you have a lot of opportunities to make money. You know, I created a great product that people liked and that was used for a lot of legitimate users. So there's nothing wrong with being successful and making money.
Welcome to the Mega launch. What we're offering is a smarter, faster and more secure way of cloud storage. And we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law.
The Mega encrypted storage system is likely to enhance privacy, but it's just as likely to enhance the private exchange of millions of dollars' worth of Hollywood movies - an act unlikely to further endear him to US prosecutors.
REPORTER: You're not going to go down quietly, obviously? They may strike back. How do you think this is going to end?
KIM DOTCOM: Well, that's the thing, you know? If your initial strike is already a nuke, there's not much more you can do! I mean, they already put that nuclear device up my ass. What else would I have to be worried about, you know? So, yeah, bring it on!
Stop! Stop this madness! Let's all be friends.
REPORTER: Can the New Zealand government afford to offend the American government to such an extent, if they don't extradite him and they let him start this new venture?
PAUL BRISLEN: There is this problem of the trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement we're trying to get signed, we have bi-lateral agreements – they would love to get a free trade agreement directly with the US. A lot of that sort of thing will become far more difficult if we're seen to be harbouring a known criminal.
KIM DOTCOM: Mega is not just a business. It's a belief and it's a mission, you know? It's a mission to give people their rights to privacy back. And Mega...
REPORTER: But it sounds like you're up for a fight. It sounds like...
KIM DOTCOM: Look, they stung me, OK? And they came into my life and thought they can just destroy me and kill me. You know? And they picked the wrong guy. You know? Because I know how to fight back and I'm going to fight back effectively and I will make them regret what they've done.
ANJALI RAO: Mark Davis there, with a very determined Kim Dotcom, who's not short of money. For the battery of lawyers he's got behind him! And you can read more about the legal issues related to file sharing on our website. Also online this week, a behind-the-scenes interview with yours truly about joining Dateline. That's at sbs.com.au/dateline.
Reporter/Camera
MARK DAVIS
Producer
GARRY MCNAB
Researcher
MELANIE MORRISON
Additional Camera
DAVID FLYNN
Editor
WAYNE LOVE
Original Music Composed by
VICKI HANSEN