Cold Open
New Zealand, January 20th, 2012…
It’s early in the morning, and the target has just pulled into his driveway… if you can even call it a driveway. More of a grand entrance. The target, dressed from head to toe in black, makes his way from the SUV to the door of the sprawling mansion. After another few tense minutes, the sun is beginning to rise over the rolling hills of this Auckland estate… and the command comes in over the line.
It’s go time.
SFX: tires on gravel, screeching to a stop, boots on dirt…
The vans move into position just outside the property gates and park. The doors slide open unleashing a swarm of armed men. A few of them jump the side gate, the estate’s security guard is totally surprised, he has no clue what the hell is happening. The officers disarm and cuff him…
SFX: the chop of helicopter blades and the roar of a plane engine…
The helicopters have taken flight and careen towards the house—one circling the mansion, one of them touching ground in the gravel roundabout by the front door. Pebbles fly and strike the mansion walls and windows, ding off the supercars parked in the roundabout. Both choppers are mounted with cameras, recording everything, watching scrutinizingly as this raid unfolds, second by second just beneath them…
Officers armed with automatic assault rifles and bullet-proof vests move swiftly to the front and back entrances of the house. The front door is thick, heavy, and isn’t caving in easy. It takes several tries and a few men to finally kick it open…
SFX: loud thud, wooden crunch! Bootsteps storming…
They flood in and begin their search. Their first priority is to clear the house, get everyone out ASAP. The family, his associates, and the giant himself… Kim Dot Com.
SFX: woman shrieks…
Somebody screams from the other room. Over the line another officer says that it’s Mona, Kim’s pregnant wife. As they pull her away and out of the house, she asks to see her children.
Right… the kids. Has anybody seen them? Must’ve, right? Don’t think about it now.
The objective is to find the target, just keep moving.
Officer 1 (on the radio): Where the hell is he? He’s impossible to miss!
But it’s a big house, he could be anywhere. And who knows if he has secret underground tunnels or an escape room or…
One officer passes a framed photograph of the target holding a hunting rifle, leaning against a Mercedes, grinning ear to ear…
Could Kim have a weapons room? Could he be locking and loading, getting ready to go down in a bloody blaze of glory?
They check the master bedroom… nothing. The home studio… nothing there either. The officers were told to secure the target as quickly as possible, that if he had enough time, enough warning, that he would use his system’s SELF-DESTRUCT button, and the case against him would be destroyed. They could NOT let that happen.
While some officers scramble to collect as many hard drives and computers as possible—throwing open drawers, knocking down hung artwork, tipping sofas and pulling covers off of beds—the others are growing more and more frustrated with every empty room… the target is nowhere to be found, and they’re running out of time.
Another call over the radio, somebody named Finn is being arrested out back. Finn is apparently in a bathrobe, but they check for weapons anyway. You never know…
Second floor now—agents aren’t leaving any corner unchecked, no rug unturned. Up ahead in an offshoot hallway, one agent bangs on a small door. When nobody answers he goes to open it… but it’s locked.
He shoves his weight against it, but it still won’t give. He calls another agent over for help. The both of them kick at the thing until the lock unlodges and they’re able to yank it open to reveal… a tiny closet. Comically small.
Officer 2: This seems out of place, right?
The officer pokes his head in, looking for any latches or hinges, but finds none. Then he kneels, raps his knuckles against the floor. The dense thud that answers back is what you would expect.
Officer 3: Big guy’s obviously not in there, let’s move.
Officer 2: Wait…
He knocks on the side wall…
SFX: hard thud…
The opposite wall…
SFX: another hard thud…
Then the back wall…
SFX: HOLLOW thud…
A hollow wall. Holy shit, this must be it. They’ve found it! The panic room… The officer leans his ear against the rear wall, but it’s much too thick to hear anything happening on the other side of it. They try with all their might to kick it open, but it won’t budge. How long has he been in there? Five Minutes? Ten? If he had a system self-destruct button on him, there’s no way he wouldn't have used it by now.
Well, there’s only one way to find out…
On this episode: big baller, shot caller, celebrities and the House of Coolness. I’m Keith Korneluk and this is Modem Mischief.
Introduction
You’re listening to Modem Mischief. In this series, we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of Kim Dot Com.
Act 1
SFX: muffled club music…
Germany, 1992…
Kim Schmitz, dressed from head to toe in white, stands out in front of a downtown nightclub. The bouncer has to look up at him. At six and a half feet tall and over two hundred and fifty pounds, he makes the bouncer look like Tyrion Lannister. But size aside, he’s being denied entry. He doesn’t fit the model of their “typical clientele”. Behind the towering Kim, a group of college girls with highlights and glitter in their hair roll their eyes, snicker to themselves.
The bouncer is adamant, but Kim has something other than size on his side—he has a sharp wit and an endearing sort of charm. The sort of confidence you build over years and years with lots of practice… Flipping on the charisma and turning it up to eleven, he chuckles, suggests maybe he’s just looking to get in to apply for a security job. Turning to the ladies behind him, he asks who they’d rather want defending them from who. It’s no contest, and now the bouncer is turning red. Soon they’ve formed a circle around Kim, the charismatic colossus, and he’s regaling them with stories of high-profile hacks, internet espionage, his built-from-scratch money-raking racket…
Kim shoots the bouncer a wry smile behind a pair of massive designer sunglasses.
The bouncer lets them all in together.
What Kim Schmidt lacked in model-good-looks, he made up for in his ability to weave a persona. He carefully crafted a character for himself that he managed to wear just like his white suit… tailor made and perfectly fitted. Which takes a lot of confidence. And a lot of tact. He knew he could never be the chiseled-jaw-line hero… so instead he decided to take on the role of the witty, party-loving super-villain. A role he leaned into headfirst…
Born in 1974, Kim was the perfect age to grow up in the gold rush of personal computers… the late 70’s and early 80’s saw a boom in computers, both groundbreaking and garbage works of technology the likes had only been seen in science fiction movies. It was a race for the best and the cheapest personal computing machine , and it gave rise to a new breed of genius: the computer geek.
And when your home life was chaotic and violent, oftentimes a computer was your only means of escape.
SFX: muffled yelling from another room…
Kim’s father was a brutal alcoholic that took out his aggression on Kim and his mother, Anneli. They eventually divorced and Anneli immediately began saving up, saving up for a computer for her son. Kim had been so fascinated by computers, by their potential, even as a young boy. To Kim, if he had a computer, if he could learn it from the inside out, conquer it, why did he need school? Why would he need to grow up to clock into a job where he’d be stuck in a cubicle?
Computers were his way out and up. And soon he had one of his very own, gifted to him by his mother. He would never be the same.
Music: ‘80’s electronic music kicks in…
It’s the 1980’s, and the first thing Kim needs to hack his way out of is school. Using a telephone hooked up to an acoustic coupler and polytechnic computer, he could essentially turn computer signals into sounds that the phone receiver could understand (wild, right?). Then once he’s hacked his way into the computer he could access, let’s say, his grades. From there it was cake. Some swift key strokes and he was passing every class. Once he didn’t have to worry about teachers being on his ass, he could focus on the real money-making hacks. One of which also included telephones. Once he bragged about when he grew up and got into night clubs…
On the club scene he gravitated toward the promoters, the dancers, the models, the top-shelf-bottle-buyers who had their own tables, and he would regale them with stories of his internet exploits—this was the decade swimming in and bookended by internet lore, especially in Hollywood. War Games, Sneakers, Hackers, The Net, and of course, The Matrix, just to name a few. The internet was new and exciting, and Kim had not only jumped into the deep end… starting at a young age he’d learned to conquer it.
At least that’s what he told people… for as mythic and feared as the internet still was, it was equally as mysterious. So when Kim Schmidt told those dancers and promoters at the German night clubs that he had hacked into the American Pentagon, into NASA, had reduced the credit ratings of global kajillionares to smoldering zeros, sold private corporate phone numbers, and ran a more mainstream online bulletin board called House of Coolness, who were they to start questioning he details? For all they knew, this guy was a blackhat master wizard.
But that status would come later, because only some of those things were ever proven to be true, and it would cost Kim his freedom…
SFX: typing…
House of Coolness was not just a clumsy name for a website. It was, as Kim touted, a type of sharing platform and message board. “A site to trade shareware and freeware,” as he described it. But of course when you’re running a software pirating board, you don’t go around saying as much.
On House of Coolness, there was a cost of entry—you either paid for the service, or you uploaded as much valuable content as you downloaded. It was an incentive for users to “share” more valuable content, and the more valuable the content, the more you could download valuable content. There were even nicknames for each kind of user—Elites (those who shared good content) and Lamerz (those who had to pay to use the site. Talk about incentive.
The issue with House of Coolness and it’s incentivising was that users began using it to trade pirated software with one another. So between the pirate users filling up the site with visits and the lamers who paid through the nose for the chance to download the illegal software, the site was quite lucrative.
And then there was the PBX phone scam.
For all of you born after the widespread popularity of cellphones that could fit in your pocket, there used to be a whole national system dedicated to the landline. Back in the day there was such a job as a phone operator who could connect calls, answer questions, log data, filter incoming and outgoing messages, etcetera… basically a human switchboard (which is where the term came from—operators would manually connect calls on a giant switch board by unplugging and reconnecting phone lines the same way you’d plug a guitar into an amp).
So, think of a PBX like a mechanical switchboard for a private company or organization to share and make phone calls internally. There would be specific codes that the company would use to connect calls, access messages, and all the like. Kim Schmidt was able to hack those systems, gain those codes, and he sold them to the highest bidders, essentially selling free phone minutes.
It was lucrative, yes, but it wasn’t exactly subtle, and it was this hack that caught the attention of well-known German anti-piracy lawyer, Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, and landed him in real trouble for the first time. Günter was apparently hot on the trail of copyright infringers all over the country and House of Coolness had been on the list of top hottest sites for pirates. When Kim found out he was in hot water, he allegedly made a deal with Günter, swapping names of other pirate-site owners for a lighter sentence… and, apparently, some extra cash on the side…
When that miraculously worked out for Kim, you’d think he’d cool it and lay low until the heat blew over and eyes were off of him before he made his next illegal move. Or, maybe, he’d learned his lesson having almost been caught and walk the straight and narrow from now on… But he got cocky. Oftentimes getting away with something bad feels better than doing the bad itself, and before long he went from selling stolen minutes to stolen numbers. It was too blatant a crime, too easy to trace back to him, and he got caught yet again…
SFX: judge’s gavel banging…
In 1996 a judge sentenced Kim to 2 years probation, saying that these were the actions of a rebellious youngster…
SFX: Jail bars slamming shut.
But not only did Kim serve just about 3 months (for good behavior) jail wasn’t quite the roadblock it was to most for him. In fact, when he got out he banked on the fact that he was now a convicted hacker. Bad news for most. Great news for the man who wore his villainy like a flashy cape.
Kim Schmidt had a plan.
Act 2
The call went something like this…
SFX: phone ringing…
…You run a thriving, multi-million dollar business and have begun the move to a digital presence in earnest. You buy more computers every day, and more and more of your company exists online.
SFX: …the receiver is answered…
There’s a guy on the line, some kid, and he’s asking you if your digital assets are safe? If you’ve taken the proper precautions to safeguard them against “hackers”. You scoff a little, wondering if the next question out of his mouth will be about your refrigerator and if it’s running or not. You go to hang up when he mentions that phone scam you heard about in the news earlier that year, some hacker who got busted for breaking into companies PBX systems… then he hits you with the sucker-punch…
He tells you something he shouldn’t know—recites a top secret contract from one of your company’s most valuable clients, word-for-word, from the top, and your heart falls into your ass. Whoever this is, he has your attention now.
CEO: Who the hell is this?
Kim: I’m the hacker you want on your side.
Upbeat, industrial-type music kicks in…
“Keep your enemies closer.” This was the sales pitch, and it worked. Soon, it was Kim’s phone that was ringing off the hook. He had very quickly become a hot commodity. He’d charge upwards of 340,000 marks, equivalent to a little over 200,000 US dollars, per consultation. And he had lots of clients… Companies from all over were asking for Kim, asking for the help of the genius hacker who was now using his powers for good… or so he claimed.
It was this money and his growing reputation that he used to help get his own startups off the ground… A tech business installing firewalls into company computer systems to help protect and warn against hackers. Other grand-ideas-turned-patents that he would sell off to the highest bidder. Ideas like Mega Car, a software system put into cars for video conferencing while on the go, a radical new idea at the time. Plus, he liked to consider himself a type of “angel investor”. For example, he bought tons of cheap stock in the failing LetsBuyIt.com (which was basically Amazon before Amazon) and he said he wanted to save the company. Well, when people heard that, they invested. Kim knew what he was doing, if anybody knew tech and tech business, it was this guy. So let’s go all in… But then Kim “changed his mind”, and sold all his stocks, stocks that had skyrocketed in value. It seemed that everything Schmitz touched turned to gold. He was making money hand over fist.
Kim truly seemed to be using his mystique and skill to make big moves in the tech world, to innovate and push the hacker narrative, his narrative, into a new light. A globally recognized—and maybe even respected—narrative.
So what does a power hungry hacker genius with a colorful and textured reputation and a penchant for flamboyance do with all that money and fame do?
He turns to his closest and most trusted hacker pals and polishes off an old idea, that’s what.
Let’s go back to the year 2005. Weezer dropped their hit Beverly Hills. Steve Carell got his chest waxed in 40 Year Old Virgin. God of War is played for the first time around the world. And humanity is introduced to what will eventually become one of the biggest social media and entertainment platforms ever… YouTube. This was the beginning of the sharing movement—you saw something online, heard a song you liked, bought your favorite movie online, and wanted to share it. Nowadays, this is as simple as tapping your screen, the modern equivalent of passing a note in class. We hardly even have to think about it. But keep in mind, YouTube is just getting off the ground. The world isn’t used to it yet, and it exists in its most rudimentary form. Also, this was 3 years before Dropbox would see the light of day. If you wanted to share something larger than a photograph, you had to wait a while for it to load onto your email or instant messenger, and then wait longer for it to actually send in full.
It wasn’t a huge problem, but it was hugely annoying. Kim capitalized on that. Hence, Mega Upload was born.
Mega Upload was, essentially, House of Coolness on steroids. A sharing platform. But instead of sharing entire videos or songs, Kim had the genius idea to share links (I know, right?). The links would be hosted elsewhere. Instead of sending the whole damn house, just send somebody the keys. At the time, this was a newer idea, an idea very few people had exploited in a successful way. Not until Kim Schmitz, that is.
Mega Upload was a success not just because Kim was a master at marketing his idea, but mostly because it worked, and it worked well. It was now easier than ever to share huge files, to download music, TV shows, movies, hundreds of thousands of documents, and to do it all quickly. Simply pay for your storage space and have at it.
It raked in buckets of money and put Kim Schmitz at the forefront of global awareness, which he believed was the perfect time to make another, slightly more personal, branding move…
Around the launch of Mega Upload, Kim Schmitz legally changed his name to Kim Dotcom, officially, permanently, and quite literally embracing his mega-tech persona.
But the more friends and notoriety you gain, the more enemies you make, the more suspicion you garner. And Kim Dotcom and Mega Upload were beginning to catch the eye of people on both sides of the legal line.
The other shoe was about to drop… but not before he had a little fun.
SFX: party music, a rambunctious crowd, lapping water, a boat horn blows in the distance…
A luxury yacht, stuffed to capacity and then some, literally making waves in the harbor from all the people jumping to the beat of the music. Colored lights flash and dance across the night sky and the stink of sweat and booze could be smelled from the shore.
This is a classic Kim Dotcom party, and everyone who’s anyone is in attendance.
The photographers and videographers are having a field day, there’s a tabloid-worthy snapshot at every conceivable angle… models swarming the rooftop pool in the last round of a wet t-shirt contest, champagne bottles being sprayed instead of hoses. Soccer stars and hip-hop up-n-comers mingling near the bar, each with a $700 bottle of their favorite sat beside them, quickly emptying into their glasses. And of course there’s Kim himself, leaning in and chatting with… Jesus Christ, is that Bruce Willis??
How many of these people Dotcom personally knew? Maybe five, six. But it wasn’t about surrounding himself with friends, it was about surrounding himself with status.
Every picture with a celebrity, topless model, or famous rocker, would be uploaded to Kim’s personal website for the world to see and envy. They saw a man among stars in Kim Dotcom, a celebrity. And the best part was he was approachable—not some adonis with an attitude. But a giant teddy bear with a passion for internet freedom. Being the son of an abusive, alcoholic father, he didn’t even drink. He was a genuine success story, a real entrepreneur. A sort of “nerd hero”, accepted by everyone.
Well, almost everyone. Because while Dotcom hosted his parties and bought his fancy cars and inflated his status, some entertainment giants in Hollywood were getting good and pissed.
You see, Mega Upload, like its baby brother before it, House of Coolness, was prone to “shady dealings”. In other words, it was now very, VERY easy to upload and share copyrighted works freely and with relatively secure encryption on your side, because if users and senders didn’t have to host or send the copyrighted material themselves, they could remain under the radar. Going back to the house and keys metaphor, it’s a lot harder to nail the person who has the copy of a house key than the person who owns the house.
Those songs and TV episodes and movies that people were flinging back and forth across the internet, were getting flung at zero cost to the consumer, and the industry suits did not like that one iota.
Maybe some of the younger listeners won’t remember this, but back when you would watch a DVD there would be some legal slides up front before the film would play, and one of those was a somewhat aggressive anti-pirating short film complete with hard techno-rock and jittery punk lettering… You wouldn’t steal a car, would you? You wouldn’t steal a purse, would you? PIRACY IS A CRIME.
It was a lot. But industry giants figured it was their best deterrent from would-be pirates using sites like Mega Upload, the thorn in their collective asses.
Then Kim Dotcom unleashed his own little videos…
Label execs watched in horror as their own contracted talent—stars like Will-I-Am, Kanye West, Demi Moore, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian for God’s sake—went on camera promoting Mega Upload in a slick promo video…
I use Mega Upload…
I trust Mega Upload…
I love Mega Upload…
2007, and Sarah Longrad is sitting outside the university cafeteria grunting at her laptop in frustration. When the fifteenth declined message banks onto her screen she lets her hands catch her face and the moan that falls out of it. Her professor just so happened to be walking by at the moment.
He asks her what’s wrong and she says it’s nothing, that with so many unexpected expenses this past month, there isn’t enough in her account to buy the last four episodes of her favorite TV show, the only thing keeping her sane through finals.
Professor: What show?
Sarah: Breaking Bad.
Professor: Oh God, I love that show. Just watch it on Mega Upload.
What the hell is that? She asks him, and he tells her. It’s this great place where you can, essentially, stream TV, movies, and music… for free.
Because before Netflix started streaming, there was Mega Upload. It was worst-case-scenario for the entertainment industry, and they weren’t about to take it lying down…
Act 3
The call went something like this…
Hollywood Excec: Hey Mr. President, don’t know if you’ve heard about his douchebag overseas who calls himself Dotcom and built this super illegal pirating website, but you should know about him now. Because I want you to take him down as quickly and as forcefully as you possibly can or else you can kiss all of your campaign funding and little treats from us over here in Hollywood goodbye. And I mean it. Do what we want, or you’ll be sorry. Capisce?
Okay, maybe that’s not exactly what happened, but Motion Picture Association Chairman Chris Dodd knew the power he wielded, knew that here in America, Hollywood was a behemoth with all the money in the world, and he used that power to apply pressure to the throat of Washington DC. And DC understood the assignment loud and clear.
After Dodd and Hollywood essentially threatened the US government, the feds here in the states began their investigation of Kim and his supposedly illegal site, and what they found was that tons of its users were pirating media. Like, TONS of them. And they concluded that Kim not just knew about it, but actually incentivised the illegal activity. But… how? It’s not like Kim would’ve been stupid enough to put a big ol’ black and white Skull and crossbones flag on the header of the site with big bold text that said “Share Pirated Shit” beneath it… And more to the point, how were they going to prove that Kim didn’t truly want to run a legit site? The US was making the claim that Dotcom built the site specifically to profit off of pirated material, but pirating had been going on for, like, ever. It’s always been a thing. The argument against the feds was the question of whether they would arrest the person who built the highways instead of the drunk idiots who drove on them.
How could Kim be responsible for what his users did on his website?
The thing is, it’s hard to shake a bad guy persona once you’ve committed yourself to it, especially the audacious kind of bad guy Kim Dotcom liked to play. Rolls Royce vanity plates that read VILLAIN in big black letters, his personal website littered with photos of himself in all black, touting huge guns, standing in front of a badly photoshopped background image of burning money… burning American money…
The feds didn’t have to work hard at all to make Kim out to be a villainous hacker. He’d done that all himself.
SFX: wedding song, people clapping, cheering…
While traveling in the Philippines in 2007, Kim met Mona. They were married in 2009. She was nineteen when she met the 33 year old Kim. It was, as she described, a Cinderella story. They shared similar rough childhoods littered with abuse. The internet tycoon was more than just an escape for Mona, she’s said to have described Kim as a safe place—emotional stability.
She was a petite model, Kim towering over her in every photograph they shared. But she humbled him. Kim was on his way to becoming the ‘family man’. By 2012, they’d had three children together and all lived happily on a gigantic estate in Auckland, New Zealand—their own little castle in their own little kingdom.
But little did they know their fairytail life was about to be turned upside down and inside out. Because the American government was in cahoots with New Zealand, and they had big plans to tear Dotcom down.
SFX: clacking of keyboards, forks on plates, five men softly chatter…
Meanwhile, Dotcom and his buddies at Mega are in talks about how to get ahead of all this piracy talk that’s been going around. They want to expand their business. I mean, now that Netflix and Hulu are getting a corner on the market, they think they can offer some stiff competition. Why not have their own streaming service? Call it Mega Flix? Or Mega Movies or something? And why stop there? Why not Mega Pix for photos? Mega Stream for gaming? Mega Help for charitable giving? Mega Porn for… well, you know? Sky’s the limit, and they already had a head start by having been the illegal Netflix for quite some time. All they had to do now was get in bed with the industry that actively hated them, make some deals, and see if they couldn’t make it beneficial for everybody involved… right? Build an empire.
That was the plan anyway. But then came January 2012…
SFX: Officers trying to break down the secret panic room door…
It’s been fifteen minutes since law enforcement descended on the Dotcom mansion like a plague, and they think they’ve finally found Kim’s hiding spot, behind a hidden door in a small nondescript closet on the second floor.
Officer 4: You know, you’d think he woulda been with his pregnant wife and kids, right? You really think he’s hiding out in here?
Officer 3: Only one way to find out…
It takes several attempts and lots of manpower, but they finally get the panic room open…
SFX: loud crash, men shouting, weapons locking and loading…
They’re greeted with a winding staircase. They fly up the steps and out into a sprawling white room with bright red carpet. They spread out, and, of course, within seconds they spot him, trying to hide behind a pillar in the rear of the room. He turns to face them, face plaid and drenched in sweat, hands in the air. Before they tell him to, he drops to his knees, surrendering to the armed officers. What other choice does he have?
As they drag the giant tech tycoon to a police vehicle, he asks after his family? If they’re alright? Asks where they’re being hel–
He stops mid-sentence as he crosses the gravel roundabout and sees his super cars being hauled up onto a truck, a grease-monkey type with a bullet proof vest tightening the last of the straps on a vintage 1950’s pink Cadillac.
Two officers shove him into the police van, pat the roof, and he’s off… They finally have Dotcom in custody.
Act 4
The case against Kim Dotcom and Mega Upload was dense.
And the allegations didn’t only include copyright infringement, they threw on racketeering, money laundering, tax fraud, and even child pornogrphy into the mix as well. On top of it all, the US was itching to get Kim extradited to the states to face trial against Hollywood, where they would surely tear him to ribbons.
The industry knew that Kim would hire the very best lawyers, wouldn’t just take all of this heat and then turn the other cheek. No, he’d try to fight each and every accusation. So their strategy was essentially a flurry of attacks, hoping that if there were enough terrible allegations, that some would stick, and Kim would go away for a long, long time. They didn’t just want to knock him to the ground, they wanted to kick him while he was down.
Kim made bail and was released to await trial. He got to reunite with his wife, got to be there for the birth of his twins. Got to go back home. It also gave him time to hire the very best lawyers money could buy, and gather up his legal defense. And what he came to court with wasn’t just a good argument, it was pretty damning for the New Zealand and US governments…
Sloppy and possibly illegal execution of a search warrant, mishandling of information, illegal spying… And what self-destruct button? There was never any such thing. It sounded to Kim like somebody was watching way too many Bond films…
But all of this chaos, the tangle of legal red tape and horrible accusations, it wasn’t something Kim could just throw under a yacht and party away. But he could do what he does best… build a narrative.
Kim Dotcom became the leading voice of internet freedom. He came out in front of the news of his alleged criminal activity by giving his side of the story—the small-time-hacker-turned-nerd-hero success story, and before long he began to gain supporters. He even helped start a political party in New Zealand. The Internet Party stood for not just internet freedom, but internet privacy. Kim knew what an overly invasive government looked like and felt like, and who better to get people riled up about getting spied on than the guy the prime minister himself had apologized to?
Kim used the same charisma he utilized at those German nightclubs in the 90’s to win the crowd over yet again. Today he’s seen as a Robin Hood type. A tech folk hero who won’t stand idly by while the man spies on the good and innocent people of New Zealand… hell, of the WORLD. He will fight for the rights of internet users, of hackers good and bad, no matter who he pisses off in the process. You either hate him or you love him.
Kim and Mona divorced in 2012, and he remarried in 2018 to a woman named Elizabeth Donelly. The Internet Party never won any elections, Mega Upload was seized by the US government and taken offline, and Kim is still in the legal thick of it… but he’s not giving up. Extradition has been unsuccessful up to this point and he still resides in New Zealand. He’s still fighting for internet rights, or, at least his internet right to start another company on his terms…
Because he’s still going at it. You can visit the new Mega, a cloud storage site with ultra encrypted security and, apparently, great customer reviews. However, there’s a slightly new spin on it now—you see, they’ve made it so encrypted, that even the owners of the site can never see what their customers use the site for, and, therefore, can’t be held liable…
That’s what Kim’s lawyers say, anyway.
But who knows: If Kim Dotcom’s track record holds, there’s bound to be something crazy happening real soon. Whether it’s a headline worthy and star-studded yacht party or an international law enforcement takedown… only time will tell.
Credits
Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app right now so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. Tell your friends, your enemies, try screaming it from the hilltops. And another way to support us is on Patreon or a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus monthly bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Dmytryk Carreno. Mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!