Not content with sticking two fingers up at the authorities with his Mega secure cloud storage service, larger-than-life entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to release further privacy-centric services. And interestingly, in a Q&A session with the New Zealand Herald late last night, Dotcom said he intended the secure email and instant messaging services to be both military-grade and so easy to use that the user wouldn’t have to do anything to benefit from this security.

This is always the issue with security – if it requires much thought on the user’s part, it will generally fail. Dotcom, who also released a white paper on Tuesday to accuse the U.S. government of misleading New Zealand authorities while pursuing the German-born millionaire, said in the session that he wanted to “provide tools that give our users their privacy back”:

“We are working on encrypted email, IM, etc. The key to make encryption a global success is ease of use. So I am spending most of my time figuring out how I can give you encryption without you having to do anything and at the same time give you military grade privacy. You are all naked on the Internet. I like to help you put some pants on :-)”

It remains unclear what Mega is planning, technologically speaking, to achieve this kind of friction-free encryption. There are plenty of tools out there for sending encrypted emails and messages, but they tend to involve browser extensions or web forms, or paid subscriptions.

Mega’s cloud storage service has also come in for criticism by some security experts, who have pointed out that its use of so-called “convergent encryption” (in order to allow de-duplication) theoretically leaves a trace of who uploaded which file.

That extradition thing

Of course, Dotcom’s plans hinge somewhat on the ongoing extradition proceedings that he faces. The U.S. had Dotcom and some of his associates raided and arrested at the start of 2012 over allegations of copyright infringement, to do with their highly popular (and now deceased) Megaupload file-sharing service, and wants them sent over to face charges.

Since then, the case has occasionally veered into farce, with the New Zealand prime minister having to apologize for the country’s security services illegally spying on Dotcom, and a judge having to step down from the proceedings after describing the U.S. as “the enemy”.

All the while, Dotcom has maintained that Hollywood lobbyists were behind the raid and arrests. He reiterated and expanded upon these claims in the white paper released on Tuesday, verbosely entitled “Megaupload, the Copyright Lobby and the Future of Digital Rights: The United States vs You (and Kim Dotcom).”

The document highlights ties between U.S. vice president Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA, Dotcom’s bête noir), describing the whole affair as a “contract prosecution” linked to campaign contributions. It calls on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Office of Professional Responsibility of the U.S. Department of Justice to “conduct an investigation and hearings into the conduct of the Megaupload prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

New Zealand prime minister John Key on Monday said he has ordered an inquiry in to “unlawful interception of certain individuals by the Government Communications Security Bureau” in the inquiry which led to Kim Dotcom’s arrest in January.

I welcome the inquiry by @johnkeypm into unlawful acts by the GCSB. Please extend the inquiry to cover the entire Crown Law Mega case.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 24, 2012

Megaupload had been the scourge of big entertainment companies for hosting unauthorized content but has also received popular user support. Megaupload and its domain names were shut down by the US Department of Justice following Dotcom’s arrest in January, which had come following an FBI request that he be extradited to face charges in the US.

In June, a New Zealand judge already ruled warrants used in Dotcom’s arrest invalid, and said the FBI should not have cloned hard drives that had been seized.

If the legality of the whole operation continues to be undermined, it could make extradition less likely.

Meanwhile, Kim Dotcom used Twitter to promise a reborn Megaupload site is under development…

Quick update on the new Mega: Code 90% done. Servers on the way. Lawyers, Partners & Investors ready. Be patient. It’s coming.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) September 22, 2012

The controversy began in January when Dotcom was arrested in a dramatic raid in New Zealand and the U.S. announced it would prosecute Dotcom and Megaupload in Virginia. Since then, however, Dotcom (a German national who legally changed his name to “Kim Dotcom”) appeared to have gained the upper hand after he was released on bail and extradition proceedings slowed to a crawl. A New Zealand court has also ruled the warrants used to conduct the raid were illegal.

On Tuesday, the chief judge of the New Zealand district court that must decide if Dotcom can be extradited announced that Judge David Harvey had surrendered the case and would be replaced. The move comes after reports that Harvey said ”We have met the enemy and he is [the] U.S.” at a recent conference in relation to the current state of copyright law.

According to a law professor quoted by the New Zealand Herald, the Dotcom affair was the “case of a lifetime” for Harvey who is one of his country’s leading copyright and internet authorities. Harvey’s sudden recusal is not surprising, however, given that a judge would be hard-pressed to appear neutral after describing one of the parties in a case before him as “the enemy.” His departure means that a new judge will oversee the extradition proceedings, which were slated for next year and may now take even longer if they go forward at all.

Overall, the case is exposing a growing global tension between the U.S. and the rest of the world over the boundaries of copyright law. Even though New Zealand, England and Canada share the same common law legal traditions as the U.S., judges and academics in those countries have grown uncomfortable with America’s increasingly expansive copyright laws and aggressive enforcement tactics. These tactics have included other extradition attempts, including one aimed at a 23-year-old UK student that is extremely unpopular with the British public.

The entertainment industry and U.S. authorities, on the other hand, are exasperated with services like Megaupload that allow users to store and swap copyrighted music and movies. “Its equipment, machinery,  and servers are here … Many of its victims are in the United States… countless American works illegally reproduced and distributed include, for example, works originally available on YouTube.com, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Dexter, Chuck, Meet Dave, and The Simpsons,” wrote prosecutors in a filing last week to argue that Megaupload can be tried in the US.

The tension has led online activists to embrace the flamboyant Kim Dotcom as a hero while law enforcement has sought to portray him as the lead gangster of a multi-million dollar criminal enterprise. As for Dotcom, he has proved adept at cultivating support, in part through a defiant Twitter feed: