Game lag points to Kim Dotcom spy scandal

MEGAUPLOAD FOUNDER and CEO Kim Dotcom has revealed that he suspects he was spied on for at least a year.

In an interview with Torrentfreak, Dotcom said that he started noticing lag while playing games online last October, despite having a superfast 100Mbit/s connection.

"When it was first installed the connection had 2 or 3 hops, but when I came back from Hong Kong last October suddenly it had 5 to 9 hops and the latency would increase by roughly 60 to 90 milliseconds," Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

Dotcom is notoriously good at gaming and is something of a pro at Modern Warfare 3. We might believe him, then, to have kept a good eye on the sort of lag that he experienced. He told Torrentfreak that neither he nor his ISP's engineers could explain the lag.

Now that it has been revealed that he was monitored illegally, he is convinced that the lag was down to espionage.

"We brought in a technician to see if any changes were made to the setup we have here, but nothing was changed. After a week of investigating to see what the reason for the lag is I asked the technician to get in touch with the telecom provider," he said.

"It was all a little bit mysterious. At the time we thought they were just incompetent and that they didn't know how to manage a network. But today, in light of this GCSB spying, we understand that the traffic of my Internet connection was rerouted, probably through equipment that the GCSB controlled."

Earlier this month the New Zealand Prime Minister apologised to Dotcom after his country's spy agency, the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) was found to have unlawfully spied on him. µ