Dotcom told the Guardian that the secure cloud storage service, launched in January, already had 3 million registered users who have stored a total of 125 million files in the first month of operation. "We're going to extend this to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won't have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email," said Dotcom.

Mega, unlike most cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, gives users both the encryption and decryption key. Dotcom has said the idea is to protect user privacy and his own ass: Mega, the provider, does not have the ability to decrypt the content it stores, so it cannot turn such content over to the authorities decrypted, and, Dotcom hopes, Mega can't be held responsible for copyright infringing content stored as the provider can't see the decrypted files.

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With a gala and launch party at his New Zealand home, the hacker celebrated Mega's launch exactly one year after the New Zealand authorities raided the mansion and shuttered Megaupload. According to reports, the party even featured a spoof raid re-enactment.

Dotcom said half a million users registered for Mega in its first 14 hours, the AP reported. Mega, which Dotcom has dubbed "the privacy company," functions similarly to cloud storage platforms like Dropbox but with encryption and decryption of files as standard. This not only offers privacy for users, but protection for the company itself. Only users hold the keys for decoding files; Mega can't see the content of the shared files and thus, according to DotCom, can't be held liable (as he was for copyright infringing materials shared over MegaUpload).

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