PROLOGUE

governments should be so lucky. Unlike its Chinese, Russian or Middle Eastern counterparts, the American government does not need to hack Google to explore its secrets. It can get a court order instead. Would you really give that up in the name of anti-trust legislation?

The Internet is one big-bubble theory – you solve one problem affecting it, but another, seemingly intractable, pops up elsewhere. And the biggest problem of all for law enforcement is anonymity. For the moment, it remains perfectly possible for anybody accessing the Internet with the requisite and learnable knowledge to mask the physical location of a computer.

There are two primary ways of doing this – the first cyber wall is the VPN or Virtual Private Network, whereby a group of computers can share a single IP address. Usually the IP address relates to a single machine, but with a VPN several computers in entirely different places around the world can appear to be situated in Botswana, for example.

For those who are not satisfied with the VPN as protection, they may also build a second cyber wall by using so-called proxy servers. A computer that is located in the Seychelles could be using a proxy in, say, China or Guatemala. The proxy does not reveal that the original IP is transmitting from the Seychelles, and in any event that computer is part of a VPN based in Greenland.

Setting all this up does require advanced computer skills and so these techniques tend to be used by only two groups involved in cyber- crime – real hackers and real criminals. But these high-end operators who represent a new type of serious organised crime are a small minority of those involved in computer crime.

That leaves the small-time players who deal individually with rela- tively trivial sums of cash, effectively petty thieves who are barely worth hunting down, given the paucity of resources available to law enforce- ment. Even if these characters cannot be bothered to set up VPNs, proxies and a host of other masking techniques, they can still make life very difficult for police officers by encrypting their communications.

Software that guarantees the encryption of your written (and even voice and video) communications is widely available on the Web for free, most notably PGP, an acronym for the cheerfully colloquial Pretty Good Privacy.

Encryption is a powerful tool that plays an important role in cyber security. It is a way of scrambling language using digitally generated