PROLOGUE

undercover cops from their sister organisations, on the assumption that they were real criminals.

As a result of their efforts, police forces and spies have, over the last decade, built up a large database of criminal hackers: their nicknames, their actual or presumed locations, the type of activity they engage in and whom they communicate with most frequently. The lowest level of cyber criminals have had their data crunched down to a pulp. Yet despite all this information, it remains extremely hard to prosecute cyber criminals.

This is where the very nature of the Web – in particular its interconnectedness – creates an enormous headache for the forces of law and order: nobody is ever 100 per cent certain whom they are communicating with on the Web. Are you dealing with a common-or-garden criminal hacker? Or are you dealing with somebody who has friends in higher places? Are you talking to a criminal? Or a spook? Or a military researcher assessing the value of criminal hacking techniques? Are you watching your interlocutor or is he watching you? Is he trying to make money for himself? Or for al-Qaeda?

‘This is like a game of seven-dimensional chess,’ the futurologist Bruno Guissani has remarked, ‘in which you are never certain of who your opponent is at any one time.’

Arriving at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was not quite like clapping eyes on the Taj Mahal for the first time, but I nonetheless felt a spasm of awe as I parked on Charleston Avenue in front of the multicoloured sign proclaiming one of the wonders of the post-industrial world.

The speed with which Google has melted into our consciousness, with all the highs and lows associated with a controlled narcotic substance, has no precedent. Its only rivals are cousins in the family of digital behemoths, like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. But not even these three are quite able to boast the success that Google can, in assisting, guiding and monitoring our lives as its cavernous servers spit out gazillions of bytes of requested information while slurping up and storing individual and collective data profiles of billions of humans. This data, of course, reveals much more about us than we know ourselves. One shudders to think what might happen if the informa- tion fell into the wrong hands. Maybe it already has . . .