DARKMARKET

The jolly pastel mix of primary and secondary colours, familiar from Google's logo, is replicated throughout the 'campus'. Often they use soft, rounded edges to define the large objects scattered around the place with precision higgledy-pigglediness. The sculptures are designed for sitting on, looking at or playing with, so that the entire complex resembles either a vast kindergarten or, depending on your anxiety and paranoia levels, the bizarre toytown village from the 1960s TV show The Prisoner, whither national-security risks were sent and whence there was no escape. Is it my imagination or does everyone I see on the campus, from cleaners to senior management, sport a trance-like smile? This both strengthens the paranoid interpretation of Google's essence and gives the impression that they are all working a little too hard on not being evil. I cannot quite gauge whether this is a dream or a nightmare.

It is almost a relief when I meet Corey Louie, Google's Trust and Safety Manager, because people involved in security have a no-nonsense air and a penchant for secrecy, regardless of who they are working for. His demeanour is a welcome contrast to Google's vibe of Buddhist oneness. A smart Asian American in his thirties, with a brisk but warm manner, Louie cut his cyber teeth not among the lotus eaters in Silicon Valley, but in the much more abrasive and masculine world of the United States Secret Service. He had been recruited to Google two and a half years before my visit, in late 2006. And by the time he left law enforcement Corey Louie was in charge of the Secret Service's E-Crimes Unit. There was little he did not know about attacks on networks (so-called intrusion or penetration), credit-card fraud, the pervasive Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks (capable of disabling websites and networks) and the malware that soon after the millennium began multiplying like rats in a sewer. And he knew a great deal about carding, the daily bread of cybercrime. This is the practice of buying or selling stolen or hacked credit-card details, hundreds of thousands of which are exchanged around the world before being used to buy goods or withdraw cash from ATMs.

How could Google resist a strategic asset like Corey Louie? Well, they couldn't. And how could Louie resist a strategic career move to Google - the balmy weather of the United States' southern Pacific rim versus DC's humidity, the winter freeze and just one week of cherry blossom; the West Coast's casual dress code or the stiff collars of the