PROLOGUE

Beltway, the money and the sense that you were involved in a dynamic project or US government service? Hardly a fair fight, really.

As you drive down Freeway 101 from San Francisco, Google is not the only cyber icon that you pass - Sun Microsystems, Yahoo! and McAfee are among the many famous names whose headquarters drift past the window as you head south. The more companies you visit to discuss security, the more ex-government agents you meet from the FBI, the US SS, the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the US Postal Inspection Service. An entire phalanx of erstwhile spooks and undercover cops have migrated from the clinical surroundings of DC to live the good life in Silicon Valley, attracted by the same gorgeous conditions that lured the movies to Hollywood.

This flow from state agencies into the private sector results in a distinct disadvantage for the government. The Treasury ploughs money into educating cyber investigators who, with a few years' experience under their belt, then leave for more pleasant climes. Yet the investment is not entirely dead because this has led to the consolidation of powerful links between the public and private sectors. Google is not just a private corporation; it is a strategic national asset, in the eyes of the White House. The message from DC is quite clear - attack Google and you are attacking the US. Within that context, the ability of somebody like Corey Louie to pick up the phone and chat to his old pals at the Secret Service, alerting them, say, to a major attack on gmail, makes the critical cooperation between public and private sector in Internet security a lot easier.

I don't know, but I'll wager Corey's standard of living has improved since he headed out west, but then he has to work extremely hard for it. Google is among the two largest depositories of data in the world - the other being Facebook. This is what makes them lucrative businesses (advertisers are happy to pay for the secrets about personal habits that this data reveals) and it is what makes them the holy grail for hackers working on behalf of themselves, of the underground, of industry and of rival states.

Towards the end of my conversation with Corey, he told me about a friend, a cop, who had invested much time in developing friendships with hackers. He had been so successful that he had taken over the administration of a vast criminal website. 'He'll probably be happy to talk to you,' he said. 'He ran a site called DarkMarket.' It was the first