The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as "forbidden knowledge": methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.

I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.

Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.