You don’t have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments.

The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.

When you're researching things that have happened, the clear narrative arc is not there already. This is the problem of writing nonfiction for me - writing nonfiction which is about serious subjects and has serious political and social points to make, yet which is meant to be popular to a degree - what happens when the facts don't fit a convenient narrative arc? I guess that for a lot of nonfiction writers that is a central challenge.

Clearly there are some things about WikiLeaks... the material is in part very interesting although none of it is a real game-changer. I think if I was an American I'd be rather proud that American diplomats are quite assiduous in the way that they chronicle issues. Of course the impact has been that the whole culture of sharing is going down the tube.

It's great that the Internet can enhance and speed up our communications and that computers can do all the things they do. It's fabulous. At the same time, it changes our priorities. For example, before I would always remember people's telephone numbers and now I don't know anyone's number. So what happens if computer systems go down but you still have landlines? Well, I couldn't call anyone because I don't know anyone's number.