One of the problem with cyber is that it lends itself to preemptive action. Your assets in cyber-warfare are your opponents' vulnerabilities, therefore in order to quantify your assets you have to be able to ascertain how vulnerable your opponents are and that involves pre-emptive exploration of your opponents' networks. So in that sense it lends itself to some pretty nasty stuff.

There are governments who are regulating things in different ways and those forms of regulation often don't square up. So you have a real legislative mess, in the meanwhile various bad people are developing all sorts of tools to exploit the Internet for their own gain and the militaries are beginning to develop some extremely frightening offensive capabilities in cyber. Yet all of this is taking place outside of any international agreement or even framework.

The issue of cyber-security, cyber-crime, and cyber-malfeasance has an impact on a whole range of issues, not the least of which is civil liberties, political activity, and so on and so forth.

I think that we're now deep into a struggle for control over the Internet and there are various actors - state, corporate, civic, criminal and military. The great genius of the Internet is its interconnectedness, but this is also what makes it an incredibly difficult problem when things start to go wrong with it and when people exploit for their own purposes.

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.

The U.S. has the most advanced cyber-weaponry on the planet, and t if you look at the U.S. from the perspective of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which runs most of its cyber activities, they look at you and they see Google and Facebook - the two largest depositories of personal data in the world - and they see the reach of the National Security Agency, which has huge digital capacity to know what is going on around the world. So the Chinese would see cyber as an un-level playing field, because the U.S. holds all sorts of advantages.

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.