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the government having a deaf security agent following every single person everywhere they go. The agent cannot hear the content of any interactions, but can otherwise observe every minute detail of someone's life: the time they wake up, how they drive to work, who they talk to and for how long, and how their business is doing, their health, the people they meet in the street, their social activities, their political affiliations, the papers and specific articles they read, and their reaction to those, the food in their shopping basket, and whether they eat healthily, how well their marriage is going, the extra-marital affairs, their dates and intimate relations. Since most of these interactions are today mediated at some level by telecommunications services, or are facilitated by mobile devices, all of this information will now reside with our internet service providers, ready and waiting for government access.

At least in the West, we stand a fighting chance of resisting some of the more draconian powers that various branches of government are seeking to acquire over civil Internet activity.

Given the strength of the civil-liberties community in the West and the KGB's comprehensive surveillance of the Internet, one might assume that Russia would represent an implacably hostile environment for cyber criminals. Yet the Russian Federation has become one of the great centres of global cybercrime. The strike rate of the police is lamentable, while the number of those convicted barely reaches double figures. The reason, while unspoken, is widely understood. Russian cyber criminals are free to clone as many credit cards, hack as many bank accounts and distribute as much spam as they wish, provided the targets of these attacks are located in Western Europe and the United States. A Russian hacker who started ripping off Russians would be bundled into the back of an unmarked vehicle before you could say KGB.

In exchange, of course, should the Russian state require the services of a hacker for launching a crippling cyber attack on a perceived enemy, then it is probably best for the hacker to cooperate.

2007 was the heyday of a loose organisation of companies based in St Petersburg known as the Russian Business Network, or RBN. This mysterious acronym offered to host websites for individuals and companies - it was known as the king of bulletproof hosters. Companies that