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phones and we arranged our lives accordingly. Today most people feel they cannot live without these tiny portable computers.

Perhaps the nearest comparison to computers is the motor vehicle. As cars became a standard family item from the 1940s onwards, only a minority of drivers really understood what was going on under the bonnet. Nonetheless that was still quite a number who could fix their vehicle whatever the cause of breakdown, still more who could tweak the carburettor in order to limp home, and most could at least change a flat tyre.

These days if it's only a flat tyre, you can still probably reach your destination. But a growing number of breakdowns are now the result of a computer failure in the control box – the black plastic housing usually located behind the engine. If it is a control-box issue, then even if you are an experienced tank mechanic you won't be able to get the car moving. If you are lucky, a computer engineer will be able to fix it. But in most cases you will need to replace the unit.

Computer systems are so much complex and fragile than internal combustion engines that only the very tiniest group of people can begin to deal with a problem beyond the familiar mantra, 'Have you tried rebooting it?'

We now find ourselves in a situation where this minuscule elite (call them geeks, technos, hackers, coders, securocrats, or what you will) has a profound understanding of a technology that every day directs our lives more intensively and extensively, while most of the rest of us understand absolutely zip about it. I had first begun to appreciate the significance of this when researching my previous book on global organised crime, McMafia. I travelled to Brazil in order to investigate cybercrime because this absorbing country is, among its many positive qualities, a major centre of bad stuff on the Web – though this was little known at the time.

Here I met cyber thieves who had engineered a spectacularly successful phishing scam. Phishing remains one of the most depend- able pillars of criminality on the Internet. There are two simple variants. The victim opens a spam email. The attachment may contain a virus, which enables a computer somewhere else in the world to monitor all activity on the affected computer, including the input of bank passwords. The other trick lies in designing an email that appears to have been sent by a bank or other institution, requesting confirmation of login