August 2022

Huib Modderkolk is an investigative journalist from the Netherlands. He specialises in all things digital and has won a number of prestigious awards for his work.

High quality investigative journalism has the power to change history and change lives.

This book is based on the cases Modderkolk has investigated over a number of years and takes the reader on a sweeping tour of the corridors and backdoors of the globalised digital world. His vivid descriptions of intelligence services, hackers and espionage operations, make it is easy to forget that this is a non-fiction book. 

It is a rich and rewarding but also challenging read and by the end, it feels like Modderkolk is looking the reader straight in the eye, calling out our ignorance and apathy (“is it because we don’t see the dangers, or because we can’t fathom them?”) and reminding us all of the role we need to play.

"It’s tempting to lay the blame for the failures and dangers of the internet wholly on what companies and governments do or don’t do [..] but that’s to ignore the role citizens play themselves…”

Of course, Modderkolk examines this topic very much through the lens of his experience in the Netherlands but perhaps now more than ever, we are facing global threats which make geographical boundaries less important, if not entirely irrelevant. We share the threats but surely we also share the opportunities.