The Dark Triad is a psychiatric term that is applied to people with a James Bond–style character, one combining narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. My version of the Dark Triad does not relate directly to those personality traits, but it seems like a fitting way to describe what I consider to be a three‐pronged attack on our freedoms on the internet.

For many years, I would talk about the pincer movement between state‐level actors (the spies) and copyright enforcers (the global media corporations). On the one side, there were governments and spies who were eroding our freedoms in the name of security and developing their own caches of cyber weapons. On the other side were the media giants looking for ways in which they could enforce twentieth‐century copyright legislation. This, ironically, has now come back to bite the corporations as governments in Australia and the EU are now trying to enforce fair payment of media‐copyrighted material replicated on platforms such as Facebook. Then I realised that, in the twenty‐first century, there is a third prong to this attack: the criminals.

As well as criminal hacking, there is another danger that comes from this faction, which is when the cyber weapon caches built up by spies fall into malign hands. These cyber weapons can then be unleashed on the world and used for anything but good.

So, when I talk about the threats we face online in the twenty‐first century, I now talk about the Dark Triad of the spooks, the corporations and the criminals. In this part of the book, I will explore each in turn, as well as looking specifically at media control and cyber warfare, which are ever‐growing threats in the modern world.

All of these threats interlink, creating a web of threats that we have to unpick and navigate, as individuals, within business, and at a national and supranational governmental level. It is essential that we are aware of the threats we face in an increasingly digital society, otherwise we have no chance of educating ourselves and protecting ourselves and our basic rights as technology becomes more advanced and interweaves with even more elements of our lives.