This book amazes on many levels. First, the level of detail is staggering. Dates, names, conversations--the facts sometimes come so fast and furious you have to stop and take a breath. This is old-school journalistic research, not the post-People magazine anecdotes that pass for “facts” on the evening news these days. Second, the serendipity that brought us to our current situation is fascinating. Random acquaintances, rampant disinterest and lack of understanding, personal ambitions--it’s a soap opera of grand proportions. Earnest engineers toil in the background, but our cybersecurity laws and policies are primarily the product of the base desires of misinformed power seekers, an intersection of those who don’t care with those who don’t know.

Some may misconstrue the title as sensationalistic and expect a quick and shallow play on the Snowden revelations. Nothing could be further from the truth. The title is quite literal in that a cyber war has been unfolding in the dark for decades, kept secret from the general public. The future of the war is also “dark territory,” being a new kind of war with no conventions or landmarks. Moreover, this is the last installment of a trilogy begun in 1983. Snowden added some drama to the final chapter, but in my opinion, the author could have spent more time on Edward Snowden and the other National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblowers. Finally, the praise on the cover from John le Carré, Ted Koppel, and Dorothy Denning should provide reassurance that this is, indeed, an authoritative report. The citations alone will probably inform scores of future books over the next decades.

The story is well shy of 300 pages long (I read a hardbound copy) and reads like a fiction novel, albeit a very detailed one. You could easily read it in a night or two. It’s divided into 15 chapters and followed by 30 pages of endnote references for all of those details. Lastly, there’s a short acknowledgments section, and even that is worth reading.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads