am very pleased to be asked to write the foreword to this interesting book. I fi rst met Dr. Jaishankar (Jai) at a conference in Bangalore in early 2009 and again some months later in November of that year when he visited the University of Leeds for 6 months on a Commonwealth Fellowship. While he was in Leeds, Jai engaged energetically in many fruitful activities, one of which was the compilation of this edited collection of chapters by international scholars. I got to know Jai during those 6 months, and we had many lively discussions about cyber crime and especially the diff erent ways that it has aff ected the people of the Indian subcontinent. I am very grateful to him for this knowledge because it has helped me to begin to understand just how ubiquitous the Internet has become and how this ubiquity has, in fact, begun to spiral in the new millenium. Even today, some 20 years or so since the graphic user interface made the Internet user friendly and popular, networked technologies are still becoming further embedded in each and every aspect of our daily lives. Even if we do not use the Internet, much of our personal information will be stored somewhere on a networked computer, so in one way or another it aff ects all of us. Because of this reality, the potential for our data to be used maliciously is much greater, and it therefore becomes increasingly important that we study the impacts of the Internet, especially as the freedom it brings comes at the cost of the new risks we experience.