#davidsanger

The Godfather by Mario Puzo. (I read it every year). Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis. I'm fascinated by people who go to extremes to seek justice. And In very different ways, that is what each of those three books is about.  

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically? 

Nora Ephron. I simply love how disarming and authentic she was. It was her super power. There's so much pressure to be objective and neutral that, especially for female journalists, it can have the effect of wiping away your personality quirks. Nora didn't let it. I don't either. And it was disarming voices like hers that helped me tell the story of the cyber arms market in the most accessible way possible. 

I also found myself flipping through Flash Boys all the time. It was a useful template in that it was a character-driven account of a highly technical subject— high-speed trading—that most people had heard of, but never understood just how screwed they were getting. That, in a nutshell, is my book. We've all heard of cybersecurity and data breaches but we never knew how screwed we were getting, in many cases by our own government. 

As for art! I happened upon the MashUp exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery early on in the process of writing this book. I was in Vancouver for a hacking conference and ended up spending an entire day at the exhibit. It featured Picasso and Tarantino and Jamaican dub music and there was an entire room dedicated to David Byrne's collaboration with Brian Eno, and I walked out of that exhibit thinking, "They were all hackers." They took art and film and music that had traditionally functioned one way and mashed it up and repurposed it for an entirely different genre or purpose, which is essentially the definition of hacking. The word "hacker" has always had a negative connotation, but really hackers are just people who take a system and use it in a way that it was never designed to be used. What I saw that day really helped inform the chapters I wrote about the early days of hacking.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?