From the perspective of human rights, modern information technology is a double-edged sword. Never before in the history of mankind has so much information been so easily available to many around the world. Although a large number of people, in particular in developing countries, still lack access to the internet, the trend towards a truly global IT-society is unbroken. Also, it has never been easier to communicate with others halfway around the world. While internet users become both more open, sharing private information with the world, users (often the very same users) have valid concerns over their private information, even in liberal, democratic societies which enjoy human rights and the rule of law. A lot of this openness, though, can be traced back to a simple lack of knowledge about privacy settings. Many users just use services as they are offered, which comes as no surprise, given that many of these services are supposedly for free. But at the end of the day, Facebook and the like are not free. Users pay for the use with their data, a fact that is often overlooked by users who at best skim long user agreements which are shown in small print and are hardly understandable to the average user without the help of a lawyer as well as an IT expert or two.

In recent years, social media such as Twitter (on the “Twitter Revolutions” see pp. 7 et seq.) and Facebook have been used in attempts to overthrow authoritarian regimes. But also beyond these easily accessible tools, activists have long used hacking in the context of protesting unjust regimes and demonstrating in favor of human rights and freedoms. Also states have long discovered hacking as a tool for both the proliferation of ideas and for direct attacks against adversaries. Today, this toll is also in the hands of human rights activists and dissidents (pp. 36 et seq. and pp. 73 et seq.). After establishing a solid fundament, Ziccardi describes and explains these activities (pp. 73 et seq.). He succeeds in making the mind-set and ethos of (this part of) the hacking community accessible to the reader (pp. 90 et seq.) and provides numerous examples of activist hacking. Yet, he does not stop there. After all, hacking for political purposes remains merely the use of one tool for an other end. Rather, the author puts things into perspective by looking at the legal aspect of the use of the internet in chapter 4 (pp. 125 et seq.), in particular from the perspective of human rights. He not only describes existing human rights norms but also explains potential threats. But it is the following chapter which might be of greatest interest to readers who come from a legal, rather than an IT background. In chapter 5, Ziccardi elaborates on the way what he refers to as “Liberation Technology” is used in practice, explaining techniques to protect users and to circumvent firewalls (pp. 161 et seq.). In doing so, he has made technological issues accessible to readers with non-IT backgrounds.

This is certainly the greatest contribution made by the author: to translate techonological concepts for lawyers and to put IT-related issues into a wider legal context. Lawyers and teachers have similar roles and Ziccardi masters this role: he manages to translate between two distinct worlds, technology and law. Law itself remains theoretical but a truly good lawyer also understands how the law she or he practices relates to the real world. In this sense, and for internet users around the world, the internet, for all practical purposes, has become part of the real world. Although there are still differences, not only for digital natives has the virtual become as real as the physical. While law is often slow to adapt to such developments, Ziccardi has managed not only to raise awareness of technological issues among lawyers but to bring these two worlds together.

In the sixth chapter, he goes even a step further and goes to the home jurisdiction of many readers by looking at specific situations in no less than fifteen countries, including also India (pp. 283 et seq.) as well as a range of very different states. These states include South Korea (pp. 227 et seq.), a veritable powerhouse of the virtual world, as well as Cuba (pp. 214 et seq.), which has one of the world’s most regulated networks, thus providing the reader also with a closer look at more specific situations.

Ziccardi, who teaches at the University of Milan, has produced a book which should be essential reading for anybody who is interested in modern communication technologies and human rights. When reading the book, one can tell that Professor Ziccardi is writing about an issue which is close to his heart. In fact, he not only is a blogger himself (http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/gziccardi/) but also has written a number of non-academic books, including, publishing in 2012, the novel “L’ultimo hacker” (“The ultimate hacker”). If anything, after have become curious, one would have wanted some more in-depth knowledge on a few points but the ample references at the end of each chapter are more than sufficient to make this book an ideal starting point to delve deeper into an issue which matters to almost all of us in one way or an other. In an age in which most of us cannot imagine life or work without computers and the internet, this publication is timely. At the same time a large part of mankind is suffering from hunger and preventable diseases and gap between those who have regular, affordable access to the internet and those who do not is widening. The next step has to be to ensure that all benefit from the joint knowledge and skills and that the internet is employed in order to solve humankind’s big problems. The problem of oppression and human rights violations is one, which can be tackled effectively by using communication technologies. In a sense, Ziccardi has shown how the internet can be used for the common good of all of mankind and provides an inspiration for readers. For a legal textbook, this is about as much as any author could hope for.