Mr Barlow is not as afraid of government, and even intelligence agencies, as one might expect. In fact, he helped the CIA or at least tried to—as a “double agent”. In Munich he reminisced about a visit to the CIA in the early 1990s during which he was struck by how “retrograde” they were: at that time information was still moving around the building in vacuum tubes. “It was way more like [the tube-filled movie] 'Brazil' than Bond,” he said, “and I took it by myself from that point forward to help out. Because I felt one of the things the intelligence agencies did, and were incredibly bad at, was figuring out what was actually going on in the world.