One late afternoon last September, a 17-year-old Dutch boy was just starting his homework in his family’s house in Rotterdam when there was a knock at the front door.
When his father opened it, eight police officers wearing balaclavas rushed past him and stormed upstairs to the boy’s bedroom. They were there to arrest the teenager on charges of rendering services to a foreign country.
The details that have emerged since have shocked both his family and Europe’s security community: the boy is accused of having been recruited by Russian agents on Telegram to spy on law enforcement organisations in The Hague using a “sniffer” device, which intercepts WiFi networks.