Reading
this book I started off a little disconcerted, went through scared, and ended
on downright terrified. For Future Crimes basically does what it says on the
tin: outlines the direction crime will take in the future as it embraces our
increasingly interconnected world, robotics, 3D printing and even advances in
biology.
A
confession of sorts. A long time ago I read for an MSc in Criminology at the
LSE in London. It was the late 1990’s and criminologists everywhere were
grappling with an odd conundrum: crime was falling, across the board, all over
the Western World. Giuliani claimed it was his zero-tolerance policing,
perhaps, problem is it wasn’t just New York. In cities across America and
Europe, no matter the policing policies, to a lesser or greater extent crime
was falling. Read any paper and that debate is still occurring. Crime
statistics still tell a tale of inexplicable declines and no one appears to know
why. Is it women’s greater access to abortion as the authors of Freakonomics
once contended (greater levels of abortion = less young men, less young men =
less crime)? Is it the decrease in levels of lead in the atmosphere due to the
introduction of lead-free gasoline? Is it that society has just become more
civilised? Well perhaps we now have an answer: Crime just moved online.
Future
Crimes starts off with what to a greater or lesser extent we already know:
identity theft, credit card details being swiped from online stores and
retailers, hacking. What new can be said about that? Well apparently a lot. For
example, he deals with the issue of botnets, swarms of computers taken over by
criminals for some nefarious purpose, all without the owners’ knowledge. Apart
from the irritation of your computer slowing down, do we really care if someone
launches a denial of service attack at some multinational? Well think again.
Did you know that a botnet might be used to host child pornography? Yup, that’s
right, thousands, maybe millions of computer owners around the world might be
inadvertently and unknowingly aiding and abetting the abuse of children.
And it
goes downhill from here. As Marc Goodman projects further and further into the
future the scenarios become more and more bleak. Banks are bringing in
biometrics to protect your accounts? Well the gangsters have already figured
out how to lift your fingerprints from a glass of water. An American
libertarian has already invented an untraceable and fully working 3D automatic
rifle; drone and tracking software is increasingly being wielded by stalkers; medical
implants have been hacked so that it’s only a matter of time before someone is
murdered by having their pacemaker switched off.
Moving
further still into the future we have viruses to match a victim’s DNA profile
so that they’re the only people to die in the room, while bio-cartels might
grow opium in wheat, corn, or even print THC or Oxycodone on a bio-printer.
Some might see all this as hyperbole, but the author is careful and meticulous
in grounding his predictions in hard science. For example he points to advances
scientists are making in personalising medicine, crafting anti-cancer drugs
honed to an individual tumour, so why not a virus honed to an individual DNA
profile?
The end
of the book contains the author’s suggestions on how society might harness the
undoubted good all this technology might bring, whilst negating the harm. He
also has a section on what you and I, as average computer users can do to
protect ourselves. But after all the warnings and dire predictions that
preceded it, it just all seems so futile.
I would recommend people read this book and
would unhesitatingly award it five out of five stars, but really that’s more to
do with my penchant for scaring the bejeezus out of myself than any real
expectation that reading it can make a difference.
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