“The street finds its own uses for things,” William Gibson noted (in Burning Chrome), and Marc Goodman’s recent TED Talk on the technological future of crime makes much the same point:
Goodman asks us to consider the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. The terrorists had AK47s, just like many had had for years, but they also had infrared goggles, phones and satellite imagery. But the scariest, and newest, part was that they had a fully equipped war room across the border in Pakistan where they monitored the BBC, social media and more. They used that information “to great effect.” As a terrifying example, the terrorists broke into a suite in the Taj Hotel, where they found a cowering man who claimed to be a poor schoolteacher. They phoned in his ID to the war room, where they Googled him — and found that he was in reality the second-wealthiest businessman in India. The war room gave their order: “Kill him.”
“We worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but our openness can be used against us,” says Goodman. Witnesses reported that the terrorists were holding guns in one hand and checking mobile messages in the other. In this siege, 10 men armed with guns and technology were able to bring the whole city to a standstill. ”This,” says Goodman, “is what radicals can do with openness.”
There has also been a paradigm shift in crime. In the last couple hundred years, we’ve gone from one person robbing another to train robberies, where one gang could rob 200 people at a time. Now, that’s scaled to the Sony PlayStation hack, which affected 100 million people. “When in history was it ever possible for one person to rob 100 million?”
Well, there weren’t 100 million people to rob before, but the tax man always does his best…
By the way, the Mumbai mastermind was recently arrested:
The Indian IB (Intelligence Bureau) played the most crucial role locating Ansari. IB worked closely with Saudi intelligence. Ansari’s undoing proved to be his overheard telephone conversations. IB arrested Ansari after his deportation from Saudi Arabia. After questioning Ansari for several days, IB handed him over to the Delhi Police which announced the arrest.