Crime has gone High-Tech and the Law Hasn’t

When most people hear the word “criminal,” they probably picture some dim-witted thug. But a security expert, Marc Goodman, has been fighting crime for more than 20 years and he’s learned the hard way that crime is increasingly going high-tech, leaving law enforcement struggling to keep up. He outlines the challenges in his new book Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It
“The fact that narcos in Mexico are going to colleges of aeronautical engineering to hire drone engineers would be a surprise to people,” Goodman says in Episode 142 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Everything from AI to synthetic biology to robotics to big data to the Internet of Things, crooks and terrorists, rogue governments and corporations are all over it.”         
But perhaps the most striking fact about crime today is who, or rather what, is committing it. “It’s not people that are committing the crime anymore,” says Goodman. “Crime has become software. It’s Crimeware.”
Examples include ransomware (viruses that encrypt your data and make you pay to get it back) and botnets (zombie networks of thousands of infected machines that can be turned against banks, tech companies, and governments). The days when only master hackers were committing computer crimes are long gone. These days every creepy stalker, disgruntled employee, or aspiring terrorist can purchase pre-programmed Crimeware to help them hack your phone, your bank account, or even your car.
The exponentially expanding threat means locking up individual criminals is no longer a realistic solution. Another approach is to crowd source law enforcement. Organized crime is already adept at crowdsourcing, using criminal networks to rob thousands of ATMs at once. 
All physical objects in our space are de-materializing and are being transformed into information technology. If you look at a 1965 Chevy, or a Mustang, those were mechanical cars, but the cars today, any car that’s rolled off the assembly line in the past few years, has well over 200 microchips in it. They control the radio, the GPS, the airbags, the cruise control, the speedometer, it’s all controlled by computer. A modern car is a computer that we ride in, an elevator is a computer that we ride in, an airplane is a Solaris box that we fly in. All of these devices are hackable.
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