Crime Has Gone High-Tech, and the Law Can’t Keep Up

When most people hear the word “criminal,” they probably picture some dim-witted thug. But 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.

“If somebody has Ebola or measles, public health officials don’t go out there and arrest them,” says Goodman. “My goal should not be to arrest every hacker in the world. My goal should be to create a self-healing immune system for the Internet, so that even if a disease or a virus gets created, it won’t be passed to me.”

Another approach is to crowdsource law enforcement. Organized crime is already adept at crowdsourcing, using criminal networks to rob thousands of ATMs at once. Law-abiding citizens need to respond in kind, forming civil response squads modeled on the National Guard or Army Reserve.

“I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to take people of technological skill, whether it be a 10-year-old kid in India or an 80-year-old woman in Seattle, and get these people involved,” says Goodman. “I think it’s the only way that we’re going to move forward and win this battle.”

Listen to our complete interview with Marc Goodman in Episode 142 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Marc Goodman on hacking cameras:

“We saw this happen with Miss Teen America, a young woman—16 years old—by the name of Cassidy Wolf. She was sitting in her bedroom looking at her laptop, and one day she got an email that contained pictures of her, naked, in her own bedroom. … Of course she was horrified. She slammed closed her laptop, and fortunately she told her parents, who called in the FBI. They did an investigation into it, and found that the hack was carried out by one of her classmates. And this kid was not a master hacker. He just bought some cheap software online, sent her an email, she clicked on the wrong thing, and now he had installed keystroke loggers to her computer and took over her camera.”

Marc Goodman on hacking cars:

“Most folks don’t realize the extent to which the whole world is becoming a computer. 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. Recently on 60 Minutes … Leslie Stahl‘s car was hacked. Somebody was able to slam on the acceleration, slam on the brakes. … 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.”

Marc Goodman on security through non-digital technology:

“I think it’s worth asking the question: What should and should not be online? There is a movement among some companies to take certain things out of the electronic realm. So companies like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s, they have secret recipes for both Coke and their fried chicken. Those are not stored in any electronic systems. Those are written down on a piece of paper and kept in a safe. And after the Snowden revelations, the Kremlin, for their secret communications in Moscow, went back to typewriters—manual typewriters, not even electronic typewriters, but manual typewriters—to type things. So I think you will see some stepping back away from this digital stuff.”

Marc Goodman on hacking biometrics:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back, particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club. And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop, cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all over Germany, which they did.”