It's Getting Harder to Be a Criminal
Nov 30, 2009 General Nonsense |
Years ago, in my book The Dilbert Future, I predicted that someday it will be nearly impossible to commit a crime and get away with it. The technology for catching criminals is improving faster than the criminals are getting smarter. Just watch any episode of CSI and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Lately, it seems as if every time a kid gets abducted, or a plane crashes, someone produces security camera footage of the incident. It won't be long before all light fixtures have surveillance cameras in them as standard equipment. Someday, everywhere there are people, inside your home and out, there will also be surveillance video. In the interest of privacy, these ubiquitous videos will be encrypted so securely that playback will be effectively impossible unless the court orders it. And the court would need a row of supercomputers plus a password to crack the encryption. It will seem creepy for about a day, then you will get used to it.
If you think you can just steal the security video after you do the crime, those days are over too. Companies like Connexed send security video to remote servers as it records. A crook can dynamite the entire building and there will still be a video of the event.
http://www.connexed.com/
I also predict that the technology for "sniffing" the air of a crime scene will improve to the point that fingerprints and DNA will become redundant. If a bloodhound can track one individual among many, I predict machines will do the same some day. Eventually, being a drug dealer will become even more
impractical than it is now. Drug sniffing dogs can't be everywhere all the time, but machines that do the same thing can be ubiquitous, assuming their costs come down over time. Someday those sniffing devices might even be in your car, preventing you from starting the engine if you're toasted. That's
the end of drunk driving.
I can also imagine that any small item worth stealing, including debit and credit cards, will someday have RFID devices built in. If you get near a Point of Sale device with a stolen card, the police will be able to track you, even before you use the card. By then, cash and checks will be obsolete.
It will soon be impossible to get away with stealing cars, cell phones or laptops, as they will all have tracking technology built in. And the police will eventually be able to remotely stop the engine of any car that is trying to make a getaway. Perhaps someday your laptop won't boot up if it senses that it is more than a predetermined distance from your phone, car, home, or business.
Even the days of police shootouts - at least the type that can last for hours - are coming to an end, thanks to the invention of a bullet that can shoot around corners.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933992,00.html
My guess is that most white collar crimes are already being detected, and the perpetrators are generally getting caught, albeit not as quickly as society would like. I predict that technology will keep getting better at thwarting that sort of illegal activity. If you work for a bank, for example, it's already nearly impossible to get away with a sizable white collar crime.
In the future, graft and bid rigging will remain the hardest crimes to detect, because in those cases it will be difficult to tell the difference between collusion and coincidence. The minimum requirement for solving a
crime is realizing that one was committed. So if you plan a life of crime, my advice is to become more of a colluder than a stabber. Stabbers will go to jail. Colluders will own them.
Lately, it seems as if every time a kid gets abducted, or a plane crashes, someone produces security camera footage of the incident. It won't be long before all light fixtures have surveillance cameras in them as standard equipment. Someday, everywhere there are people, inside your home and out, there will also be surveillance video. In the interest of privacy, these ubiquitous videos will be encrypted so securely that playback will be effectively impossible unless the court orders it. And the court would need a row of supercomputers plus a password to crack the encryption. It will seem creepy for about a day, then you will get used to it.
If you think you can just steal the security video after you do the crime, those days are over too. Companies like Connexed send security video to remote servers as it records. A crook can dynamite the entire building and there will still be a video of the event.
http://www.connexed.com/
I also predict that the technology for "sniffing" the air of a crime scene will improve to the point that fingerprints and DNA will become redundant. If a bloodhound can track one individual among many, I predict machines will do the same some day. Eventually, being a drug dealer will become even more
impractical than it is now. Drug sniffing dogs can't be everywhere all the time, but machines that do the same thing can be ubiquitous, assuming their costs come down over time. Someday those sniffing devices might even be in your car, preventing you from starting the engine if you're toasted. That's
the end of drunk driving.
I can also imagine that any small item worth stealing, including debit and credit cards, will someday have RFID devices built in. If you get near a Point of Sale device with a stolen card, the police will be able to track you, even before you use the card. By then, cash and checks will be obsolete.
It will soon be impossible to get away with stealing cars, cell phones or laptops, as they will all have tracking technology built in. And the police will eventually be able to remotely stop the engine of any car that is trying to make a getaway. Perhaps someday your laptop won't boot up if it senses that it is more than a predetermined distance from your phone, car, home, or business.
Even the days of police shootouts - at least the type that can last for hours - are coming to an end, thanks to the invention of a bullet that can shoot around corners.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933992,00.html
My guess is that most white collar crimes are already being detected, and the perpetrators are generally getting caught, albeit not as quickly as society would like. I predict that technology will keep getting better at thwarting that sort of illegal activity. If you work for a bank, for example, it's already nearly impossible to get away with a sizable white collar crime.
In the future, graft and bid rigging will remain the hardest crimes to detect, because in those cases it will be difficult to tell the difference between collusion and coincidence. The minimum requirement for solving a
crime is realizing that one was committed. So if you plan a life of crime, my advice is to become more of a colluder than a stabber. Stabbers will go to jail. Colluders will own them.
Votes: +13
Comments
Dec 9, 2009
1) I stopped hoping CSI was even fact checking the real science when Gil Grissom said, "The terminal velocity of a falling object is 32 feet per second per second." Wrong number, wrong dimensions, wrong concept.2) I once had to watch 8 hours of security tape. I understand the problems. But the solution is, don't encrypt any of them and let everyone check them. Make it easy for every suspicious wife to watch her husband move from one camera to the next and there won't be a TV program called cheaters.
3) I don't think a lot of new regulators will keep the next industry from investing in something new, when a mathematical model says it will work, and no one has tried it before. Would you want them to? Nor will you be able to keep some of the new things from failing spectacularly.
+3
Dec 6, 2009
Nonsense. It's getting easier to be a criminal. People these days just need to send a scam email to a million users, get a .001% response rate, and they have ten victims. Cameras can't do anything about that.
Dec 3, 2009
You're imagining an incredibly advanced future of security - a machine that can smell better than a sniffer dog - and pairing it with today's standard of criminal. Not sure if that works.A machine can't tell if it's in the hands of a bad person, so whatever technological advances occur, they occur for both sides.
The only way technology could be allowed to evolve to such a omnipotent state, exclusively used by law enforcers, would be if all our civil liberties and freedoms had already been taken from us.
Your idea about the future of surveillance seems quite possible, I wonder if the concept of 'privacy' will one day be considered a quirky concern of past generations?
Dec 2, 2009
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0
Dec 2, 2009
I agree with other commenters who noted that $700 billion missing dollars seems like a pretty big white collar crime -- one that has been committed right underneath our noses.How? I think they have actually been using a technique like the confusopoly. Bankers have actually convinced us that it is their job description to do risky things with trillions of our dollars, take a percentage as a (risk-free) salary/bonus, and leave taxpayers holding the bag. This is much more money than is lost to muggers every year, but law enforcement (the DOJ) doesn't recognize it as a crime.
If we (the people) are committed to spending all that money propping up institutions that failed, then we should criminalize behavior so risky that it forces us to do so. Perhaps require institutions backed by us (the lender of last resort) to provide risk analysis in their financial disclosures, and hold them to it under Sarbanes-Oxley.
0
Dec 2, 2009
I work for a company that makes "sniffers" (mostly for detecting drugs and explosives), facial recognition systems (not nearly as accurate or flexible as shown in movies), and fingerprinting systems (~99.7% accurate for comparing "clean" prints, but much less likely to identify partial, smudged prints). These are really useful tools and getting better each day, but they're also not cheap. The CSI labs have what looks like a tens of millions of dollars in equipment. And as other people have pointed out, even the large cities that have the cool toys can only afford the people to process the most severe crimes. LA's rape kits are backed up for years waiting for the funding to process them. It's going to be a long, LONG time before society can afford the kind of wide deployment of forensic tools like you're talking about.As for new toys, one I like is the police dash camera that automatically reads license plates in front of it and searches for warrants, alerting the officers in the car if one hits.
>a bullet that can shoot around corners.
I read the article - it talks about going over or through walls, but not making 90 degree turns. However there is a right angle gun for that.
Dec 1, 2009
I don't buy the CSI argument, because you'll never have enough CSIs to process all the cases. Ever tried to get the cops to print the scene of a residential burglary? In addition, a small minority of criminals will no doubt become very adept at not leaving behind forensic evidence, or the traces left behind will be so common as to be useless (nylon carpet fibers).A lot of forensic "science" is utter nonsense with a veneer of gobbledegook (bite mark analysis, for example).
Same with CCTV footage. Unless you have some way to automate the review, who's going to slog through all that footage?
Of course the time honored way of avoiding prosecution is to be a well-connected political contributor.
0
Dec 1, 2009
Several different thoughts come to mind when reading this...1) Literally everyday more and more activities that were once normal and legal are becoming illegal.
2) Police often don't respond when a real crime has been committed http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/calling-911-but-where-208859.html
3) There can be no question that across the county police forces are quickly moving away from being "peace offices" to a quasi military police force. Where tazer first ask questions later is becoming the norm (all in the name of "police safety")
In direction we are rapidly heading, giving the authorities more technological tools is not a good thing. Example, if the government control all the surveillance video is there any doubt that the footage will be cut and delete to suit those in power?
Dec 1, 2009
It's time to start cheering for the criminals. When Robin Hood can't help the poor without being sniffed out by a machine and our founding fathers can't even commit a small crime, much less start a revolution against a tyrant King, it makes for a commie gray and hopeless society.
+1
Dec 1, 2009
You'd think that in London, UK, they would have no crime at all now that a huge percentage of downtown is covered by CCTV cameras. But it seems it hasn't reduced it at all, and hasn't even resulted in higher prosecution levels on crimes committed. I'd include the link to the article if I could find it, but I'd bet you could Google it faster.And CSI is fiction. Yes, some of the things they do resemble real life, but they frequently stretch both logic and science to make the story work.
+1
Dec 1, 2009
"If you work for a bank, for example, it's already nearly impossible to get away with a sizable white collar crime."This is your best joke in long time. Talk about a 700 billion dollar heist not being a crime . . .
Nov 30, 2009
Off topic:watching tonight's (11/30) Mystery Diagnosis, waiting for the denouement....
I have a guess.
Yup.
Spasmodic Dysphonia
I guessed it early on, when she couldn't speak without rasping, but she could yell at her child's sports game.
+1
Nov 30, 2009
You lost me at:"Just watch any episode of CSI and you'll know what I'm talking about."
What nonsense. I stop reading when I see the utter crap parade that is (any variant of) CSI mentioned in an attempt to drive home a point. Crap.
0
Nov 30, 2009
The future is here already, if course. The "Find My iPhone" feature of mobileMe has already caught numerous crooks who have stolen iPhones, with their built in GPS. Google for plenty of stories.
Nov 30, 2009
Way to seamlessly integrate product placement ads into a blog. (sarcasm)
0
Nov 30, 2009
The flip side of this conversation is how easy it used to be to get away with things. For example, if you wanted to murder someone in medieval or Renaissance times, no one could ever be sure if your victim died of natural causes (say if you poisoned them) or "fell" down the stairs or into the river, or just went for a very long walk and never came back - eaten by wolves, perhaps, or absconded by witches. I bet lots of people got away with murder back then. It's kind of interesting to think about.
Nov 30, 2009
Nah. It will just become more and more likely that if you are a criminal, you are working for the government. In fact, that day is already here.
+1
Nov 30, 2009
"Umm, Scott...? What planet have you been living on for the past year? Just because our leaders refuse to prosecute the politically connected doesn't mean that no crimes have been comitted. In fact, our status quo is the very definition of "getting away with it.""The truth is that white collar corruption is more of a symptom than a disease. Whenever the market is growing and/or speculative, hiding corruption is easy. Nobody questions a decent rate of return in a good economy, and nothing about it seems at all nefarious. In a weak economy, any decent return being offered will attract a lot of attention which will result in the cat being let out of the bag. White collar corruption is like the illegal drug market; when the perceived costs are low and the perceived gains are high, such actions are unstoppable. The only way to really get rid of corruption is to have the economy always be in recession. Corruption and speculation both play a role after any long term, sustained bull market, and play a much more restrained role after the dips. This can't be prevented any more than you can prevent the weed dealers from selling their product. This is another reason why large periodic recessions are GOOD, not mistakes for which we need to assign blame.
Recessions
A) Clear out much of or all of the corruption that had been festering during the bull market.
B) Allow resources to be redirected from failing or overgrown industries to new upstarts and older but more successful "core" industries.
C) Clear out the needless speculation so that you know if a stock goes up (without government support) it's probably safe to say that it is actually a growing company (depending on what area of the market you're in in some cases, as some industries are permanently speculative).
D) Force people to adopt more common sense strategies to life and consumption (like not borrowing 4 grand for that new bigscreen).
I laugh at the way that people pretend that recessions only occur, because somebody F'ed up. Why can't we just embrace the business cycle and learn to live with it, so that the government can focus on helping the people who really need it during recessions rather than focusing its resources on trying to pretend it can create a recessionless utopia that somehow still sees large increases in quality of life. It's speculation and creative destruction that creates real value in the long term, and most attempts to regulate or de-risk the economy will have the consequence of less growth and development overall. We won't see billions of people yanked out of poverty if we regulate the economy to death, but we will have a flacid weak market that waits for cues from government planners.
Nov 30, 2009
Don't you think geneticists will eliminate criminals altogether? I remember reading about the discovery that criminals had a deficiency where, they know the difference between right and wrong intellectually, but the brain cannot or does not communicate the part of them that knows this to the part of them that controls behavior. I imagine they'll be able to detect this in the womb and correct it before birth, virtually eliminating natural born criminals.
+3
Nov 30, 2009
I believe that I should point out that most CSI "science" isn't really science. There is no peer review, or oversight, and many times the CSI team is just trying to hammer out a conviction. Bite mark forensics is an utter lie, and even fingerprinting isn't that useful. CSI teams often throw people in prison only to be later exonerated by real science (dna evidence, the only scientific form of evidence).http://reason.com/archives/2009/02/20/how-to-bring-real-science-into
Please, read the link. Why are libertarians the only ones discussing this issue? Sorry to break it to all of you CSI fans that you're favorite show bare no similarities to reality (boctae).
