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Famous Criminal Opines that Technology Breeds Crime
jcatcw writes "In an interview with Computerworld's editor in chief, Don Tennant, Frank Abagnale spoke about his life of crime and crime prevention. Abagnale is a notorious criminal, whose exploits were portrayed in the movie 'Catch Me If You Can.' Abagnale claims: 'It would be 4,000 times easier to do today, what I did 40 years ago, and I probably wouldn't go to prison for it. Technology breeds crime — it always has, it always will ... I really think the more technology there is in the world, the more you have to instill character and ethics. You can build all the security systems in the world; you can build the most sophisticated technology, and all it takes is one weak link — someone who operates that technology — to bring it all down." This would seem to echo commentary in a New York Times article about the rise of Russian hackers in recent years.
For everything that benefits society, along comes those who seek to use said benefits for personal, illicit gain. I don't think it's so much that "Technology Breeds Crime" as "Crime Feeds On Technology".
It only makes SOME crimes easier.
When you had to walk into a bank to empty someone's bank account, you were limited by how far you could travel.
Now, when you can do it across the 'Web, you are not limited in the same way.
The problem is that the security model has not kept pace with the concept of "web services" offered by the banks. But if the banks were 100% liable for any loss, you'd see them focusing on the security.
It isn't that technology breeds crime; it is that technology is a form of human enhancement, and some humans are criminals. However, technology also enhances law enforcement, brings new ethical and moral issues to the table for society (or the ruling political junta) to rule on, and empowers people further and further down the economic scale as technology itself becomes inexpensive.
I don't think we ought to be "criminalizing" technology as a whole. We simply need to keep considering, and re-considering, the ethical and moral issues of the day in the light of what our current society can tolerate without infringing on the liberties of individuals and the security of the group.
If we have a fault, it is an inability to change quickly when we see social regulation - like the drug war, or the current pogrom against sexuality - isn't working. That's a political problem, and one we (speaking as a US citizen) have been roundly unable to address.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
"The person operating the technology" ... A stick, a rock, a screwdriver, all tools. Can I kill somebody with a screwdriver? A Glock, on the other hand, is designed for a reason.
The better a tool is a doing crime, the more we need to ask: who designed it and why?
Do computers make some crimes easier? Yeah. But they also make detecting and preventing crimes easier. They're general-purpose tools.
Nothing has changed in 2000 years about how much character it takes to avoid criminality. So if there's more crime, there's less instilling or more unbridled greed.
I'd blame the latter. Leadership sets the example.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
...but it also makes it far more traceable (along- sadly- with more legitimate activities). The potential intrusiveness of technology into our lives and the trail of electronic fingerprints we leave is far greater than most people are aware of, and it's going to get worse before- if- it gets better.
For one simple example, what about the trail that your mobile phone leaves with the network when you leave it switched on and are travelling somewhere?
This isn't even counting the fact that with future improvements in technology, it's quite feasible that activities that you can "get away" with today could leave a trail that is inciminating with tomorrow's forensics and analysis technology. I'll bet that people who committed murders 30 or 40 years ago didn't even consider the possibility of their getting nabbed by DNA tests in the future.
And in all honesty, even if the data we have available to us today isn't able to tell us much, this might change with improved data mining/analysis tools. Something that someone does today might not be enough to get them prosecuted immediately, but what happens when improved tools come along in the future and spot things that had been missed previously?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
For everything that benefits society, along comes those who seek to use said benefits for personal, illicit gain.
I will not stand for your impugning politicians in that manner!
All the intelligent criminals are already at the top. They simply made what they do legal.
Deleted
Anyone know what it means to be 'Notrious'? Is that 'not nutritious'? Damned editors...
Uh actually, technology breeds prosperity which sadistic sociopaths view as more opportunities to commit crime.
Qxe4
The Russians may be especially vulnerable to this, coming down as they are from a fully-controlled society. Under Communism, individuals must be taught from childhood to ignore their inner moral voice and instead follow the orders coming down from above. Inner sensibility is bred out, because it can only interfere with a command economy.
But then the command structure toppled, and all of its cogs were set loose in "freedom, horrible freedom". No more orders coming down from above... and no inner voice (or at least an abnormally quiet one) and not much of a national religion to forcibly install one. Perhaps such people are therefore more likely to become free-riders, or worse, as the opportunities arise.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Criminals do. The fact that we have gunpowder and pistols make it where an asshole requires a lot less in the balls department to rob a liquor store. I suppose you could try to pass photocopied 20 dollar bills, but you would be not only an asshole, but a stupid asshole. The world is always going to have a complement of assholes, but the cost of crime generated by most technologies is much less than the productive value.
Language attempts to convey limited information about reality. That information is not just conveyed through the explicit meanings of individual words, but also through more complex means such as context, emphasis and innuendo.
"Technology Breeds Crime" places the emphasis on technology whereas "Crime Feeds On Technology" places the emphasis on crime. I would say this is a story more about crime than about technology, so the second is more appropriate.
And a tool is neither good or evil. It only empowers the one able to wield it to use it for good or evil. Take whatever invention ever created and you will see that it can be used for both.
Weapons are of course an easy example, but everything human ever invented works. It is something that gives the one able to use it a power edge over someone not equipped with it. Knowledge works a similar way, but to a lesser degree.
And having more power than someone else can be used to exploit him. Ever been that way, ever will be. Technology is power. Superior technology allowed the exploitation of Africa and Asia as colonies. Superior technology (or rather, superior knowledge of technology) allows a trojan writer to exploit the "clueless" user with his infected machine.
But that doesn't make technology a device for more crime. It makes technology a device of power. Not more, not less.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. what technology does is increase the number of attack vectors. a lock box full of money has only a certain number of ways to steal the money inside. meanwhile, a complex intercontinental banking system has orders of magnitude more ways to steal that same amount of money
that's why i've always said we should never have electronic, or even mechanical, voting systems. that even the most technologically advanced society should still use paper ballots. yes, you can still mess with paper ballots, but only in a small number of ways. anything more complicated than that, and you've just introduced 1,000 more ways to tamper with voting. the trust in the voting system is just too vital to imperil and be technophilic about it just to make it more "convenient"
2. technology, yes, makes crime smarter... and this, on its flip side, is actually a GOOD thing. bear with me here:
say you want to steal a guy's horde of gold in rome in 100 BC. ok, you have to actually kill a few people to get to it. bloody, messy, ugly, brutish. but the criminal doesn't necessarily want to kill to get the cash, but he will if he has to. now fast forward to the 20th century, a criminal just wants some money, so, like frank abignale, he merely manipulates the trust system of the technology involved in financial transactions. ie, he forges checks, and gets people money without actually causing a drop of blood to flow
in other words, more technology turns crime from a game of violent sociopathic brutal physical force to one of subtle mind games and con artists. not that it's ok that you are left without your money, but it's better to be penniless and alive than penniless and dead
it's still stealing your dough, but it's stealing it without turning you into a corpse. so it is progress, in a twisted way
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What a funny way to make perfectly ordinary statements seem moonbat extremist.
Actually, there is nothing new on the table. The basic concepts of "DRM" and easy copying of Copyrighted material go back to the days of player pianos and rolls of punched paper that played copyrighted songs.
The internet and digital music are NOT new concepts. The ONLY difference is the speed and ease by which these things may be done. The legal concepts, the morals, and the ethics are all the same as they were 150 years ago!!!
The only difference today is the degree to which the public has accepted the arguments of corporations regarding what those corporations' "rights" should be, in regard to copyrighted material. They have tried to extend it far beyond the rights that were ever allowed to individual copyright holders. And that is sad. Partly because the corporations, in general, have been full of shit. And partly because actually, corporations do not have "rights" at all. They have certain legal privileges, but rights belong to individuals, not companies. And partly because, ultimately, it is individuals working for or with those corporations who actually created the content that those corporations "bought". The reality is: the corporations have been all for them, and none for you. So the idea of supporting them at all in this endeavor is foreign to any reasonable concept of justice. They should be fought at every turn, with every angle available. Because indirectly but inevitably, their goal has been to make your life more expensive and difficult.
We all know the Mayan long cycle is coming to a close as we realign with the galactic core ushering us into the dawn of the age of Aquarius. The Rapture is coming, but who will be the Antichrist come 2012? As always, the answer has been hidden in plain view.
Let us take the name
President Hillary Rodham Clinton
We rearrange the letters and the truth comes to light!
Rapid hell Antichrist demon, no rly
We further rearrange these letters to complete the damming message:
Antichrist lol no rly I'd dampen her
Ignore the evidence at your own peril. Vote Ron Paul!
Quite right. That is why Microsoft is a weak link.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Abagnale has some good points. Forgery is much easier than it used to be. Printing and paper quality are no guarantee of anything.
A point Abagnale didn't make to the interviewer is that social engineering is easier, too, because people are more used to remote requests for information. Many of Abagnale's scams required him to physically go someplace and deceive someone. Most people can't act well enough to pull off a con like that. Now, much more can be done remotely. "Identity theft" barely existed before the Internet; a few times a year somebody might pull something off, but it wasn't widespread.
Anywhere that you have connectivity combined with the absence of a functioning judicial system; you will breed crime. It doesn't matter what that connectivity is, or how you measure that connectivity - whether it is in paved roads, running water, electricity - each of these factors contributes to both the reach of commerce and the reach of criminals. The two cannot be divorced from each other. If you have a rapid expansion of transportation, without an equal expansion of police power, criminals will exploit that weakness. In the wild west, outlaws would rob trains as they crossed the nation, knowing that they'd be vulnerable and there was little chance of being caught.
Let's look at Russia. Back in the cold war era, there were technology export restrictions in place. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, those restrictions were relaxed. By the time we in the United States started going online en-masse in 1995, upgrading our computer systems to Pentium machines running Windows 95 - our old computer systems didn't go into the garbage, they were sold into the huge technological vacuum of the former Soviet Union.
Who are the early adopters of technology? Kids of course! And Russia was no exception. Like a 16-year-old with a hot rod, the youths started souping up computers that we considered garbage. They got on to the internet using whatever they could, and once they connected to our information flows, they started teaching themselves programming. Because they were learning to program on outdated equipment, this forced them to become very, very good. There was no such thing as code bloat. Then you add 5 years to the calendar and what do you have? Little Ivan is no longer 15, he is 20 and has 5 years experience - and therein lies the rub - Ivan cannot go out and get a job in information technology, there is no economy to support his skill set. So, he goes about earning a living any way he can. I call it "N0 RUL3Z, JU5T WR1T3". Ivan sets about writing spam software, creating Trojan horses, worms... this is where we see the emergence of the botnet.
Brazil wasn't far behind. In 2004-2005 we saw an uptick in the botnet wars arms race with Russia being one-upped by Brazil with the Beagle/Bagle, Mydoom and Sasser botnet pissing contest.
There is a tide shift taking place. Putin has implemented a 12% flat tax which is bringing revenues flowing into the Russian economy for the first time in 15 years. They are reviving their legal system because they want to attract the Foreign Direct Investment dollars which will never come if they have no legal system which can enforce a legal contract. Along with the civil justice and FDI dollars, criminal justice must reign in corruption otherwise the FDI dollars will quickly disappear. So, Russia is growing out of the script kiddie phase and reemerging onto the world scene. Its good to have Mother Russia back.
I could go on providing details of history and economics, but I will leave that for the book I'm writing. But I will pose this question for you to think about: What do you think the outcome of One Laptop Per Child will have on the future of cybercrime? If connectivity absent a legal system is the breeding ground for crime, what do you think will happen as the bottom billion in Africa gets online?
Computer security is all about dealing with the unintended consequences. Every computer and every system that was ever built was first done to share information, not secure it. Security only came after we got everything connected, then had the collective "awww crap!" moment.
Regards,
Joel R. Helgeson
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Tech creates new opportunities for everyone, including criminals. The best way to get rid of crime is to give everyone a fair go. In this world, where a child's wealth and education are fated to be little better than their parents', crime is only going to get worse.
Software patents delenda est.
It helps, sure. It's not really possible though.
Because even if you create identical access to all parts of the school-system and job-market, having rich parents will still be a great help. It'll allow you to study full-time and not need part-time jobs on the side. More importantly, having *educated* parents means you have the kind of parents who think that education matters. Which transfers to the kids in a million little ways.
The school-system in my part of the world already works pretty close to identical-access. There's still a large (not as large as in USA, but still large) difference between how kids of well-off parents do and how kids of poor parents do.