Reviewing: Future Crimes by Marc Goodman

The Motive:

If you’ve been playing with technology since before World Wide Web, shouldn’t you have something worthwhile to say about cybercrime?

Actually CARL, I think I should. But since I’ve spent years specialising in digital activity of a more mundane nature, I’m going to take some direction from a four-year-old book which remains, depressingly, as relevant as ever.

The Evidence:

Once upon a time, as we moved from old world to the new, and personal lives and interactions became increasingly mediated by technology, storytellers probably wondered how they would ever generate suspense again. Being stuck overnight in a haunted house feels less isolated when your character has a friend on speed dial, or they can drown out the spooky moans by cranking up the volume on Angry Birds. And while having a serial killer stalking you through the streets is never good, tension ebbs if the Uber app can adjust your pickup location while you flee.

But for every device the plot gods removed, they quickly leaked replacements, in multi-gigabyte data dumps. While this book was designed to raise concerns about our relationship with technology (it does, and then some) it reaches this blog because there are story ideas dripping from every chapter. In fact, you’ll find all manner of low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking, which is, ironically, a decent metaphor for Goodman’s vision of the modern world.

I read Future Crimes as an audiobook because Santa brought me a bluetooth hat and I could listen on the move. But let’s reflect momentarily on that hat… It’s an equivocal kind of progress to be stuck indoors until you’ve charged your headwear, not dissimilar to some of the advances the book discusses. For example, a few days each year someone might want to tweak their heating temperature before arriving home. The modern solution specifies a device for all seasons, an intelligent thermostat, network accessible come rain or shine.  Such networked devices create classes of risk our society has never faced before – in this case, the potential for a central-heating hijack. But what harm could that do in reality? Those of use who don’t design new crimes for a living may have to find out the hard way…

Hacking domestic items might not inspire instant panic, but we must also consider that medical devices have been given online interfaces. When the author met Bertolt Meyer, a man with an advanced cybernetic prosthetic arm, their realisation that his limb was vulnerable to bluetooth takeover could easily make a hi-tech version of the vintage horror The Hands of Orlac. A less sensational but more widespread threat is that pacemakers and other medical technology may now be accessed by bluetooth and other protocols. A core message of the book is where something can be hacked, it will be, so Goodman would find it unsurprising that two years after publication a large number of cardiac devices were withdrawn over safety concerns. That potentially fatal hacks cause excitement at hacker conferences might be considered disturbing, until we realise that this high-profile whistleblowing puts pressure on companies to fix their bugs. I’d imagine most hackers don’t wish to put such techniques to murderous use, but are simply excited to see their specialised digital skillset reach ever more powerfully into the analogue world.

But Goodman finds technology experts on both sides of his war. Since hackers will gain more wealth and recognition selling exploits to the highest bidder than by reporting faults through official channels, we have created a dangerous problem of perverse incentives. This is compounded where exploits are bought, hoarded and leaked by agencies we expect to protect us, leaving our societies as collateral damage. So as the world becomes swamped with novel (and vulnerable) networked devices, we can expect a growing tsunami of the wrong kind of opportunity.

Technology encroaching more intimately into our lives creates temptation for both cyber-criminals and otherwise trusted authorities, as school pupils in Philadelphia discovered. When George Orwell attempted to forewarn us about this kind of thing in his classic novel 1984 he predicted a governmental thought-police. Did our democracies duck that, only for a sucker-punch from the private sector? In return for free messaging, games and web tools have we willingly inserted ourselves into a machine for manipulating populations, available to any entity with the means to pay? In both the UK and USA the role social media may or may not have played in influencing national ballots is under serious examination, so this is not a crazy question.

Some other reviewers of Future Crimes have mentioned a sense of repetition, but I doubt that was entirely avoidable. When examining diverse topics from domestic automation through military systems and critical infrastructure, Goodman finds vulnerability to similar kinds of technological errors. That different software systems are prone to the same mistakes shouldn’t surprise anyone. Software is complex and the development process is prone to fixate on function, with security processes to inhibit function too often an afterthought. Combined with our toxic delusion that personal software is free, we’ve been blind to the cost of losing control of our data, and have created huge and valuable data pools for criminals to target and use against us.

In the end, Future Crimes paints a picture. It is a picture of a world where crime is not only more scalable than ever, but also more accessible. A world where it takes only limited expertise to purchase a digital crime kit from the Dark web and even place the seeds of a physical crime business into the same basket, with anonymous purchasing for drugs, weapons and stolen identities. We know technology is reshaping everything, but Goodman adds a reminder that criminals are part of that revolution. Put simply, the proliferation of connected systems multiplies our points of weakness, whilst making it more likely those points will be attacked. It is a bleak picture indeed.

The Verdict:

Future Crimes remains an important and enlightening book, but not one that permits much optimism. Its closing manifesto of short and medium-term tactics we should (but won’t) universally apply leaves little doubt that we face a long-term struggle. Those looking for gripping potential plots will find them here, with Goodman a doomsayer muse citing a bonanza of near-misses and catastrophic hits to get story juices flowing. But there’s no avoiding a hard fact: when a work of non-fiction starts to sound like a wild dystopia, things have drifted badly awry. We should keep writing the stories by all means, but we should type them with crossed fingers.