Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I think you may be missing a large group of criminals in the middle. Like with ordinary humans in non-criminal context, you have a group of indiscriminately stupid people, a group of very smart people, and a large group - I think majority - that just parrots what everyone else is doing or recommending around them, with very little individual thoughts given.

You can compare it to COVID-19 reactions among the people you know. Almost everyone now keeps distance in public, because everyone knows they should and are expected to. But how many people don't connect this with the fact that they should absolutely not meet up with their friends now? Or that they should absolutely not visit their families this Easter? Or that it would be wise to wash groceries and deliveries?

We could say this parroting group is doing cargo-cult OPSEC. They can know they shouldn't brag about their crimes in person or on social media, and yet at the same time they could easily trip using communication tools they don't understand - unless the industry goes out of its way to make such tripping impossible. I think this is the group the law enforcement is talking about. Not the idiot criminals, not the smart criminals - just regular ones, who don't understand the world they live in well, and occasionally make mistakes.

The group in the middle is the group I'm talking about. At the far edges of stupidity are the sort of criminals who break into an electronics shop to steal GPS tracking devices or try to stick up a police station. The far extremes give you 1000 ways to catch them instead of 100.

The guy who carries his phone with him during the commission of the crime is the guy at the median.

It also doesn't hurt that the average criminal skews dumber than the average law-abiding citizen to begin with. But even for the somewhat above average criminal who gives you ten ways to catch them instead of a hundred, you still don't need eleven because you only need one.

What do you suppose the percentage of criminals is who are so diligent that having default insecure communications is the only way to catch them and they wouldn't have chosen a secure alternative regardless?

>It also doesn't hurt that the average criminal skews dumber than the average law-abiding citizen to begin with.

Is this true? I'd be interested to see the research for this. I would believe that the average convict is dumber than the average law-abiding citizen, but how many criminals are lumped in with the law-abiding citizens simply because they don't say "oh yeah, I break the law all the time"?

You're going to have the Three Felonies A Day problem there, where in practice everybody commits crimes all day long and the people "not getting caught" is really everybody, even including people currently incarcerated who are still guilty of many other crimes they haven't been convicted of.

But if you want to talk about, shall we say, "real" crimes then that's another story. The solve rate for murders is actually pretty high (because they're given significant investigative resources), to the point that the population of convicts is probably not a terribly unrepresentative sample, and the lower intelligence of the convicts is pretty well established.

It also depends how you measure intelligence. The IQ of people who commit politically-motivated bombings is often significantly above average, but they also choose to commit a crime that attracts a hugely disproportionate level of investigative resources and correspondingly has quite a high solve rate despite the perpetrators' supposed intelligence, so maybe there are different kinds of stupid too.

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