It's Getting Harder to Be a Criminal
dilbert.com
dilbert.com
I don't think this is any where near the truth in the finance world.
It's well known that wall street has long drawn the brightest graduates from the best universities in the world. If you read up on how many times the SEC came close to busting Madoff over the years but couldn't quite connect the dots it's pretty shocking and also very clear that the smartest guys go to make the money, not play cop for the SEC.
From the NYT article about it:
In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.
“In the interview, Mr. Madoff said that the young investigators who pestered him over incidentals like e-mail messages should have just checked basics like his account with Wall Street’s central clearinghouse and his dealings with the firms that were supposedly handling his trades.
“If you’re looking at a Ponzi scheme, it’s the first thing you do,” he said.
While I agree there will be more and more live video available, I think the encryption and privacy stuff is mostly wrong.
For starters, nobody bothers to encrypt email, despite the technology existing for many years. Also look at social networking sites. People happily post all kinds of personal data, with increasing frequency and decreasing concern for their own privacy. I think that trend will continue.
People might say they care a lot about the ongoing loss of privacy in the modern world, but they don't really.
Are we not basically talking about a chemical-based air tester that would have to sort through ridiculously complex masses of data trying to pick out which subtle combination of particles applies to a perp?
The sense of smell of a dog is extraordinarily complex and makes full use of a brain. I don't see this being duplicated by computers anytime soon. We'll have full-on walking and talking robots before then... and those robots won't have a sense of smell for a long time.
Or maybe I'm just ignant.
Seems to me it would be cheaper to build a kill-bot that defends all your possessions from intruders than to make a device that can monitor the subtle smells in a room.
He's talking about detecting a unique person out of many - that's much much harder.
Implementing this to sort through things like deodorants and skin flakes is way more complex. You are dealing with organic molecules, for starters. And there are billions of different combinations of airborn bacteria and viruses and stuff that make up the smell of a person.
I would certainly agree that smell-recognition may be more difficult than image-recognition. However, there's been a lot of progress on that front, more than I expected just a few years ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847620
But in terms of what he's saying, I think I disagree. I find it telling that he mentions watching CSI for examples of how law enforcement uses technology faster than the bad guys can keep up. We all know how accurate CSI is.
From what I've seen, the opposite of what he's predicting is the truth: criminals adapt and use technology faster than law enforcement. Additionally, many of the theoretical technologies he points out have enormous adoption hurdles, including technical, legal, and social. Hopefully some of them will never be used. And each new technology creates new vectors for criminal malice.
I'm just not convinced.
He used CSI because forensic science has become linked with the CSI TV show in pop culture's mind for better or worse.
edit: This may have a reference to the sandwich being thrown away (based on the google search summary) but it's in PDF and I don't feel like parsing through it to make sure. I'll just leave that as an exercise to the reader.
The real problem is proving the forensics are wrong. Combating faulty forensics is a huge task to bear that can take years too. People who have lost 20 years in jail because the forensics were done by unqualified people or simply incorrect.
Sometimes I hear the science explained by the shows and I wonder how in the world is it true. Who verified these results? Who defines what is unique and what isn't? Particularly questionable is techniques that prove uniqueness.
Indeed, this is commonly referred to as the CSI effect: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect ).
Even if we are getting better, we have a long way to go. Murder and Aggravated Assault are the only crime categories where the clearance rate in the US is above 50%. Most are much lower. (source: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offenses/clearances/index.ht...)
I also feel obliged to point out that the last time I happened to glimpse some sort of CSI-like show on TV, the investigators were zooming in on someone's eyeball in security tape footage to see what was reflected there. CSI is possibly not the best source of information when drawing conclusions about the state of crime-solving technolgies.
All those stereos, TVs, bicycles, etc that people used to steal and sell at pawn shops now have very little value. Most people just don't go shopping at pawn shops anymore.
That is a major factor that makes theft of personal property less lucrative going forward.
The technology to automatically give people tickets for speeding already exists, yet it only is implemented in a few areas. I'm curious what other HN'ers think about this...
I think that this article is a vision of a dangerous future. A free society must necessarily sacrifice some measure of safety. The more information like this we give the state, the closer we come to 1984. It is important to maintain a balance of power between citizens and the police, a balance between criminals and cops. Power Corrupts.
History has always shown change to come in pendulum swings. At some point, people are going to react to the loss of privacy strongly and we will get back some measure of what we have lost. In the end, we will find some balance but I certainly hope it is not found at this end of the spectrum.
A while back there was a post stating that the world is moving more towards "A Brave New World" than "1984." I think that it was mostly right.