Just Finished Reading: Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for our Connected World (or Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable and What we can Do About it) by Marc Goodman (FP: 2015)

I’d been looking forward to reading this for some time. It had been sitting on my Amazon Wish List for a while and I’d been feeling that my reading had been focusing too much on the past and not enough on the future. Also I’d read Stephen’s review some time ago as well as his other reviews on Technological based books so felt that particular itch needed some scratching. That probably accounts for my initial disappointment.

For about the first quarter of the book the author (knowledgeable in the field of the criminal use of technology) lays on an apocalyptic vision of criminals, hackers out for fun, terrorists and spooks from governments across the world with the skills and drive to covertly enter any connected system on the planet – including critical infrastructure, banks, credit companies, online retailers and even the smart phone in your hand and essentially do anything they wanted: shut down airports, steal identities, read you e-mail, use your credit cards and generally mess things up and here’s the rub: There’s really nothing that either you or your government can do to stop them. Yes, the criminals are that good (or that tuned in) and the authorities are that far behind the curve that they’re still trying to build cases and arrest people IRL (that’s In Real Life) on the street caught in the act of typing code on their laptop. The text is relentless, case after case after case – some you’ll have heard of, some you won’t have as they affected a single person. At this point you would expect the panic to set in and the sound of connected equipment being switched off spreading across the globe. But I couldn’t help thinking: hold on a minute – if our systems are so vulnerable, and our defences so poor and, at the same time, the baddies are so powerful and so bad then why are the lights still on? If poorly protected systems are under sustained and powerful attack why aren’t they off-line more often or, you know, at all? OK, companies and individuals are being hacked and countless millions of credit card details are being stolen, viruses are being spread and, occasionally causing various degrees of havoc but still it’s not exactly the end of the world here.

So I read further with a heavy dose of scepticism along for the ride. After that things got better and he started making much more sense. He’s right that on-line security isn’t exactly high on many people’s lists. I’ve known people who proudly say that they’ve never installed Anti-Virus software on their PC because they didn’t see the point – and anyway they’ve never had a virus yet (OK, how would they know?). I know that most people pick really crap passwords for their accounts and use them across multiple sites. I know that most people (around 85% apparently) never change or even check the default settings on their smart phones and them load them with personal data. What I think is worse is that I’ve discussed privacy issues with people who have Facebook accounts and you know what? They simply don’t care. They don’t care that companies like Facebook and many others sell your data on the open market which makes it easier for advertisers to target you specifically – and that’s just the upside of the lack of privacy!

I try to keep my book reviews to a single side of A4 ‘paper’ as it helps to concentrate the mind and I honestly don’t want to bore people with possibly unfocused and rambling praise or criticism. As this book approached 600 pages in length there’s just no way I’m going to (or want to) even precis his main arguments. What I will do is give you my impression of the good and the bad points of the book overall. I’ll start with the good: This is definitely a topic that needs a much wider recognition and attention paid to it. The latest wave of technological wonders we seem to be completely entranced with is only the beginning. What we are ignoring are the risks and the downsides which this book make abundantly clear. The author highlights what is happening right now and what steps (there actually are some!) that we as individuals and the software companies, on-line retailers and governments can do to at least reduce any damage the bad guys can do whilst we, as a society, get our act together and stop being so naïve where technology is concerned.

Now the bad points: I could go on but I’ll be as brief as I can be. The style of the book, most especially at the beginning, is at best poor. I know what the author was trying to do. He was trying to frighten people into taking the topic seriously and paying due attention to the problem. Shouting that the world is coming to an end was, I felt, more than a little counterproductive. The author used hundreds of examples of crime, technical innovations, or criminals with in excess of 90-95% of them based in the US. After a while this got more than a little wearing. Places outside the US exist and are quite technically advanced. His use of the euphemism ‘Crime Inc’ made it appear that there is some kind of global organised crime organisation bent on robbing the whole planet. I seriously doubt if such a thing is even possible. Sure organised crime exists. That’s a given. Sure some parts of it co-operate and assist other parts but this isn’t a stand-up fight between Good and Evil. The book was far too long and used far too many examples to back his points – of which there are probably only two or three at most. It could have easily been 100 or even 200 pages shorter without any loss of impact. I think he was best on his discussion of the upcoming Internet of Things and the use (and abuse) of Big Data. He should really have stopped there rather than moving off into speculation on the future use of robotics, gene splicing and AI. OK, we all like a bit of speculation from time to time but his point, yet again, was to instil fear (although no doubt he’d view it as caution) in his readership. A very mixed book I thought. Too sensationalist when it needed to be sober and far too repetitive. But he did have good things to say too and, if you have the metal and the patience, you can find some good advice in amongst all the scare stories that could possibly save you some grief in the future.