Future Crimes (Goodman)

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
Marc Goodman, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385539005


Summary
One of the world’s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you—and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.

Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims’ every move.

We all know today’s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that’s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked—a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation’s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.

Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today’s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow’s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online.

But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car’s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.
    
With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.
    
Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us.

Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity—before it’s too late. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Marc Goodman has spent a career in law enforcement, including work as Futurist with the FBI, Senior Advisor to Interpol and street police officer.  As the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and chair for Policy, Law & Ethics at Singularity University, he has continued to investigate the intriguing, often terrifying intersection of science and crime, uncovering nascent threats and combating the darker side of technology. (From the publisher.)

Marc holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University and a Master of Science in the Management of Information Systems from the London School of Economics.   In addition, he has serves as a Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s MediaX Laboratory.  Marc is frequently covered in the press, having been featured by CNN, ABC, NBC, BBC, Fox News, The Guardian, Le Monde and PBS, among others. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Rather than challenge us to reconsider our habits, [some technology books] are more likely to inspire a defeatist "everything is terrible, nothing matters" attitude. Future Crimes,” a new book from Marc Goodman, inadvertently falls into this...category, which is unfortunate, because its arrival couldn’t have come at a better time.... While Goodman intends to deliver a warning about the dangers and vulnerabilities of our techno-laden world, Future Crimes often sounds less like a manifesto and more like a Wikipedia entry about the recent history of cybercrimes, some real, many hypothetical.
Jenna Wortham - New York Times Book Review


Addictive….[I]ntroduces readers to this brave new world of technology, where robbers have been replaced by hackers, and victims include nearly anyone on the Web… He presents his myriad hard-to-imagine cybercrime examples in the kind of matter-of-fact voice he probably perfected as an investigator. He clearly wants us never to look at our cellphones or Facebook pages in the same way again — and in this, Future Crimes succeeds marvelously.
Washington Post


Excellent and timely…Mr. Goodman is no neo-Luddite. He thinks innovations could ultimately lead to self-healing computer networks that detect hackers and automatically make repairs to shut them out. He rightly urges the private and public sectors to work more closely together, "crowdsourcing" ideas and know-how…The best time to start tackling future crimes is now.
Economist


This is a must-read!
Larry King


Future Crimes is a risk compendium for the Information Age…. Exhaustively researched…. Fascinating…. Thrilling to read.
San Francisco Chronicle
 

In Future Crimes, Goodman spills out story after story about how technology has been used for illegal ends...The author ends with a series of recommendations that, while ambitious, appear sensible and constructive...Goodman’s most promising idea is the creation of a “Manhattan Project” for cyber security...[Future Crimes is] a ride well worth taking if we are to prevent the worst of his predictions from taking shape.
Financial Times
 

Marc Goodman is a go-to guide for all who want a good scaring about the dark side of technology.
New Scientist
 

Utterly fascinating stuff... Goodman weds the joy of geeky technology with the tension of true crime. The future of crime prevention starts here.
NPR, San Francisco


A well-researched whirlwind tour of internet-based crime.
Science Magazine


By the middle of the first chapter you’ll be afraid to turn on your e-reader or laptop, and you’ll be looking with deep suspicion at your smartphone... [Goodman's] style is breezy but his approach is relentless, as he leads you from the guts of the Target data breach to the security vulnerabilities in social media...Mr. Goodman argues convincingly that we are addressing exponential growth in risky technologies with thinking that is, at best, incremental.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


[A] hair-raising exposé of cybercrime...Goodman’s breathless but lucid account is good at conveying the potential perils of emerging technologies in layman’s terms, and he sprinkles in deft narratives of the heists already enabled by them...A timely wake-up call.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) An alarming view of the burgeoning dark side of the Internet.... In this highly readable and exhaustive debut, [Goodman] details the many ways in which hackers, organized criminals, terrorists and rogue governments are exploiting the vulnerability of our increasingly connected society.... A powerful wake-up call.
Kirkus Reviews

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