You have to remember, this was back when we all lived with a constant barrage of text messages and emails designed to get us the information we needed to get something like this done. These criminals neither used forced intrusion nor any kind of sophisticated technology to gain access to my accounts. Instead, they had relied on publicly available information and a fake credit card number to worm their way into my Amazon account, where they looked up the last four digits of my actual credit card number. Then he used that information to get into Apple. And because that account was linked to my Gmail, and that to my Twitter, it gave them the keys to everything.
But what really bothered me was what I learned as I followed my hack over the coming weeks and months: This kind of thing, though still new, was becoming common. Some version of what happened to me happened to many other people too. The kids who were responsible – they were a few kids – were not criminal masterminds. They had simply found a gap, a place where a technology was now common but its risks and exploitable surface areas were not yet fully understood. It so happened that all my stuff was left lying in the empty place. Today that difference might include a crypto wallet or a deepfake of a loved one’s voice. (Or both.)
Crime change.
The goals remain the same – the pursuit of value, the pursuit of power – but new technologies create new vulnerabilities, new strategies, and new ways for criminals to evade detection or capture. And the law definitely lags behind. It is deliberately backward-looking and slow, relying not on innovation but on precedent. That deep consideration was about how we protected our common democratic society, how we protected each other from each other.
But the same new technologies that have allowed crime to overtake the law have also reinvented law enforcement and government – ​​introducing new ways to root out crime, collect evidence, monitor people. Consider, for example, how cold-case investigators used DNA samples and genealogy databases to track down the Golden State Killer years after his murder – ushering in a new era of DNA-driven investigations.
Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. This sometimes raises questions about the nature of the crime itself. Unregulated behavior, facilitated by technology, may exist in gray areas of questionable legality. (Until TikTok announced its new ownership structure, both Apple and Google were technically breaking the law by allowing the app to remain on their platforms under provisions of the law. Protecting Americans from Foreign Enemies Controlled Applications Act. Aah! Well. still.)
