Spoofing Life: Reality Altering Technology Enables Crime

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As we come to rely more and more upon technology as a filter for our life experiences, opportunities to bend reality abound.  In theory, none of this is new.   Ask anybody who has ever been on an online dating site and they will tell you what you see is not always what you get.  Yet as technology plays an ever-increasing role as an intermediator for our daily experiences, those who control the technology can control our experiences.  These changes have some significant implications for crime and social disorder in the 21st century. Phishing emails routinely take users to websites that appear to be genuine, but are in fact controlled by organized crime.  Unsuspecting victims enter their personal banking details and are defrauded shortly thereafter.  Pedophiles pretend to be teenagers, creating extensive fake online profiles in order to lurk in chat-rooms popular with young adults and to contact them.  The [...]

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  • Video: Social Networking

Twittering with Life and Death: A Tweet Too Far?

June 20, 2010
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When Jack Dorsey founded the Twitter micro-blogging service in 2006, he, like most business owners, was surely hoping for great success.  Now just few short years later, he clearly has arrived.  Twitter has grown from about 500,000 tweets per quarter in 2007 to more than 4 billion tweets in the first quarter of 2010.  While Twitter naysayers abound, the numbers speak for themselves and clearly something big is going on here. Yet even the founder of Twitter himself could not have envisioned a tweet like this one:  A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct [US Supreme Court], & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice. The tweet was posted by the Utah State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff on his Twitter page.   Shurtleff posted the update via his iPhone on the state’s firing-squad execution of convicted murderer [...]

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Unlawful Assembly in Virtual Spaces Now Also Illegal

June 6, 2010
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Many governments around the world have criminal statutes preventing “unlawful assembly” crimes.  Generally speaking, an unlawful assembly refers to a gathering of individuals who come together in order to commit an unlawful act or to behave in a violent, boisterous or tumultuous manner.  While nations around the world differ in their tolerance of public gatherings, in the Western world, peaceful assemblies of the people are well-accepted and commonplace. The concept of lawful assembly, or freedom of assembly, is well-enshrined in a number of human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – Article 20, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – Article 21 and the European Convention on Human Rights – Article 11. Moreover, the right to peaceably assemble is a founding principal of national law in democratic nations around the world, including in the US under the  First Amendment to the Constitution of the United [...]

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When Satellites Go Rogue: On the Origins of Space Crime

May 16, 2010
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In early April 2010, for the first time in history, an American geostationary satellite has gone  “rogue.”  The satellite, known as the Galaxy 15, is no longer responding to command and control communications from its legitimate owner, the Intelsat corporation.  Moreover, the satellite has left its assigned duty location and is now drifting uncontrolled through space.  While mis-orbiting and crashed satellites are not a new phenomenon, they usually cease functioning and stop transmitting when leaving orbit and hurtling towards earth. What makes the Galaxy 15 case so unique, is that the satellite’s systems are fully functioning, with its telecommunications payload (the equipment that relays customer’s transmissions around the globe) fully “powered-on.” Despite 150,000-200,000 attempts to reboot system’s software, the satellite is refusing to accept commands from Earth.  The primary threat in this case is not from the satellite crashing directly into another satellite, but instead interfering with other global satellite [...]

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Mobile Phone Botnets: Is Your Refrigerator Next?

May 8, 2010
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For some time now, experts in the information security community have been concerned about the possibility of  mobile phone botnets: now it appears these fears may have been well-grounded, as suggested in the article below.   While there are billions of desktop and portable computers in the world, there are billions more mobile phones.  As the computing power of mobile smartphones increases, they have been transformed from simple hand-held devices used solely for placing voice calls into highly capable full-fledged portable computers.  In fact today’s iPhone likely has more processing power than most desktop machines had just a few short years ago.  These developments, driven by Moore’s law, have created a fundamental shift in the nature of computing and how people access the global power of the Internet. As portable computing devices become more powerful, end-users are storing serious amounts of information on them.  While one was unlikely to “lose” [...]

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Hacking Airport X-Ray Machines: Terrorist Implications

April 20, 2010
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(Part 2 of a 2 part series) In part one of this series, we examined the latest generation airport full-body scanners and explored the privacy concerns raised by many regarding potential abuses of this technology, to include the unauthorized preservation and sharing of nude images of passengers passing through the devices.   In this second article, we look more closely at significantly more nefarious abuses of airport X-ray scanner machines, to include their potential abuse by terrorists.

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Automated Crime: Scripting Blackmail

April 16, 2010
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Increasingly innovative computer scripts are being created that automate entire criminal processes—processes that, in the past, used to require human intervention.  Don’t like your boss?  Threaten to tell his wife about the affair with his secretary unless he pays you to keep quiet.  The problem was that your boss knew it was you who was blackmailing him, opening the blackmailer to potential negative consequences.  Now, however, thanks to the miracle of technology, no need for a human being to become involved in such a dirty and murky affairs.  The entire process can be scripted and automated. Not only can you extort your boss via a scripted attack, but as the entire process is automated, you can blackmail other people’s bosses halfway around the world as well.  Crime automation allows transnational organized crime groups to gain the same efficiencies and cost savings that multinational corporations obtained by leveraging technology to carry [...]

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Hacking Airport X-Ray Machines for Fun and Porn

March 29, 2010
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(Part 1 of a 2 part series) Ever since the unsuccessful bombing attempt against Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit  on Christmas day 2009, there has been renewed scrutiny of airport security measures.  Given that the suspected bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to easily pass through security with mixture of explosive materials, including PETN and triacetone triperoxide (TAPN), it is not surprising that extensive scrutiny has been focused on the adequacy of current airport X-ray scanners. In the wake of this incident a phalanx of politicians and security officials from around the world has arisen, including the former Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who have called for the widespread adoption of whole-body imaging scanners that use radio waves or X-rays to reveal objects beneath a person’s clothes.  The new generation of airport security scanners are based upon one of two underlying technologies, [...]

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When Flash Mobs Become Crime Mobs

March 26, 2010
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When people think of flash mobs, they tend to focus on the positive: 300 people showing up to dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller in a London tube station,  a relatively calm Worldwide Pillow Fight Day or even an impromptu Sound of Music performance in Antwerp’s (Belgium) central rail station. Yet as the below article demonstrates, love, dance and pillow fights are not always the goals of flash mobs and increasingly the underlying technology is being used for criminal purposes. As noted elsewhere on Future Crimes, criminals are using a variety of social media to include Twitter, Facebook and simple SMS messages to coordinate their nefarious activities.  Though the flash mob originated as a playful social experiment in spontaneity and often featured more positive themes such as hugging, kissing or dancing, as the case from Philadelphia show us, the same underlying communications technology can also be abused. In some of the [...]

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Mobile Phones: A Crime Superhighway Into Your Life

March 24, 2010
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Accessing the Internet via a PC is quickly becoming passé and according to Gartner Research, the number of users accessing the Net via mobile phones will surpass those on PC’s by 2013.  As more and more people use their mobiles as portable computers, it is only logical that hackers and malware will follow in an effort to capitalize on the criminal opportunities.  Although mobile phone viruses and trojans have been around since at least 2004, as mobile phones evolve into powerful hand-held computers, the threat posed by mobile malware is vastly increasing in severity. Since early 2006, it has been possible to remotely activate a mobile phone’s microphone, transforming the phone into an omnipresent eavesdropping device.  As mobile phones add more features, including cameras, Bluetooth connectivity and GPS functions, they will become even more powerful tools for criminals to reach out and discover unsuspecting victims.  For example, a stalker could [...]

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When Computers See: Crime and Policing Implications

March 24, 2010
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Ah, remember the good old days of searching the Internet…the days when you had to type your search request into a search engine text box?  So quaint…so 2009.  Now, thanks to Google Goggles, it is possible for your mobile phone’s camera to take a picture of an object and use that image itself to search Google. Have you seen van Gogh’s The Starry Night while visiting New York’s Museum of Modern Art? Just snap a picture with your Android mobile phone and using Google Goggles the picture will be submitted to Google who will recognize the real painting and return an array of search data on it.  Standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and want to know more?  No problem, just snap a shot and Google will identify the Paris icon and tell you all about it. Of course Google Goggles does not just work on famous objects.  Discovered [...]

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