Future Crimes

You live in an exponential age—where computing power, data volumes, and network connections double on timescales that make yesterday’s tools ancient tomorrow. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman explores how the same forces driving innovation also amplify vulnerability. The exponential curve is not just a mathematical curiosity—it is the engine behind both technological miracles and criminal catastrophes. Understanding that dynamic is the first step toward surviving it.

Exponential growth and the crime singularity

Goodman begins with the lily-on-a-pond thought experiment and Moore’s Law: slow growth suddenly becomes explosive. Computing power doubles every few years, and so do data, devices, and users. Historically, crime was limited by physical reach—a train robber could take only one train. Now a single hacker can hit millions of systems simultaneously. The Target breach (110 million accounts) and Sony hack (77 million) show how crime scales exponentially once systems are digitized. This is Goodman’s “crime singularity”: limits vanish as digital tools multiply targets.

Control the code, control the world

When machines and infrastructure obey software, whoever controls the code controls the outcome. Stuxnet demonstrated that principle by sabotaging Iranian centrifuges through manipulated sensor data. Your car, pacemaker, or thermostat now have the same vulnerability: if someone rewrites their firmware, they rewrite the physical world. Moore’s law doesn’t just accelerate progress—it accelerates weaponization.

Data as the new commodity

Digital convenience made information the world’s most valuable asset. Free products like search engines or social networks monetize you through surveillance. Firms such as Acxiom, Experian, and BlueKai aggregate trillions of data points, while innocuous apps leak your habits, location, and health metrics. The economics are simple: if you don’t pay, you are the product. The consequence: privacy collapses and predictive analytics can infer deeply personal facts, as Target’s pregnancy-prediction algorithm famously did.

The new law of asymmetry

Defenders must secure millions of endpoints perfectly; attackers need only one flaw. Digital amplification grants criminals superhuman reach. Malware spreads automatically, exploits are sold as turnkey kits, and underground economies operate with professional efficiency. The same network effects that made Amazon dominant now make ransomware omnipresent.

Essential understanding

Exponential technology isn’t inherently evil—but it rewards speed and scale. Without corresponding evolution in ethics, governance, and security, every leap forward multiplies exposure faster than protection.

Goodman’s overarching argument is not anti‑tech; it’s pro‑resilience. He urges you to stop viewing cyber threats as fringe issues—they are structural byproducts of our exponential civilization. The same mathematics that made smartphones affordable makes global malware inevitable, and the only way out is to design systems that evolve as fast as attackers do.

You may believe online privacy still exists—but Goodman shows how quickly it evaporated once data became a commodity. Every click, search, and message fuels a surveillance economy that monetizes your identity. In practice, free platforms are bait: you pay with personal exposure.

From free services to total profiling

Companies like Google and Facebook unify your actions across devices. Search, maps, mail, and social likes blend into universal dossiers used for targeting and resale. PatientsLikeMe and Nielsen’s scraping incident illustrates how even health communities become data farms. When these fragments are cross‑linked by brokers like PeekYou, anonymity collapses.

Data brokers and ethical gray zones

The private data‑trading industry, led by Acxiom and Datalogix, aggregates profiles on nearly everyone—sometimes selling lists of vulnerable populations. Unlike credit bureaus, brokers operate with almost no regulation. Goodman underscores the gap: accuracy and consent vanish once data circulates behind opaque corporate layers.

Legal blindness and Terms of Service

Your routine acceptance of unread 10,000‑word policies creates a de facto surrender of rights. Companies secure perpetual licenses to your photos and messages. The GameStation stunt (“we own your immortal soul”) proves how casually we cede control. Once granted, these rights endure even after account deletion.

Core lesson

Regulation lags behind data economics. The surveillance economy exists not because people want it, but because it’s profitable, and consumers have little leverage until laws classify privacy as a right rather than a commodity.

Goodman advises assuming that any data you share will be monetized, re‑identified, and resold. The implications ripple through employment, health, and security—everything from targeted ads to discriminatory algorithms. Restoring agency means demanding transparency, encryption defaults, and paid, privacy‑respecting alternatives.

The digital underworld now runs like a global industry. Goodman maps its actors—from lone script kiddies to organized crime, hacktivists, and governments—and its markets for malware, stolen data, and botnet rentals. What used to be obscure technical skill is now an economy with supply chains and customer support.

Crime as a professional enterprise

The case of Innovative Marketing reveals how cybercrime mirrors legitimate corporations: executives, R&D, finance, and HR orchestrated a scareware empire making hundreds of millions from fake antivirus sales. Similarly, Citadel’s developers ran a customer‑support CRM for their malware buyers. Crime‑as‑a‑service normalizes fraud as a business model.

Marketplaces and automation

Exploit kits like Zeus or SpyEye sell for thousands and let non‑experts launch attacks. Zero‑day brokers connect governments and criminals, pricing vulnerabilities at hundreds of thousands apiece. Botnets and ransomware scale theft automatically, while Dark Web bazaars like Silk Road and successors distribute drugs, weapons, and stolen credentials anonymously via Tor and Bitcoin.

Nation-states and proxy warfare

State actors such as China’s Unit 61398, Russia, Iran, and North Korea all use cyber tools to map grids, steal IP, or disrupt rivals. They often fund proxy groups for plausible deniability. Thus crime and espionage blend into a single transnational network exploiting the same digital infrastructure.

Operational takeaway

Cybercrime scales because automation and commerce intersect: each technical advance instantly multiplies criminal leverage, especially where anonymity and unregulated payment systems exist.

For you, this means that protection is no longer a purely technical challenge. It requires disrupting criminal business models—cutting off revenue streams, laundering networks, and exploit marketplaces—at systemic levels rather than chasing single hackers.

In Goodman’s most chilling examples, bits translate into physical harm. Power grids, transportation, and home devices now rely on networked control systems never designed for the Internet. The result: critical infrastructure and consumer gadgets alike are open to remote manipulation.

SCADA and physical consequences

Industrial controllers (SCADA/PLC) govern pumps, valves, and power lines. Yet many still run unpatched firmware or default passwords. Incidents from the Lodz tram hack to Maroochy Shire’s sewage spill and Shamoon’s destruction of Aramco data prove that digital compromise can create environmental and human casualties. Goodman warns that adversaries have already mapped entire grids for potential wartime activation.

The Internet of Things multiplier

IPv6 enables billions of addressable devices—from fridges to pacemakers. Each poorly secured endpoint becomes a new vector. The Texas Auto Center case, where one insider immobilized hundreds of cars remotely, dramatizes the shift from inconvenience to potential disaster. Smart meters, thermostats, RFID badges, and home hubs leak behavioral data and open pathways to intrusion.

Wearables, implants, and bodily exposure

Security now extends to your body. Fitness bands and smartwatches broadcast intimate telemetry; implantable medical devices can be hacked lethally. Barnaby Jack’s demonstration of wireless pacemaker control exposes the stakes: when connectivity meets biology, cybersecurity becomes life safety.

Practical reflection

Convenience expands faster than protection. Every connected sensor enlarges the attack surface, and until manufacturers adopt security‑by‑design, you must assume exposure in anything with an IP address.

Goodman’s prescription is clear: redesign infrastructure and consumer tech with authentication, encryption, and update mechanisms as mandatory—not optional. Otherwise, everyday flaws in thermostats, elevators, medical implants, and drones will continue to bridge the digital‑physical divide for attackers.

You act on what you see—but Goodman warns that screens lie easily. Digital interfaces mediate nearly every decision: medical results, trading dashboards, emergency alerts, social feeds. Once compromised, these perceptions warp judgment and trigger real‑world consequences.

Deception through displays

From Robin Sage’s fake persona deceiving defense professionals to Stuxnet’s forged sensor readings, attackers exploit trust in what appears on screen. Banking Trojans falsify balances, and spoofed alerts—like Montana’s zombie emergency broadcast—generate panic. Even airport X‑ray monitors and FAA systems prove vulnerable, enabling phantom aircraft or invisible contraband displays.

Psychological and physical fallout

Social engineering thrives on surface cues. Caller ID and GPS spoofing mislead with authoritative indicators; swatting turns deception into kinetic chaos when police respond to false emergencies. Market systems like high‑frequency trading show algorithmic trust collapsing in seconds, erasing billions through automated reactions to false inputs.

Key principle

Never treat a digital interface as truth without verification. When critical decisions pass through screens, confirm the data’s origin and integrity—especially for health, finance, or public safety.

For Goodman, this theme connects all other risks: technological mediation erodes sensory certainty. The solution isn’t technophobia—it’s skepticism and redundancy. Trust systems must be engineered to fail safely, not to merely appear safe.

Machines now act on their own. Goodman extends his analysis from static code to moving hardware—drones, robots, swarms, and 3‑D printers—each introducing new dimensions of crime and warfare. When autonomy meets connectivity, risk scales beyond human reaction time.

Drones and weaponization

Low‑cost UAVs like the WASP can intercept Wi‑Fi, mimic cell towers, and survey entire neighborhoods—capabilities once limited to intelligence agencies. Criminal and cartel uses already range from contraband drops to experimental weapon rigs. The Rezwan Ferdaus plot to bomb U.S. landmarks with model jets demonstrated feasibility. Physical security built to stop people fails against airborne robots.

Swarming and autonomy

Harvard’s thousand‑robot swarm proves coordinated autonomy possible. Military systems like BAE’s Taranis and South Korea’s SGR‑1 turret extend autonomy to lethal action. Goodman joins voices like Noel Sharkey and Human Rights Watch warning of algorithmic kill decisions and the moral vacuum around them.

3‑D printing and biological frontiers

Digital fabrication dissolves borders. Files for the Liberator pistol spread globally; key duplication services and counterfeit production threaten commerce and safety alike. Synthetic biology deepens the parallel: DNA sequencing and printing make living systems editable, enabling both breakthroughs and biocrime. Cartels may one day brew narcotics in microbes, and malicious actors could fabricate pathogens or fake forensic DNA samples.

Core warning

Autonomy and digital manufacturing collapse the boundary between thought and action. Design files, not factories, now carry risk—and biological code joins software as a new frontier for misuse.

Goodman’s forecast is unsettling but instructive: expect automation, robotics, and biotech convergence to redefine crime. Ethical, legal, and technical frameworks must evolve before autonomous machines and editable life forms produce irreversible consequences.

Goodman closes with practical hope. Progress is not the enemy; complacency is. His final chapters outline how you—and society—can survive the exponential onslaught through education, institutional reform, and personal discipline.

Redesign incentives and accountability

Software markets reward features over safety. Goodman calls for liability standards, robust bug‑bounty programs, and consumer demand for secure‑by‑default products—akin to auto safety reforms after government intervention. Economic pressure, not moral appeals, will change corporate behavior.

Personal hygiene and resilience

He offers the UPDATE checklist: Update devices; use password managers and multifactor authentication; Download only trusted apps; avoid admin privileges; Turn off unused systems; and Encrypt everything. These habits neutralize the majority of common attacks at minimal cost.

Institutional innovation

A “Cyber CDC” could coordinate global outbreak responses to malware. A Manhattan Project for cybersecurity would fund foundational safe‑system engineering. Incentives like an XPRIZE for defense could catalyze breakthroughs. Goodman also urges crowdsourcing citizen participation, noting successes like MIT’s balloon‑hunt and Foldit’s protein‑folding game: proof that cognitive surplus defends as well as it entertains.

Final message

Technology will not protect itself. You, your institutions, and your decisions must evolve with it. The future belongs not to those who fear exponential change, but to those who design resilience into every layer of it.

With clear guidance and inspiring calls to action, Goodman reframes cybersecurity as collective civic hygiene—an essential discipline of modern survival, ensuring human values keep pace with accelerating machines.