Now is a good time for doing crime

Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup. But when I flipped open the lid of my laptop, it too was mid-restart. And then, suddenly, the screen went gray. It was being remotely wiped. I turned on my iPad. It, too, had been wiped. I was being hacked. 

Frantically, I shut down all my devices, unplugged everything connected to the internet in my house, turned off my router, and went next door to use my neighbors’ computer and find out what was going on. Deepening my panic, I realized hackers had also gained control of, and nuked, my Google account. Worse, they were in control of my Twitter, which they were gleefully using to spew all sorts of vile comments. It was nasty. 

You have to remember, this was before all of us lived with a constant rain of text messages and emails designed to elicit the information necessary to pull something like this off. These crooks hadn’t brute-forced their way in, or used any sort of sophisticated techniques to gain access to my accounts. Instead, they had relied on publicly available information, and a fake credit card number, to socially engineer their way into my Amazon account, where they looked up the last four digits of my real credit card number. Then they 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 troubled me was what I learned as I followed up on my hack over the ensuing weeks and months: This kind of thing was, while still novel, becoming more common. Some version of what happened to me had happened to lots of other people. The kids who were responsible—it was a couple of kids—weren’t criminal masterminds. They had just found a gap, a place where a technology was now commonplace but its risks and exploitable surface areas weren’t yet fully understood. I just happened to have all my stuff in the gap. Today that gap might feature a crypto wallet or a deepfake of a loved one’s voice. (Or both.)

But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized law enforcement and government—offering new ways to root out crime, to gather evidence, to surveil people. Think, for example, of how cold-case investigators tracked down the Golden State Killer years after his murders, using DNA samples and genealogy databases—launching a new era of DNA-powered investigations. 

Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. It sometimes calls into question the nature of crime itself. Unregulated behaviors, facilitated by technology, can exist in murky zones of dubious legality. (Until TikTok announced its new ownership structure, Apple and Google were both technically breaking the law by allowing the app to stay on their platforms, under the provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.)

That tension is the key to our March/April issue. Thanks to technologies like cryptocurrency and off-the-shelf autonomous autopilots, there’s never been a better time to do crime. Thanks to pervasive surveillance and digital infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to fight it—sometimes at the expense of what we used to think of as fundamental civil rights. 

I never pressed charges against the kids who hacked me. The biggest consequence of the hack was that Apple set up two-factor authentication in the following months, which felt like a win. Now I’m not sure anyone expects their personal data to be secure in any meaningful way. I’m certain, though, that somewhere on the net, a new generation of kids is coming up with another novel crime.