Chris McCann's Personal Blog

Update: Found this video online of Marc Goodman speaking about future crimes. >


This morning I attended my first full session of Singularity University. I had always about SU and I even applied to attend their first class ever but was rejected (probably because I was hugely naive and still in undergrad at the time ).

Luckily this year though my friend Vivek Wadhwa – who’s been a professor at every top school, writers for the Washington Post, and recently took the VP of Academics position at SU – invited me to the executive program going on this week.

I was super excited to attend a full day of classes, I even woke up early for it and class started at 8:45am sharp. First up was an hour on neuroscience by Chris deCharms, next was an hour on our Energy infrastructure primarily about Electricity by Gregg Maryniak, followed by some medicine startup demos led by Daniel Kraft, then finally the talk that blew my mind – Policy, Law, and Ethics by Marc Goodman.

I’ll be honest going into the last talk titled “Policy, Law, and Ethics” after being mentally drained by multidisciplinary thinking, I wasn’t expecting much. But WOW was I wrong.

The ethics portion of Marc’s talk was interesting but I had heard much of the debate over a TED talk by Paul Root Wolphe “It’s time to question bio-engineering” (highly recommended). But the second part of his talk about what criminal, terrorism, governments, and interest groups are doing with exponential technology was extremely eye-opening.

We as entrepreneurs, inventors, and creators typically think of the positive implications of new technology but it’s critically important to also realize what the “bad” groups are doing with these technologies as well. During Marc’s talk he gives eye-opening after eye-opening example of what is already happening out in the world right now. Here are some of the examples he gave during his talk:

• Organized crime and theft used to be a non-scaleable activity but now organized crime can steal 100′s of millions of bank account information at a single time. A recent example of this was the theft of the Playstation’s Network information.
• There are now literally Crime as a Service (CaaS) services that you can purchase to do your maleware service for you. You even get volume discounts based on how much you purchase.
• Programmed military robots have had a few instances where they have “malfunctioned” and went on a shooting spree on their own.
• A man was caught with a DIY remote control drone strapped with C-4 planning to fly it into the White House.
• Metadata can be extracted from pictures to pinpoint your location from services like Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, etc. This has given rise to sites like ICanStalkU and PleaseRob.me
• Criminals can now use 3D scanners to scan ATM’s & quickly create thin plastic covers that go over the card reader. So when ever goes to use the ATM normally they are storing all of your ATM and credit card information.
• There’s crimesourcing, using the power of the crowd for criminal activity: Flash robberies, hiring decoys on craigslist for bank robbery, and crowdsourcing the solving of CAPTCHA’s for phishing scams.
• Gangs using twitter and facebook to “communicate, recruit, issue threats, traffic narcotics, promote violence and expand their criminal activities.“
• The laundering of virtual currency & exchanging it to paper money.
• OccupyWallstreet is now using remote helicopters to spy on and track the police forces surrounding them.

The main takeaway for me was the lines between governments, interest groups, criminal groups, and terrorist groups is blurring. What used to be available only for the FBI and CIA are now being put to individual group use and we are going to have to deal with the consequences of this.

As Marc Goodman said at the end of his talk at Singularity University, “The internet was originally created with just a few nodes mostly by Universities and there was no need to build security into the system.” But now we must take responsibility for our current realities.