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.)
Crime changes.
The goals stay the same—pursuit of value, pursuit of power—but new technologies create new vulnerabilities, new tactics, and new ways for perpetrators to evade discovery or capture. And the law necessarily lags behind. Relying not on innovation but on precedent, it is intentionally backward-looking and slow. That plodding consideration used to be how we protected our shared democratic society, how we protected each other from each other.
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.)