'future Crimes,’ By Marc Goodman

Goodman is a former Los Angeles Police Department patrolman and a counterterrorism expert who has worked in more than 70 countries, and the risks he traces in the age of the Internet, the smartphone and so-called big data largely fall into what Al Gore aptly called “the stalker economy.” Suddenly Americans love to watch; we watch our friends, and we watch ourselves being watched (thanks to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden) by those to whom we pay taxes. The risks Goodman sketches may occasionally be life-and-death risks, as when terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba swarmed the Taj Majal Palace Hotel in Mumbai in 2008 and broke into the room of one of India’s richest bankers. Alongside the precedent set by that command center for terrorists and that nearly fatal Google search (the banker in fact got out), Goodman also traces mass transactions that dehumanize citizens largely through endless encroachments on privacy: the social media sites that steal and sell your data and grant themselves rights to keep it forever. Like a pusher holding that first dime bag of heroin over a soon-to-be junkie, Google gave you something 'on the house,’ and only later might you realize the implications of the bargain you were making. Goodman, the chair for policy and law at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, is best when skeptical, as when he is examining the blurring by (mostly) American corporations between the illegal and improper, and the new normal just a hair’s breadth away. Under an alias, he joined an online support group on PatientsLikeMe.com for advice on his subsequent depression, assuming his privacy would be protected by his alias and by the site’s privacy policy. The subsidiary company’s business model was to copy what it could from the Internet’s many sites, social media outlets, blogs and news media and sell this to marketers and advertisers. In his exhaustively researched book, Goodman likens the routine activities of big data companies and social media brands to spying. What they keep, too, could represent the future crime you didn’t even know you committed when it happened, whether literal or mere taboo (picture the grieving son being outed for his depression as he runs for office in the future). The main trouble in this otherwise fascinating book is Goodman’s occasional vagueness over different crimes: crimes of conscience, whistle blowing against corruption, for example, versus crimes of greed, done for profit, or in the name of violence and security. While Goodman’s catalog of techno-woes can at times be thrilling to read, it is disheartening, and discrediting, to see the category mistake of egregious crimes conflated in cases like these with those who bravely reveal them.