Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Christmas for criminals in 2020

Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist, Nov 2004

Christmas is a season to be merry, to celebrate, to be with family and friends, to show we love each other with presents and general good cheer. But I’ve written about the nice side of Christmas a few times now and this year I thought I’d take a look at the other side of Christmas, the opportunities for shoplifting, fraud, the easy mugging targets and the general wellbeing of the criminal and deviant community. And of course, with honour among thieves and all that, I’ll look at the sorts of presents they might buy (or steal) for each other at Christmas in 2020.

I’ve had a lot of fun recently thinking about identity cards and how they will allegedly stop terrorism by identifying us all from iris scans, Minority Report style. These cards are likely to be compulsory by 2012. Fortunately for our criminal and terrorist classes, by about 2012, we will also be seeing the very first generation of active contact lenses, and these will be commonplace by 2020. These will use tiny lasers and micro-mirrors to raster scan an image directly onto our retinas, so we can wander around with a permanent head-up display, Robocop style. We can edit the ugly people out of our field of view, and by remotely scanning the RFID tags on the Euro notes in people’s wallets as we brush past them in the crowd, we can tell just by glancing at someone whether they have enough money with them to be worth mugging, or which pocket it is in for a more refined pickpocketing. With a radio scanner, we might also be able to tell which electronic equipment and credit cards they also have on them, and also exactly whereabouts on the person it is. But, back to the point, these lenses will need to interwork between the real world and the computer generated world. They will adjust their transparency by using liquid crystals. The more advanced ones will allow their appearance to be adjusted to act as part of our body adornment. They could change colour, or vary their pattern. Importantly, they could display pictures, even a picture of an iris. So providing we know what someone else’s iris looks like, we could pretend to be them, steal their identity, mug someone and have them get the blame, or generally walk right through any terrorist defences that rely on iris scans. Given the number of tiny cameras that we already see, and the new liquid lens technology that will greatly improve the images, capturing an image of someone’s iris will be quite easy. Even the fact that iris scanners will check that the eye is alive by checking for pupil dilation will not defeat active lenses, which will easily be able to make the image respond quickly enough. So criminals and terrorists will be able to masquerade as anyone they please, and have all the opportunities for theft and mugging highlighted in their field of view. They will also be able to see warnings about any police that come near, or even track them, so that they know with certainty how long they have to rob a shop before the police could get there. Active contact lenses are right at the top of the criminal present list.

And of course, active contact lenses are a lot of fun for deviants too. Being able to digitally alter the appearance of anything in the field of view has many benign uses, but also allows people to digital strip anyone they fancy. Forget cameras and Photoshop, this could be real time. And it doesn’t just have to be by overlaying videos from a porn site on passers by. Millimetre wave radio is already being used in airports for security purposes, and essentially allows security staff to see right through clothes, which are completely transparent to those frequencies, while the body reflects them well, so you can see an anatomically detailed picture of the person. Of course, legitimate manufacturers ensure that these images are digitally altered for use in airports so that the staff can concentrate on the job and customer privacy is maintained to a point, but we are talking about criminals and deviants here, so we should expect technology that is not only not toned down or specialised to spot guns and explosives, but actually enhances the pictures by being optimised to show human detail, and adding plausible skin tones. Quite high on a deviant Christmas wish list I would think, even higher than the miniature cameras that are already everywhere today and can take photos without anyone knowing, just by moving a finger.

Since criminals often operate in gangs, the new virtual air technology will also be a useful breakthrough. This will essentially overlay every part of a town with digital information, much of it dynamic and mobile, much of it moving around with people in their digital bubbles. This will provide honest people with navigation, tourist and shopping information, show us where our friends are, and enable a wide range of games and social activities. Criminal gangs will be able to use it to mark out their territories with digital pheromones, or to masquerade as legitimate businesses to capture information from us. Virtual air enables people to ‘stick’ information to each other that is visible to other people, so criminals could mark other people as a target for a colleague down the street, just by sticking some seemingly innocent information to them. And of course, using the virtual air systems to develop plans in advanced and for coordinating an attack would be ideal. Since the police might use digital air for their purpose too, it may be easy to make decoys and diversions that would keep the police away from the real crimes even longer.

Another technology that will be around by 2020 is active skin. Just as we can miniaturise electronics to fit a full display into a contact lens, so we will be able to get memory devices, display components, processors and sensors all smaller than human skin cells. We could print these on the skin surface or blast them into the skin itself. We could have video tattoos, smart makeup, or computer displays on our forearms. We might be able to link to the peripheral nervous system, recording and replaying sensations. Apart from the obvious IT and body adornment uses, the games potential is vast, so we’ll all want this for Christmas. But criminals and deviants will have even more fun than the rest of us. Imagine hacking into someone’s smart makeup. This uses nanoparticles that can be aligned with an underlay electric field just like a liquid crystal display. A woman just needs to spend an hour in a clinic to have the active skin underlay reprinted every few months or so. A hacker could change people’s appearance, or write messages on their skin, and the person wouldn’t feel a thing or know anything had happened till the people around them start laughing. Criminals could not only have lots of fun, but they could even sell advertising space on peoples’ foreheads. This will be almost passé by then of course, since they will have been doing just that with smart clothes for ages by 2020, and we will be well used to advertising spam on video T-shirts. One step further than that, imagine hacking into someone’s nervous system. Today this is the stuff of sci-fi but by 2020 it may well be real life. Again, the games potential is vast, linking your feelings to someone else’s, or enjoying not only their holiday video, but the actual sensory experience too. Wow! Well, now imagine the deviant who lives down the road hacking into your nervous system while you are in bed. All he needs is to hack through the firewall on the games interface that you bought. If you are behind on your software updates, this could be one of the consequences. He might even be able to get the images from your contact lenses while he’s at it. And if you are slightly deviant too, these might not actually be the image of the partner you are in bed with but with someone you’re fantasising about, so he also has a blackmail opportunity. Another opportunity is the pain gun. Games technology will require that modest amounts of pain can be induced in the wearer. Muggers might be able to over-ride the pain limiters and use it as another weapon. While we are suffering, they simply walk off with our wallets. Of course, individual criminals don’t need much expertise at all, they will just buy stuff on the black market that does almost all the clever stuff for them.

While these might be the main presents for criminal and deviant types in 2020, there will be many other options. If RFID tags are as commonplace as some of the hype says today, then there will be a black market for RFID clones that can be stuck on any goods to make them appear cheaper at the checkout. LCD number plates might be used to evade tolls or speed cameras. We should also expect ongoing derivatives of the crimes that exist today, such as software and music piracy, codes to get satellite channels for free etc.

Artificial intelligence devices might act as the ‘brains’ of any criminal gang by 2020 too. Indeed software might be the culprit for a lot of crime by then. Computers are used by criminals today, and the criminal is punished if caught, but the computer and the software cannot be punished. In the 2020 timeframe, there may well be conscious computers with superhuman intelligence levels, and these could be criminals in their own right. However, an AI entity that is encrypted heavily and which can be distributed across millions of computers in every continent would be rather hard to arrest, or even to identify.

The really bad side of all of this is not so much that it offers new opportunities for criminals, but that for every new technology that improves our quality of life, there is always someone who wants to abuse it and ruins it for the rest of us. We must not let these concerns stop us from developing the technologies though, otherwise the criminals will have stolen much of the fun of Christmas too.