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The thing that scares me about Flock cameras isn’t just their ability to surveil cars without license plates. The story of the guy who was rollerblading down the street and stopped underneath the camera may not seem striking to a reader until you find out that it was so good, it was able to clearly see that the man was watching rollerblading videos on his phone while he was there. It’s crazy to think that it was only a century ago that if you and someone else chose to walk into a forest and have a private conversation, nobody else in the world would’ve been able to know what you were talking about. Today, that’s impossible.
One thing I was talking about with a friend recently was the financial system and how the nature of fraud has changed. If you look at a traditional, physical counterfeiter of currency, the fundamentals of that haven’t changed in roughly a hundred years. Do small amounts, avoid large bills, don’t go on spending sprees, etc. Today, it’s one of the worst ways to counterfeit. And not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of your likelihood of getting caught. In the digital era if you want to commit fraud, the best way to do it isn’t to steal a million and deposit it in an offshore shell account somewhere. Government’s often hire extralegal forensic auditors in the shadows to avoid the costly red tape and they will catch you before breakfast. The best way to do it is not to go for the cash register but to go for the vault. Massive sums of money. Deposit it in private, international shell accounts all over the world, outside of your home country’s jurisdiction. It isn’t because some of it won’t be recovered. But the banking system and other companies write it off and outsource it for third parties to chase you, because they don’t have the budgets to put in the necessary work to battle with other countries to get their money back. And if you’re spending 2:1 or 3:1 to recover every dollar lost, you’re losing money. And if all else fails from the criminal’s standpoint, declare bankruptcy. Stay clean under the window of scrutiny and then afterward go get your money. A century ago, the opposite of all this used to be true.
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