Frank Abagnale, Jr. on Technology, Crime and Ethics - Entering the Networked World. DON'T PANIC!

Topics: Security & Insecurity, Insights, Networked World, Cybercrime, Ethics

Back in mid-October, ComputerWorld published excepts from an interview it had with Frank Abagnale, Jr., a former con artist and a consultant for the FBI. Abagnale's exploits were depicted in the movie "Catch Me If You Can".

One of the questions asked Mr. Abagnale was, "Suppose you'd been born in 1990. How much of what you got away with 40 years ago do you think you'd be able to get away with as a 17-year-old today?" Abagnale answered, "It would be 4,000 times easier to do today, what I did 40 years ago, and I probably wouldn't go to prison for it. Technology breeds crime -- it always has, it always will."

He explained how expensive and time consuming it was to pull off some of his scams in the 1960s and how current technologies make the same action cheaper and easier. Also the online information resources make it far easier to scout out information useful for scams.

When asked about ways to make computer crime less attractive to young people, Abagnale commented upon ethical shortcomings in present day society.

---
There are about four reasons why we have crime to begin with. One of them is, of course, that we live in an extremely unethical society. We live in a society that doesn't teach ethics at home, a society that doesn't teach ethics in school because the teacher would be accused of teaching morality. We live in a society where you can't find a four-year college course on ethics. I have three sons who went through graduate school; only the one who went to law school had a course even offered on ethics. So today you have a lot of young people who have no character, no ethics and they find no problem in defrauding somebody or stealing from somebody or cheating somebody. Until we change that, crime is just going to get easier, faster, more global, harder to detect.

[....]

I really think the more technology there is in the world, the more you have to instill character and ethics. You can build all the security systems in the world; you can build the most sophisticated technology, and all it takes is one weak link -- someone who operates that technology -- to bring it all down. People don't like to talk about that issue, because they think it's over-simplified. But the fact is, in all my experience, that's where the problem lies. Until that changes, crime is always going to be with us.
---

It may seem ironic that a former scam artist lectures on the need for teaching ethics, but he is right. Many of the current technology problems such as privacy and cybercrime are much more human problems than technology problems. The technology extends human capabilities to do the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In my experience back in the 1990s with kids getting trouble with certain approaches to hacking, I saw a gap in mentoring. All the people in their lives who could talk about ethics did not know about technology and the techies the kids knew did not talk about ethics. The kids were mentoring each other and, well, they are kids. The online world can look so much like a video game where physical world considerations don't work the same way.

Today, I believe it is getting better but we are a long ways off from effective teaching ethics & technology. Some of the current efforts seem to be hobbled by "Thou shalt not pirate music" and similar themes, not really helping to develop the ability think further about what one's actions do to others. (E.g.; The anti-piracy themes and such fail to look further at the ethics "intellectual property", of fair use allowances for the public, and such.)

The interview went on to examine international aspects of cybercrime and how organisations can protect themselves. Some good insights.

I do question one of Abagnale's comments concerning background checks of people running systems:

---
So I think most companies fail to take into consideration that they've developed this great system, but then they've failed to look at the person who's operating the system, the person who has information about the system -- his background and how much that person can be trusted. Companies hire people today with very little background checking; they're put into positions or they earn their way up to positions where they can do something to harm or cheat that company. So we have to pay a lot more attention to that weak link -- the human part of the system.
---

I do agree with the importance of knowing who's working for you. But he makes it sound like there were more background checks years ago than today. This strikes as quite odd, given things such as post-9-11 emphases on background checks and the expansion of positions for which a background check is required. Perhaps it is the phrase "very little background checking" that is the misleading.

The problem is not the amount of checks but how good they are. Abagnale may be thinking of earlier, less mobile eras, when it was likely people would know a job applicant personally or, at least know people who knew the applicant.

Many background checks today rely primarily upon databases and this is a mingled deal. There is more accessible data, but what does the available data really tell about the person? No hits on criminal records checks may seem good but the full data might not be available for the search. The searches tell little about the person's character. How does the person deal with conflict? How mature is the person? How does the person deal with alluring temptations? (In some instances, people with clean records become crooks on the job because they face temptations they never had before in their lives. Before the particular work position, they had nothing valuable to steal and sell.) Perhaps the person is a scoundrel who knows how not to get caught committing a recordable offence.

Then there is the problem that the data might not be really connect with the person. Mismatched data or impersonation can make things difficult both for employers hiring a false negative and for innocent people hit with false positives.

J.D. Abolins