Future Crimes — Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

Goodman opens with a memorable anecdote: in 1995, a 28-year-old investigator at the LAPD, his sergeant yells across the detective squad room to ask whether he knows how to spell-check in WordPerfect. He answers «Ctrl+F2» — and that very day lands his first computer crime case. After this comic start the tone turns serious: the author describes Mexican cartels building their own encrypted cellular networks and criminals staying a step ahead of the police, and calls himself not a fearmonger but «an irrational optimist».

The book's central thesis fits in one sentence: «When everything is connected, everyone is vulnerable.» Goodman stresses that he is no Luddite and believes technology can be the greatest force for good, but says Silicon Valley entrepreneurs pay little attention to the public, legal and security risks of their products. He ends the prologue with Morpheus's red-pill line from The Matrix: after these pages, you will never look at your car, your phone or your vacuum cleaner the same way again.

Chapter one begins with the 2012 hacking of Wired journalist Mat Honan: within hours his entire digital life, including photos of his newborn daughter, is wiped. Goodman then zooms out: power grids, air traffic control, fire dispatch systems, even elevators depend on computers — «Is there a Plan B for humanity? As you might guess, there isn't.» The comparison with the Westphalian system is interesting too: state borders work in the physical world, but bits and bytes flow through no customs at all.

The clearest explanation is the bank-robbery comparison. A criminal robbing a Times Square bank leaves fingerprints, DNA and camera footage, and is limited by the weight of cash and exploding dye packs. In 1994, however, Vladimir Levin stole $10.7 million from Citibank from his home in St Petersburg without ever setting foot in the US. Who has jurisdiction — the US, Russia, or Finland and Israel, where the money went? Goodman shows that this «country-hopping» is the main reason cybercrime investigations are so hard. The section on Brain, the first PC virus, written in 1986 by two brothers in Lahore, shows how cybercrime grew from «harmless fun» into an industry.

Weaknesses: the book is far too long, and the same message — don't trust technology blindly — is repeated through countless examples. The tone sometimes veers towards sensationalism. Having been written in 2015, it covers major later developments — the ransomware explosion, AI-driven deepfakes — only as predictions. Even so, it is a powerful book for anyone wanting to see the risks of digital life in plain language.

• Real crime stories and anecdotes from police work
• Each chapter shows both the benefits and the abuse of a technology
• Practical recommendations and extensive notes at the end