An ‘Iceberg’ of Unseen Crimes: Many Cyber Offenses Go Unreported

it also has to involve looking at what is classified as a crime. Today priorities are often tilted in the wrong direction and resources misapplied. This article has some of that in it... The Fentanyl epidemic. 30+ years of the war on drugs as proved that Drug Addiction can be be solved with the criminal system, even the most charitable understanding of the research points to laws have no effect on use or abuse, and if you look at it realistically you can find substantive arguments for criminal enforcement being directly leading to increase death not to mention other negative effects.

However there is a ocean of federal funding, external resources, Civil Forfeiture and political capital to be spent on the Drug War, Local police depts will have their budgets flush in cash to go hard on drugs.... However to go over iphone thefts, or ID Fraud, or Property Crimes, or even non-drug related violent crimes it is a cost to the local dept...

In order to police work effectively, they need incentives to redirect their resources off of drugs and on to the other crimes... We as society also need to accept that the criminal war on drugs is a failure and always will be, it needs to be a medical and social battle, not a criminal one.

The best thing we can do for crime and drug addiction, is to stop treating drugs as a crime

No kidding. A world with zero crime can be nothing but an authoritarian dystopia.

Just as with encryption, having backdoors for some good guys (cops) puts other good guys (dissidents) at risk from bad guys (repressive regimes).

On the other hand, encryption can also be used by companies to oppress and control their users ("walled gardens", DRM, and the like.)

Maybe the underlying philosophy here is that absolutism is never good, regardless of intention...

To secure a computer system, you have to find and patch all of its vulnerabilities, as well as distribute your patch to every node in the network. It's like what Maggie Thatcher said about terrorism. If the defender messes up even one time, the attacker wins. So the amount of effort that the attacker needs is much, much smaller than what the defender needs.

Compare that to a European country without America's easy access to guns. Crime is always cheaper than law enforcement, but in a country without ubiquitous guns, crime is somewhat cheaper than law enforcement. Online, crime is massively cheaper than law enforcement. That means that crime has a systemic advantage.

Who even hires for cybersecurity, in government? Who has the resources for it? Do local police departments compete with startups for top tech talent? Of course not.

Say you're a small town in Pennsylvania. A woman who lives in your town is being harassed by a loosely affiliated global network of anonymous misogynistic trolls. Is your police department qualified to protect her? This is a major flaw in the police department's ability to fulfill its responsibilities towards its citizenry and taxpayers, and we haven't even added black hat hackers to the equation yet.

In a hacking situation, the defender needs to coordinate an entire network, to make sure everybody's using the latest patches, while the attacker can operate solo, which eliminates organizational overhead. Yet attackers can and do share information about attack vectors. The decentralization that network technology makes possible is very favorable for attackers. Meanwhile, most of our infrastructure runs on languages that are extremely difficult to secure, even without questions of coordination.

This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law. Some of these problems can be addressed by modifying which agencies are responsible for which types of problems. But the economic aspects are fundamental. Crime is cheaper than enforcement and security by orders of magnitude. Few people are qualified to secure these systems, and many of them can make more money by penetrating them. For every brilliant hacker who moves to the US and starts another Google, there are a hundred who are stuck in Estonia, where their best bet is stealing credit card numbers or breaking into Bitcoin exchanges. The profit potential there is literally in the billions; even Silicon Valley has a hard time competing with that.

These incentives are inherently dangerous, and that is unlikely to change.