Schneier on Security

DC • January 19, 2010 9:21 PM

I’m not a criminal for two reasons:

1. Morals etc — though I’m quite willing to break minor/dumb laws if I’m not hurting anyone by it.
   In my state, oral sex with your wife is a felony. Come on.
2. The amount of mental work and constant preparedness it takes to be successful. I already do that, but already make much more than most crooks do because of it.

I’ve known a number of pro crooks (not organized types though).

Criminals fail because they don’t plan ahead much, they are “animals” in that regard, usually (not in the other sense, many are quite non-violent). Mostly they get caught because they are dumber than the cops, which is sometimes a challenge to be, but the cops can stay on it — they don’t have to worry the next meal and so forth like a small time crook does — who usually lacked even the ambition to commit a crime until finances were dire. So though the cops can grind slow, and not too smart, they have persistence and win that way more often than not. If for no other reason, that type of crook keeps having to do it over and over, and will someday get unlucky (perhaps not as spectacularly so as the the guy who tried to rob a gun store in Arizona after tripping over the cop car parked outside).

As far as high value and white collar crime, isn’t it interesting that even in high value cases the crook gets sent to a country club prison (usually getting out early for good behavior), while knocking over the local liquor store for a couple hundred bucks gets you years hard time, even if no one was badly hurt?

The very little contact I’ve ever had with organized crime made me want to stay far far away, as was mentioned above, they don’t need to fire up the cop shop, that would just lower the value of something they already own. Maybe without even the knowledge of the cops inside, probably even. It goes pretty high up and someone has to prioritize what the line cops do each day — some things just never make the list.

I know some of this because I live in a very remote place that is often used by criminals to hide out or live in, no people, no cops etc — safe. I’ve found it useful to befriend them rather than have them as enemies, and as a result I don’t have troubles with minor thefts and so on. Perhaps being a shooting champion has a similar effect — I seem like someone not very profitable to mess with, even dangerous, and most of my possessions aren’t easy to sell someone at a profit with low risk. When they try to fence something to me, I give them honest work instead. They don’t like it too much sometimes (I don’t give them the easy work to do, but stuff I’d rather not do myself, like roofing say), but I’ve found that most of them simply lack other opportunities for income and are grateful for the work. Kind of a protection scheme in a way, except in this case the protection (of me) is very real and very effective. I’d rather see most of these guys than the local cops, because there is honor among thieves the cops don’t seem to have.

As a result, the only thefts I’ve experienced have been done by the cops themselves — stealing the license plates (dead) off my trick go kart when responding to a wreck, taking all the medicine and my tools for vet work from my house on a drug bust where there were no illegal drugs present, and things like that, a pita and of course, you never get that stuff back, it’s “evidence” though of no crime — on some cops garage wall added to his cool collection of dead plates or someone using a plastic syringe (the kind you can’t put a needle on) that I use to put ear medicine into cats for a turkey baster or something. Or cool glassware (quite expensive) from my chemistry lab that had nothing in it at all, because it’s pretty — the cops are the thieves here, not the crooks.

And this is the good old USA.

Yes, that’s all factual, and provable.