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What If Crime Were Impossible

By: Neal Wagner

I've long been fascinated by the simple question: "What If Crime Were Impossible?" It brings to mind all sorts of approaches, as for example in the following scenario:

Stolen TV: Picture yourself as a petty criminal who just stole a television set from someone's house. You take it to your fence, who gives you the bad news: "Sorry, Joe, but this doesn't work." You are outraged. "What? I even turned it on before I stole it. Why won't it work now?" "I don't know, but it's the latest gimmick, and this TV will not work outside the house you stole it from." "And how does it decide it's not still in that house?" "How the hell should I know? But don't tell me to get it reconfigured. If you don't have the password, you'd need to replace the whole circuit board. That costs far more than it's worth."

Even a dumb burglar will quit stealing things that don't work and are worth nothing. But how could you build in such a gimmick? There are several ways, and for all I know, it may already have been done. Most devices now have a computer at their heart. The manufacturer could set up a secret password to access the special features. Then they could use a GPS chip, and program the device to work only if it's close to the stored location. Or they could have the house broadcast a special code to activate all devices. The code could be an encrypted version of the date and time, to keep someone from just recording and replaying this code.

This shows the benefits of making crime impossible -- eliminating the whole process: the crime, the detection and capture, the prosecution, and the punishment.

At the core of my proposals for impossible crime are three key concepts:

1. Open access to information about activities in public. (In order to have information to access, one would need to gather and save data about all public activities.)
2. Empowered free speech.
3. Guaranteed privacy of activities in private. (You can always retreat to your home or other private space to enjoy privacy, and you can always communicate with others in private.)

Let's try another scenario:

Pollution: Suppose you are worried about pollution of the groundwater by leaks and spills of gasoline and other hydrocarbons. First you put floating meters inside tanks to detect the onset of any gasoline leak. This would allow you to fix the leak before any significant spill. Then you put detectors at a number of places in the groundwater. In this way you have an early indication of pollution and can seek out the source and try to halt it. Finally, you use trace amounts of "marker" contaminants in the gasoline, a different mixture for each source, and compare the "fingerprints" on a pollution sample with those on the various sources. In this way, after the pollution, you can identify the source to hold it accountable.

Here you are not always making the "crime" of pollution impossible, but in the second case only stopping ongoing pollution, and in the third case determining the guilty party after the fact. Also the fear of such detection might discourage a polluter from this activity.

I picture a world configured like a large modern airplane, with sensors and gauges measuring as much as possible. When such data is monitored, one eliminates many unpleasant surprises, and the monitoring itself can be computer automated.

When people hear proposals like these, there is an immediate fear of a "big brother" surveillance society, and I do indeed propose extensive surveillance in public. But these fears are part of the reasons for Items 2 and 3 above: to keep the surveillance out of private areas and to allow free and open discussion of all that is happening.

Here's a final scenario:

Identification: A man gets onto a plane using a forged version of someone else's passport. He does something awful on the plane (steals valuables, say) and parachutes out over a wilderness area, where he escapes. But the government has put into place identification measures that do a double biometric check of all passengers, saving the data. This passenger will never again be able to get onto a plane without being identified as the previous robber.

It's a waste of time to pretend to verify identities, but to do such a bad job of it. We need fool-proof identity verification at all important public activities. There have been past problems with all forms of biometric identification, but these have mostly been overcome.

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