FUTURE CRIMES

From our mobile phones and ubiquitous Facebook accounts to the impending arrival of self-driving cars, the more we incorporate assailable technologies into our world, the more vulnerable we become. THE GLOBAL HACK will give readers a deep understanding of the mostly invisible changes that every one of us encounters every day of our lives.

Marc Goodman can see into the future. He has witnessed Ocean's Eleven-style teams of criminals coming together to build their own drones and quad copters to fly drugs and weapons into prisons. He saw criminal hackers taking control of cars fifty yards away—deploying the airbags and slamming on the brakes. And he witnessed a multitude of stalkers and industrial spies remotely activating cell phone cameras to spy on people through their own mobile devices. Goodman, FBI Futurist-in-Residence, Chair for Policy, Law & Ethics at Singularity University, Chairman of the Future Crimes Institute and former LAPD police detective, has spent a career at the intriguing, slightly terrifying intersection of science and reality, fighting crime and uncovering nascent threats. In THE GLOBAL HACK, he will open his database of hundreds of real criminal cases to weave together a fascinating story of impending perils that will engross, alarm (as did his recent TED talk, voted among the top two talks of 2012 “most likely to freak-out” the TED community) and ultimately, empower any intelligent reader. THE GLOBAL HACK is much more than a treatise on the latest threats from criminals and terrorists. Rather, it is about the society we are building – a society in which there never will be a network that can’t and won’t be hacked – and the common future we are creating for ourselves as individuals, for our families and for humanity. We are plugging more and more of our lives into a global information grid that is inherently insecure and at risk. THE GLOBAL HACK is neither a journalistic account nor a technical treatise on cybercrime and hacking. Rather, it invites readers into the rare mind of a grounded street cop, global security operative and Silicon Valley entrepreneur fluent in the language and science of emerging technologies. The result is a compelling glimpse into our future from someone who has spent his life in law enforcement and counterterrorism. Goodman, featured on the cover of last month’s Wired (UK) magazine, will extrapolate from what he’s seen and lived first-hand, applying that knowledge to help us solve the technological tsunami of surveillance and crime that is a clear and present danger to us all. He will provide readers with the tools and understanding they need to survive the technological progress we’ve all been promised and unravel the risks associated with how we share data and over-rely on technology. Moreover, he will offer a call to arms for countering the looming technological threats before we find ourselves in the eye of a storm.