Serious Crime Mega Trends – The Problems
The world is in a period of unprecedented social, political and economic change. This creates new opportunities for growth and prosperity for one of the most entrepreneurial and responsive sectors of the economy – the crime sector.
Sustainable competitive advantage is often won by entrepreneurs who find global opportunities where mega trends clash or cross over. And this is exactly what today’s serious criminals have done. Unlike recent crime generations who have largely iterated on old crime themes, this new generation has transformed the serious crime sector.
These four crime mega trends will see organized crime networks, cyber criminals and terrorists own the high ground for the foreseeable future:
1. Decline of traditional crime in developed countries
- Volume crime such as burglary is being designed out (e.g. home security, car immobilizers, smart phone tracking)
- Domestic crime agencies in developed countries are shifting their focus to violent crime prevention (family violence, child abuse, homicide, gun crime) and targeting repeat offenders to reduce long term custodial and social costs
- This new focus is driving demand for multi and cross agency collaboration (social welfare, police, corrections) to stop high risk offenders and protect at-risk victims
- Traditional or “old crime” enforcement agencies are transforming and re-tooling into intelligence-led “new crime” prevention agencies
2. Growth of trans-national and serious organized crime
- There will be continued growth in the trans-national trafficking of drugs, guns, humans, CBRN and laundering of money
- We will see a rapid expansion of organized crime taking advantage of mobile phone and social media networks “going dark” and increasingly leveraging the secret (deep) web economy
- Organized crime financial objectives and terrorist political objectives will merge, creating a self sustaining global economy
3. Globalization of new generation terrorism
- The emergence and rapid growth of self-funded, professional, deep rooted terrorist organizations will continue
- They will systemize operations using social media as global command-and-control tools (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp)
- Intelligence agencies will get increased powers but there will be challenges implementing new oversight legislation in response to public privacy and security concerns
- Security agencies will be unable to reliably detect, intercept and manage persons of interest due to immature risk management systems, data sharing and identity resolution failures
4. Rise and proliferation cyber warfare
- Governments and corporates will acknowledge that cyber crime is a growing, unsolvable problem
- Large scale theft of intellectual property, compromise of critical national infrastructure and espionage will be exposed
- At risk organisations will accept that traditional network perimeter security has been ineffective and new cyber intelligence approaches will be adopted
- Investment in zero day capability by East, West, corporate and hactivist actors will escalate into a cyber arms race
- Weapons of mass disruption will replace weapons of mass destruction
This post was written and first published by Craig Richardson, CEO Wynyard Group in his blog on LinkedIn on 27th Jan 2015. This can be accesses by clicking HERE
