A rising tide lifts all criminals
The Australian reported today on alarm by Federal police at the opportunities the NBN will provide to cyber-crooks. "The inherent risk of the NBN is that it could facilitate the continual growth and sophistication of online criminal syndicates' ability to commit cyber offences against online systems due to the attractiveness of the increased speed," they said in a submission to a Parliamentary enquiry.
The problems with this line of reasoning should be immediately obvious. When your mission in life is to thwart crime, you apparently start to see all change through the prism of your own job.
Solving and preventing crime is, certainly, easier in a simpler and slower world. The police are right in saying that the NBN will bring new opportunities for crooks. As bandwidth increases, new and complex services will proliferate, more transactions and commerce will occur online, and international boundaries will blur even further. Communications will become more difficult to trace. To the enterprising fraudster, hacker, or even child pornographer, the NBN will be a boon.
It's also true that new roads help bank robbers execute their getaway. Is this an argument against road-building?
