Tradeoffs. Traditional tradecraft would inhibit such discovery methods. But it's slow and expensive. Your competitors would outmaneuver you in the short term.
To enable the "kid who knows computers," you also need to train your people in opsec and digital sanitation. That might similarly be expensive and growth inhibiting enough to invite more daring competition.
For long-term plans to pay off, they must survive a series of short terms. Criminal gangs and dictators don’t ignore the long term because they’re stupid. They ignore them because they must. A drug gang practicing classical tradecraft would be decimated by one coördinating electronically. The latter will be caught faster. But a series of short-term motivated actors is the equilibrium state of illicit and physical trading systems.
Any criminal activities needs customers and so communicate about its activities.
Of course after a bust, you could go back and say “well obviously they should have done this differently and doubled their security here” but they can’t double their security everywhere and they can’t know every single possible way that every single aspect of everything could become compromised.
There's a reason that classified processing and data storage employs layered physical security too. There's that old saying about what happens when you give someone physical access to the machine.
Shipping coordinators got busted? How sad.
Over my life Ive met people who while they seem competent and can tie their shoe laces appear to make bad decisions because they have trouble with judging likely outcomes. Those are the people getting hired to do this sort of work.
I'd bet good money that the truth is usually quite banal: these individuals make a series of small and highly contingent decisions over time that gradually push them in the direction of criminality or culpability, reinforced over time by social & financial reward for doing so.
I imagine that most layers are just doing their job and getting paid for it. Bringing morality into that equation makes no sense in a legal system that has little to nothing to do with morality.
I bet you change your mind about the ethics of having a lawyer represent you.
The standards of ethics they are checked against are not yours or mine, they are the rules they agreed to. To pretend like ethics aren't a thing for lawyers is surprisingly uninformed for HN.
Unless you are the sort of person that claims that reality is just an opinion, too, in which case you should also study formal philosophy.
Ethics is a matter of philosophy, which has a bit more going for it than just being composed of raw, uneducated opinion.
You are thinking of morals. That is a matter of opinion
A system that didn't need to hold a trial or give the mob boss a lawyer would be irredeemably immoral but one in which they go free is a shittier world. I don't envy anyone trying to remain moral while walking that line. I don't see how anyone who specialized in such clients could live with themselves.
There's more unemployed tech people out there than many here realize though. People that don't present well in interviews, people that didn't stay employ-ably current in tech, hardware guys replaced by the cloud, people in less hot locations for tech, etc. Criminal organizations are much less picky and judgmental than your average tech startup and in some cases may be the only one's willing to give them a chance.
Those are the worst. There was this one candidate who gave all the interviewers mousepads with his picture and aol email address on it. Who even wants that kind of stuff? The best ones give some candy, like there was someone who gave us gum with a custom printed wrapper “Hope I ‘stick’ in your mind!”
For what it's worth, I would still be completely unemployable in France despite having 7 years of successful commercial experience under my belt in some well-known companies. Thankfully I played my cards right and managed to move to a saner country where tech is still more or less a meritocracy.
These people are organised in that they make deals with each other in friend networks. But the people involved are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They get their positions via violence and intimidation more than cunning and planning.
There are cleaver crooks, but we do not often hear from them. A lot of them work at Wall Street, which contains the biggest and most profitable criminal gangs
These ones, who were busted, are greedy violent thugs. They do not know who to trust because they are untrustworthy.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Most if not all markets until now have been run by geeks with limited knowledge and skills, wading in to the criminal underworld and inevitably making rookie mistakes.
Both Ross and the guy in Bangkok had their personal emails tied to the markets. Some kids running a big market from Germany connected to the server on their mom's wifi. The list goes on.
Imagine being responsible for facilitating murder-for-hire, sex trafficking and so on...
If you want that to change you have to make it illegal to do business with such folks not hope consumers fix it for you via the magic of the market.
I think it's also more jarring that diamonds are otherwise useless symbols of status. At least iphones trickle down in some way (e.g. allowing the proliferation of older gen smartphones even in poor countries).
You need to be either professional criminal (skill set completely orthogonal to IT, so chance of somebody possessing both at professional level is miniscule), or a moron.
Parallel reconstruction is the phrase you're after.
The guy in Bangkok had his personal email in reply-to headers of the the "welcome" emails being sent out. If that wasn't true, everyone who received the mail could have proven that.
Parallel reconstruction may have been a occurred, it's true we won't know.