KEEPING A STEP AHEAD OF CRIME

The frightening side of the technology explosion is that it can be used for
evil as well as good. Most people are familiar with cyber crimes, which
generally involve stealing someone's identity or credit-card number or
stalking someone via the Internet. But crime and technology go way beyond
computers.

Police along the Wasatch Front are having trouble catching methamphetamine
dealers because the dealers have equipped themselves with expensive
surveillance cameras and police scanners. They have guns with laser sights.
They have loyal dogs. As a recent story in this newspaper noted, the whole
idea is to buy the bad guys enough time to make a clean getaway before the
cops arrive.

The Wasatch Front is one of the nation's leaders in the production of
illegal methamphetamine. This may be because lawmakers here were slow to
catch on to the fact they needed to control the flow of certain
over-the-counter chemicals used to make the drug. But whatever the reason,
makeshift drug labs exist here in a variety of places. Often, dealers buy
nice homes in expensive neighborhoods and hope to operate without
generating much suspicion. They use chemicals that are highly combustible,
and they produce drugs that are highly addictive and destructive.

Police are doing an admirable job, but they constantly have to work to
outsmart the crooks.

This struggle with technology is hardly new. Early in the 20th century, the
new-found ability to identify people through fingerprints led people like
Al Capone to constantly — and uselessly — file away at their fingertips to
avoid detection. When credit cards became common, thieves began stealing
numbers and manufacturing their own counterfeit cards. Soon, Visa and
MasterCard began using holograms on their cards, but it didn't take long
for the criminals to buy the machines necessary to make their own
holograms, as well.

The situation promises to get only trickier. This week, the San Francisco
Chronicle reported that researchers at the University of California at
Berkeley are developing tiny, near-microscopic-size computer devices that
could float in the air like dust, gathering and transmitting intelligence.
The good guys want to use this to keep track of troop movements in a war or
to get a better handle on the weather. But the bad guys could easily use it
to spy on people or to stay a step ahead of the law.

Yes, the future could bring all kinds of challenges. But the one sure-fire
advantage police have is that most criminals tend to be, to put it
politely, less intelligent than they are. Criminals, by nature, engage in
reckless behavior and expose themselves to capture. They don't make the
best decisions under stress.

Police have one other advantage, and that is that most people are
law-abiding. The more of those people who become naturally curious and
suspicious about things in their neighborhoods, the better the chances are
that the good guys will triumph.