Entry 3:

After a light breakfast, I head over to the conference hall to give my speech. In dress, these law enforcement and intelligence types make accountants look like Marilyn Manson. I look out at various tones of dark suit, some of them filled by very fit former SAS types, and others by the more dangerous species, the rumpled academic. The few women have adopted the coloration of the males. Before coming over, I had an epiphany of sorts. For all the dour pronouncements by various participants about threats of corruption, organized crime, cyberterrorism, and the like, I realized that I was probably the most pessimistic (or, as I prefer, realistic) person at the LE&NS conference.

I believe that there are far larger forces than crime threatening instability, phenomena that are so deep and intractable that we will not be able to avoid their effects. These forces (developed in The Future in Plain Sight) include environmental changes such as climate shifts and ecosystem fragmentation, as well as profoundly destabilizing aspects of such economic and social phenomena as the wage gap, the integrated global economy, and infectious disease. Still, I left out present-day preoccupations such as toxic pollution (I may have been wrong about that) and crime, precisely because I felt that through technological change or because public alarm mobilizes politicians, society could come to grips with these problems.

I offer this meager good news, and then, after laying out my argument, discuss a few ways in which these various forces might affect law enforcement and national security. In an unstable world, for instance, people take out insurance of various types. Some forms of insurance—e.g., strengthening family ties—will probably act as a brake on community-level crime. Other ways people seek insurance, such as the embrace of radical religious fundamentalisms, can exacerbate instability. The unstable world I envision is very different than the information age wonderland commonly projected. Amid instability there is less innovation and deployment of new technologies—a counterintuitive idea for those, like this audience, who see high technology continuing to metastasize through society.

The talk seems to go well (Gillian, at least, comes through with a thumbs up), and while my imagined rumpled academic nemesis never appears, there is a near miss. One man rises and asks me to comment on the idea that the truly profound long-term force for instability has been individualism, which has gathered force in the centuries following the Renaissance. It's an interesting question that I'm still pondering (I'm submitting these diaries a few days after the events because the conference schedule was weighted toward the end of the week). Whatever role individualism plays in creating instability, I reply that an unstable world would become less hospitable to individualism as societies turned inward.

With my talk behind me, I enjoy a walk through the exhibits and booths. They do not disappoint. Aviation Security International has a handout on hijack management for cabin crews. Bullet points on the sheet include such topics as "preparing for the nightmare scenario." Nearby is the eSecurity Services booth of Buchanan International. As a backdrop the exhibit sports a large poster that shows two affectless people staring emptily at each other across a bare table. I ask the Buchanan representative what it means, and he shrugs, saying, "One visitor told me it depicted the typical British marriage." At the booth for Britain's National High-Tech Crime Unit (motto: "Cybercrime. Real crime. Real victims."), Jim Devery of theIntelligence Study Centre gives me the news that most companies learn that they have suffered an intrusion only when NHTCU or its equivalent elsewhere tells them so.

Such lurkers are the real threat of cybercrime, apparently. Almost everyone at the conference dismisses the importance of the juvenile attention-getting hacker pranks that garner the most press coverage. Rather than attention, the cybercriminal wants to install a virtual agent, monitoring the activities of a business or critical system until it is time to act. Eric Goetz, of Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies, estimates that there are now about 200 people in the world with the skills to bring down society's IT integuments.

The threats of cybercrime and cyberterrorism are major themes of the conference. Mark Shaw, director of eSecurity for Buchanan, lays out a scenario in which cybermalefactors aggregate into ever larger associations—going from "true believers" to "tribes" and then "nations"—until by 2005 they have the pooled skills to penetrate and take command of some critical installation, such as a French nuclear power plant. There is much discussion of the unique attributes of a cybergang where members don't need to physically convene to attack.

Tom Longstaff, who was part of a White House task force on the vulnerability of critical computer networks, thinks that the loose structure of these groups may make them hard to crack, but it provides another reason they haven't yet crippled an economy: They don't pool information and thus are slow to identify truly vital targets. When asked whether it is wise to recruit and hire cyber-attackers, he offers an emphatic no, noting "the magnets of their moral compass are extremely weak and can be shifted," often by a bigger paycheck.

Paranoids would have a field day chatting with this group. Deadly cyberlurkers might already be in place. The trafficking in slave labor and women is flourishing. Cyber terrorist armies are just around the corner, as are genetically engineered killer pathogens. The delegates here are not paranoids, however, but civil servants and businessmen who probe criminal and terrorist organizations for their weak points—ties with the licit world, support organizations, the vagaries of human psychology.

"Don't look for James Bond's SPECTRE to take over the world" is one message. Mafias might bring down nations, but they want to feed off them, not run them. Raymond Kendall, the honorary secretary general of Interpol points out that these groups have their own risk assessment and their weak points, such as their dependence on outside service providers.

There is some good news. Douglas Morton, the deputy chief of intelligence of the DEA, says that Mexico is still the toughest place in the world to find trustworthy counterparts (he liked Traffic, by the way), but President Vicente Fox is making the best effort yet to get control of Mexico's drug-infected law enforcement infrastructure.

The depth and breadth of expertise on display at the conference does not reassure me that I will be up to tomorrow's panel on crime and migration. Gillian and I head off for the zoo and then a hike in the hills.