> 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone.

Just want to add to this credit card theft (i.e. Target and Home Depot). The rewards are so much higher, and you never have to face someone in person to steal from them.

And you can do it from almost anywhere in the world, including countries that would be very hard to extradite you out of.

Pre-modern Web it would have been far more difficult - nearly impossible - for someone from eastern Europe to steal money from me in any manner.

This is the sort of casual prejudice about eastern europe that I despise. Sure you can probably say something like "well I just picked Eastern Europe at random" but I think we all know that's not the case, and that's a little sad.

Prejudice is not the same as fact and statistics:

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/73391/1/73391.pdf

"Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why. "

I'm only one data point, but I've had three credit cards used maliciously. Each pre-auth for 1 dollar came from a company somewhere in Europe. After my card had been shut off, I would get a call asking about transactions, and they would all start off with that similar transaction.

Perhaps the person stealing the information is based anywhere, but the company commonly issuing the pre-auths is in Europe?

You may despise it, but I think that we can objectively say that Eastern Europe has a significant computer crime scene.

> Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs

In what ways have witness protection programs improved? More money? I can't think of any technological changes that help here and although I have no knowledge of such a think I think social networking would make Witness Protection a lot harder(not just using your old name/putting up pictures/auto face tagging but possibly something invloving your social graph)

Witness protection programs appeared not that long ago, between thirty and forty years ago. I don't think that they are relevant for most street crime, but rather for investigations of organized crime.

> 1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet.

On the other hand, now everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. My friends and I entered Southeast Asia with four phones and left with one. None of our wallets were pickpocketed, but that may just be chance.

iOS 7 devices are bricks when stolen if Find My iPhone is enabled. Android could get there eventually. That might well be a technological problem with a technological solution.