of crime and terrorism,

and frankly, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid by what I see.

I sincerely want to believe

that technology can bring us

the techno-utopia that we've been promised,

but, you see,

I've spent a career in law enforcement,

and that's informed my perspective on things.

I've been a street police officer,

an undercover investigator,

a counter-terrorism strategist,

and I've worked in more than 70 countries

around the world.

I've had to see more than my fair share

of violence and the darker underbelly of society,

and that's informed my opinions.

My work with criminals and terrorists

has actually been highly educational.

They have taught me a lot, and I'd like to be able

to share some of these observations with you.

Today I'm going to show you the flip side

of all those technologies that we marvel at,

the ones that we love.

In the hands of the TED community,

these are awesome tools which will bring about

great change for our world,

but in the hands of suicide bombers,

the future can look quite different.

I started observing

technology and how criminals were using it

as a young patrol officer.

In those days, this was the height of technology.

Laugh though you will,

all the drug dealers and gang members

with whom I dealt had one of these

long before any police officer I knew did.

Twenty years later, criminals are still using

mobile phones, but they're also building

their own mobile phone networks,

like this one, which has been deployed

in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos.

They have a national encrypted

radio communications system.

Think about that.

Think about the innovation that went into that.

Think about the infrastructure to build it.

And then think about this:

Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter)

How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause)

We consistently underestimate

what criminals and terrorists can do.

Technology has made our world

increasingly open, and for the most part,

that's great, but all of this openness

may have unintended consequences.

Consider the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai.

The men that carried that attack out were armed

with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades.

They threw these hand grenades

at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes

and waited to catch trains on their way home from work.

But heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations.

Guns and bombs are nothing new.

What was different this time

is the way that the terrorists used

modern information communications technologies

to locate additional victims and slaughter them.

They were armed with mobile phones.

They had BlackBerries.

They had access to satellite imagery.

They had satellite phones, and they even had night vision goggles.

But perhaps their greatest innovation was this.

We've all seen pictures like this

on television and in the news. This is an operations center.

And the terrorists built their very own op center

across the border in Pakistan,

where they monitored the BBC,

al Jazeera, CNN and Indian local stations.

They also monitored the Internet and social media

to monitor the progress of their attacks

and how many people they had killed.

They did all of this in real time.

The innovation of the terrorist operations center

gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness

and tactical advantage over the police

and over the government.

What did they do with this?

They used it to great effect.

At one point during the 60-hour siege,

the terrorists were going room to room

trying to find additional victims.

They came upon a suite on the top floor

of the hotel, and they kicked down the door

and they found a man hiding by his bed.

And they said to him, "Who are you,

and what are you doing here?"

And the man replied,

"I'm just an innocent schoolteacher."

Of course, the terrorists knew

that no Indian schoolteacher stays at a suite in the Taj.

They picked up his identification,

and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room,

where the terrorist war room Googled him,

and found a picture and called their operatives

on the ground and said,

"Your hostage, is he heavyset?

Is he bald in front? Does he wear glasses?"

"Yes, yes, yes," came the answers.

The op center had found him and they had a match.

He was not a schoolteacher.

He was the second-wealthiest businessman in India,

and after discovering this information,

the terrorist war room gave the order

to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai.

("Kill him.")

We all worry about our privacy settings

on Facebook,

but the fact of the matter is,

our openness can be used against us.

Terrorists are doing this.

A search engine can determine

who shall live and who shall die.

This is the world that we live in.

During the Mumbai siege,

terrorists were so dependent on technology

that several witnesses reported that

as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand,

they were checking their mobile phone messages

in the very other hand.

In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded

and over 172 men, women and children

lost their lives that day.

Think about what happened.

During this 60-hour siege on Mumbai,

10 men armed not just with weapons,

but with technology,

were able to bring a city of 20 million people

to a standstill.

Ten people brought 20 million people

to a standstill, and this traveled around the world.

This is what radicals can do with openness.

This was done nearly four years ago.

What could terrorists do today

with the technologies available that we have?

What will they do tomorrow?

The ability of one to affect many

is scaling exponentially,

and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil.

It's not just about terrorism, though.

There's also been a big paradigm shift in crime.

You see, you can now commit more crime as well.

In the old days, it was a knife and a gun.

Then criminals moved to robbing trains.

You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation.

Moving forward, the Internet

allowed things to scale even more.

In fact, many of you will remember

the recent Sony PlayStation hack.

In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed.

Think about that.

When in the history of humanity

has it ever been possible for one person

to rob 100 million?

Of course, it's not just about stealing things.

There are other avenues of technology

that criminals can exploit.

Many of you will remember this super cute video

from the last TED,

but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute.

They don't all have drumsticks.

Some can be armed with HD cameras

and do countersurveillance on protesters,

or, as in this little bit of movie magic,

quadcopters can be loaded with firearms

and automatic weapons.

Little robots are cute when they play music to you.

When they swarm and chase you down the block

to shoot you, a little bit less so.

Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first

to give guns to robots. We know where that started.

But they're adapting quickly.

Recently, the FBI arrested

an al Qaeda affiliate in the United States,

who was planning on using these remote-controlled

drone aircraft to fly C4 explosives

into government buildings in the United States.

By the way, these travel at over 600 miles an hour.

Every time a new technology is being introduced,

criminals are there to exploit it.

We've all seen 3D printers.

We know with them that you can print

in many materials ranging from plastic

to chocolate to metal and even concrete.

With great precision

I actually was able to make this

just the other day, a very cute little ducky.

But I wonder to myself,

for those people that strap bombs to their chests

and blow themselves up,

how might they use 3D printers?

Perhaps like this.

You see, if you can print in metal,

you can print one of these,

and in fact

you can also print one of these too.

The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws.

You needn't bring the gun into the UK anymore.

You just bring the 3D printer

and print the gun while you're here,

and, of course, the magazines for your bullets.

But as these get bigger in the future,

what other items will you be able to print?

The technologies are allowing bigger printers.

As we move forward,

we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things.

Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives

to the Internet, which means

that the Internet of Things will soon be

the Internet of Things To Be Hacked.

All of the physical objects in our space

are being transformed into information technologies,

and that has a radical implication for our security,

because more connections to more devices

means more vulnerabilities.

Criminals understand this.

Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this.

If you control the code, you control the world.

This is the future that awaits us.

There has not yet been an operating system

or a technology that hasn't been hacked.

That's troubling, since the human body itself

is now becoming an information technology.

As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs.

Every year, thousands of cochlear implants,

diabetic pumps, pacemakers

and defibrillators are being implanted in people.

In the United States, there are 60,000 people

who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet.

The defibrillators allow a physician at a distance

to give a shock to a heart

in case a patient needs it.

But if you don't need it,

and somebody else gives you the shock,

it's not a good thing.

Of course, we're going to go even deeper than the human body.

We're going down to the cellular level these days.

Up until this point, all the technologies

I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes,

but there's another operating system out there:

the original operating system, DNA.

And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system

waiting to be hacked.

It's a great challenge for them.

There are people already working on hacking the software of life,