s3raphita sez: > > Re I haven't been following all this, but you remind me that > I wanted to comment earlier that sadly your idea of The > Assassination Bureau is old news. Reality has been there, > done that.: > > I didn't know that! But then I don't subscribe to Soldier of > Fortune.
I didn't subscribe, but I certainly read it from time to time. It's probably a guy thing. That, and growing up of draft age in that era, and seeing many friends go to Vietnam and come back basket cases. Some of those basket cases wanted to put the skills they had learned in the Army -- killing people -- to use, and get paid for it. > Of course, my point was more about how feasible it would > be in our connected age to set up as a crime lord and yet > be untraceable by the police. It certainly seems to be getting > closer. If you can act as a middleman for others to commit > the crime and yet take your cut without worrying about the > law it sounds like the much-sought after (by crime fiction > writers) Perfect Murder. It's a complex situation, but I would be willing to bet that such Internet crime lords already exist, and to some extent free of worrying about being caught by the police or the Feds. Take modern drug lords, for example. They're richer than the cops trying to chase them, and they can hire better hackers than the guvmint can because they pay more. But many of them manage to get caught anyway. Go figure. A lot of them get caught through sheer hubris, but a few get caught because the guvmint hackers figured out their communications encryption before their own hackers had noticed. There's meat for a TV series in all of this. I mean, the nitty- gritty of the War On Drugs is being fought by nerds on both sides of the border. :-)
