Crime and Control The Future of Computer Crime The previous
chapter discussed computer crime but its subject was metaphor.
This time it is crime. THE PAST AS PROLOGUE In the early years,
computers were large stand-alone machines; most belonged to
governments, large firms, or universities. Frequently they were
used by those organizations to control important real-world
actions – writing checks, keeping track of orders, delivering
goods. The obvious tactic for computer criminals was to get
access to those machines and change the information they
contained – creating fictitious orders and using them to have
real goods delivered, arranging to have checks written in
payment for nonexistent services,1 or, if the computer was used
by a bank, transferring money from other people’s accounts to
their own. As time passed, it became increasingly common for
large machines to be accessible from offsite over telephone
lines. That was an improvement from the standpoint of the
criminal. Instead of having to gain admission to