Zócalo Public Square

Internet commerce has boomed in the last decade. Americans alone spend over $150 billion in online transactions, and over 50 million U.S. households bank on the web. But how safe are the sites computer users around the world trust with their most sensitive information, and how precarious is the system? Isolated cases of identity theft and computer viruses fail to capture the vast risk crime poses to the way we use the Internet, and a real public debate has yet to begin. Exploiting systemic security holes and a Wild-West-style lack of governance, supported by governments bent on cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare, and rarely thwarted by law enforcement agencies, organized crime has made the web its main operation, compromising more than half the world’s computers. Journalist Joseph Menn, Technology Correspondent for the Financial Times and author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, visited Zócalo to explain why organized crime threatens the Internet as we