> anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices running open source software which at least wouldn't be trivially systematically turned against them all at once quite so easily
Tradeoffs. Traditional tradecraft would inhibit such discovery methods. But it's slow and expensive. Your competitors would outmaneuver you in the short term.
To enable the "kid who knows computers," you also need to train your people in opsec and digital sanitation. That might similarly be expensive and growth inhibiting enough to invite more daring competition.
To add, we are just looking at one of a thousand aspects of tradecraft. They aren’t just dealing with this. They are dealing with moving goods, moving goods across borders, in person meetings, transferring money, recruiting new members, avoiding physical police bugs, avoiding police tails, securing good and money against other criminals, and on and on and on. Each one of those things has a learning curve and takes time, energy, and money.
Of course after a bust, you could go back and say “well obviously they should have done this differently and doubled their security here” but they can’t double their security everywhere and they can’t know every single possible way that every single aspect of everything could become compromised.
Nothing wrong with inhibiting growth in return for long term stability. Does it matter if your competition is more daring—if they aren't going to last very long? If anything, they might serve as a useful distraction.
> Nothing wrong with inhibiting growth in return for long term stability
For long-term plans to pay off, they must survive a series of short terms. Criminal gangs and dictators don’t ignore the long term because they’re stupid. They ignore them because they must. A drug gang practicing classical tradecraft would be decimated by one coördinating electronically. The latter will be caught faster. But a series of short-term motivated actors is the equilibrium state of illicit and physical trading systems.
I can't help but imagine that what you're describing are the criminal gangs we know about; the ones which are well documented. If there are criminal gangs which we don't know about, that aren’t well documented, perhaps they're better at maintaining long term stability.
Your thinking like a lifestyle business criminal enterprise when you should be thinking like a hungry startup. If you go slow and steady someone will try and eat your lunch. Big criminal enterprises have all the same scaling issues that regular companies do.
Yes, we are seeing precisely this in action. The short term guided organization has gone down and the long term stable strategy remains uncaught and now has one less competitor.
Tradeoffs. Traditional tradecraft would inhibit such discovery methods. But it's slow and expensive. Your competitors would outmaneuver you in the short term.
To enable the "kid who knows computers," you also need to train your people in opsec and digital sanitation. That might similarly be expensive and growth inhibiting enough to invite more daring competition.