How technology is transforming crime and terrorism

Over the next two decades, militancy, terrorism, and organized crime will profoundly change as nonstate armed actors adopt many of the same technologies used by conventional armies and everyday society. Criminal and militant groups are already espousing many emerging and existing technologies—using drones for smuggling and violence, artificial intelligence (AI) systems to develop new synthetic drugs, and digital currencies to hide and launder money. In the near future, crime and violence will require much less labor and territory, while causing significant harm across far larger distances and legal jurisdictions. Law enforcement and security forces will need to adapt by integrating the same technologies into their operations, while also balancing the demands of technological surveillance and predictive capabilities with the protection of civil liberties and human rights. A forthcoming companion piece will discuss how policing and anti-terrorism methods may evolve. 

Money without land

For years, the financial foundations, operational logistics, and revenue-driven motives of most organized crime organizations and pro-state militias were inextricably linked to the control of territory.

For groups such as the Islamic State, the Taliban, al-Shabab, Sendero Luminoso (or Shining Path), M23, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the country’s paramilitary autodefensas, physical domination of territory provided access to resources, populations, and trade corridors, enabling them to levy taxes, take over legal economies, and manage illicit ones. Without some form of territorial control or access, financing, logistics, and overall life were harder and much less lucrative.

Today, however, new technologies, such as synthetic drugs production, digital payment systems, AI, and networked devices, are eroding the traditional benefits and reasons for holding territory, especially its role in generating revenue.

AI-enabled scams, online fraud schemes, ransomware operations, and cryptocurrency-based laundering can now yield earnings larger than the taxation of legal or illegal economies. In fact, annual profits from these criminal activities exceed hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars globally each year—and tens to hundreds of billions in the United States alone. Over time, these activities will supplement and increasingly displace more traditional sources of income for criminals and militants.

Similarly, rather than depending on large tracts of land, as is the case with cultivating coca or opium poppy, the manufacture of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine and synthetic opioids, can be clustered in a handful of residential basements, quickly relocated, and cheaply accomplished.

Taxation and extortion are, of course, about much more than money. Such activities are also mechanisms of enforcing psychological control and obedience. These purposes won’t go away, but nonstate armed actors will be less financially dependent on the land itself.

Weapons without smuggling

New and evolving technologies will also bring vital logistical chains and production systems much closer to the operational bases of nonstate armed actors. This shift will lessen their reliance on international smuggling networks and specialized intermediaries, weakening the crime-militancy nexus.

For instance, increasingly effective 3D printing and other forms of additive manufacturing will reduce the need to procure weapons from the illicit international market. In Brazil, some criminal groups are already printing high-power rifles. Beyond the lack of traceability associated with ghost guns, such production offers advantages like self-sufficiency and simplified logistics. 

Attacks without bombs

Some criminal and militant groups may continue to rely on conventional explosives for their shock-and-awe value. Yet a growing share of killings and acts of sabotage will no longer depend on such weapons or on people physically delivering them. Remote platforms, including inexpensive aerial drones—whether military-grade drones leaking from wars or modified commercial models—are making it possible to carry out killings and assassinations from great distances in criminal contexts, not just in wars or insurgencies.

Nor will violence be limited to kamikaze drones dropping from the sky onto targeted government officials or noncompliant extortion victims. With a few keystrokes, attackers can compromise critical infrastructure. Assassinations may be executed by sabotaging individual vehicles or hacking domestic appliances connected to the internet. In-home systems will be penetrated to scope residences for theft and to map the daily routines of intended victims.

Turning ordinary household systems into instruments of lethal harm will vastly expand the tactical options and target sets for terrorists and criminals. Taking away the presumed safety of one’s home will also amplify their terror effects. 

Violence without fighters 

The territorial model of terrorist finance and criminal governance has been highly labor-intensive. Even for criminal groups, it has often depended on large standing forces numbering thousands and even tens of thousands of hitmen and fighters. As everyday objects are turned into explosives and drones are used for killings and territorial control, the number of hitmen and rank-and-file combatants will shrink radically. A single click could cause mass casualties through engineered traffic accidents, while a small team operating coordinated swarms of drones could seize and hold territory in conventional warfare, insurgencies, and criminal takeovers. 

Crime without labor

The labor forces of criminal and militant groups have also included sentinels, community monitors, accountants and tax collectors, shadow governors and judges, and smugglers, cumulatively numbering additional thousands or tens of thousands. Similarly, work in labor-intensive illicit economies, such as the cultivation of illicit crops or scamming victims, has required a labor force in the tens of thousands per locality.

AI systems and other technologies will allow groups to expand their operations without having to enlarge their workforce. A small number of people running automated scams, deepfake-enabled identity fraud, and algorithmic phishing can impact millions of victims at minimal cost. The arrival of synthetic drugs has already reduced the required production labor from tens of thousands to hundreds. Aerial and marine drones will cut the need for human smugglers. Crime and militancy will become far less labor-intensive.

Paradoxically, this shift toward learner criminal operations will occur just as broad segments of the population, including many middle-class professionals, will likely face job losses driven by AI adoption. For years, criminals and militants have gained substantial political capital by acting as employers of those shut out of legal employment. If the new technologies, operational-security concerns, and profit-maximization strategies push them to hire far fewer people, they will forfeit much of this political support and leverage. In turn, they may come to rely far more heavily on coercion to sustain their rule. 

The real estate of value 

Although crime and militancy will become de-territorialized for some, some territories will still matter.

First, for some militant groups, having a rebel state with large land and people to control is their primary goal and infuses their identity.

Second, having access to a physical haven beyond the reach of law enforcement—such as territory shielded by a rival state—will continue to offer significant advantages, as it did for al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the 1990s and as it does today for Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers operating under government protection.

Third, as marine drones advance and are used for smuggling cargo and personnel, the world’s littorals will rise in importance. That doesn’t mean that nonstate armed actors will constantly need to possess long coastlines, but they will benefit from frequent access points.

Fourth, remote violence and digital crime, like the overall digital economy, will depend on physical materials, data centers, and energy flows. Localities rich in critical minerals, rare earth elements, water, energy production, and data infrastructure will be priority targets for a wide range of actors—including nonstate armed actors—seeking to seize, destroy, sabotage, or hold them hostage for leverage. In areas experiencing weak governance and frequent conflict, terrorist and criminal groups may simply seek to replicate existing illicit and corrupt networks, as is evident today in gold mining. 

Data: The most precious asset of all

Data, and the ability to protect or exploit it, will become the most important asset. The capacity to collect information, break into rivals’ systems, and shield one’s own data from hostile breaches will define advantage. High-quality data, and the skill to separate AI “slop” from truly actionable material, will be a premium for terrorists and criminals, as it is for everyone else.

Instead of controlling large territories and managing populations at scale, militants’ and criminals’ offensive and defensive operations will increasingly revolve around dominating digital infrastructure and manipulating information flows.

Law enforcement’s center of gravity 

The fight between security services and illicit actors will pivot toward a contest over data control in a complex, crowded, and highly transparent battlefield. Criminals and militants who can spoof data, for example, by faking the geolocation of their fighters or assets or hijacking the electronic identities of legitimate commercial drones to move contraband, will gain a major edge.

Corrupting and recruiting the data custodians of governments, private-sector firms, and rival groups will also become a top priority for nonstate armed actors, whether through bribery, intimidation, or deepfake trickery. Insider threats will be a key vector of risk.

This struggle over public safety will inevitably fuel fierce public debates and shifting policies over privacy. How much access to one’s bedroom will publics be willing to relegate to governments, law enforcement, and tech companies to secure themselves from criminals and militants? The more public policies can be developed before terrorists or criminals unleash a major shockwave, the more balanced the policy choices will likely be.

Law enforcement and security forces will, of course, be deploying many of the same technologies as terrorists and criminals and developing defenses against them. Although the future of crime and militancy will be faster, closer, and more complicated and dangerous than in the past, the competition between states and nonstate armed actors over who can adopt new technologies more effectively has been playing out over centuries.