Interview: Bruce Sterling Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

Excerpt from a spirited interview

"Bruce: Man, the current generation of cops is scarily computer-literate. More so than straight people, even. You get busted for anything at all nowadays, and the cops are all over your computers. They're in your smartphone, your Dropbox, your Facebook. They can shovel you off into the slammer without even bothering to talk to you.
Even miserable credit-card coder-thieves are getting hit by RICO charges now. That means that if you're some hacker rip-off artist, and you've got a sock full of Bitcoins hidden somewhere, man, the cops are gonna come to your door with trucks and vans and confiscate every physical object you own. With RICO, they'll raffle that off, and keep the proceeds for themselves. They've got the legal precedents in place now to treat bad-boy hackers just like the Mafia and the Sinaloa drug cartels. Draconian? You bet! Clumsy? Not really."

Interview: Bruce Sterling Answers Your Questions - Slashdot