Even the best technologies have unintended consequences, and the benefits are seldom spread uniformly. And this is before the new technology is misused for harmful ends, as it inevitably will be. In the 1700s, soon after Ben Franklin created the postal service in the United States, criminals invented mail fraud. In the 1800s, with the telegraph and the telephone, criminals invented wire fraud. In the twentieth century, when technologists invented the internet, it was apparent to anyone who knew history that the invention of new forms of fraud was unavoidable.
