Better Ways to Rob a Bank

This morning the BBC News Web site has a story by Technology Reporter Dave Lee that presents statistics from both the United Kingdom and the United States to the effect that there has been a marked decline in "bank job" armed robberies of banks. This was run as a Tech department story for two reasons. The first is that new technologies have both made bank building safer and made those who attempt such robberies easier to catch. The other, however, is that there is more to be gained from crime in cyberspace than from brick-and-mortar based robberies.

Lee supports this last claim with the recent theft of credit card information from Target. This is what might be called "approved" evidence to make the case. However, it overlooks what might be called "gross semantic evasiveness" when it comes to many of those major losses in capital that led to arguments that governments (meaning, at the end of the day, taxpayers) would have to bail out failing banks. There was a joke that became popular back in those days that never showed up in Lee's analysis:

The best way to rob a bank is to own one.