• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 13, 2012

Terrorists use our openness on the Internet and in social networks against us. Marc Goodman, who has spent a lifetime in law enforcement, explains how during a TED conference presentation. "A search engine can determine who shall live and who shall die," he said, explaining events that took place during the attack on Mumbai.

During the Mumbai siege four years ago, terrorists depended so much on technology that several witnesses reported seeing them shoot people with one hand and check messages on their mobile phone with the other.

The messages came from an ops center that terrorists built to monitor events, such as news reports on the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, and local India broadcast stations. They also monitored the Internet and social media to determine how many people they killed. During the 60-hour siege, one of the terrorists found a man on one of the top floors in the hotel who claimed he was a schoolteacher. Since the terrorist didn't believe him, he called the ops center to find out the alleged school teacher's real identity. A search on Google identified the hiding man in the hotel room as the second-wealthiest businessman in India.

Privacy setting on Facebook, along with information found in searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo can benefit and hurt society. Goodman said that during the Sony PlayStation hack more than 100 million people were robbed by one person. The Internet of things means the world will see more vulnerabilities in a variety of things -- including the human body, in which doctors are implanting more electronics. Goodman said in the United States more than 60,000 people have pacemakers that connect to the Internet.

It's not just about stealing things. Recently the FBI arrested an al-Qaeda affiliate in the United States who was planning to use a remote control drone aircraft to fly explosives into buildings in the U.S.

Goodman also talks about hacking other systems, such as DNA, and delves into synthetic drugs in yeast. For those interested in Moore's law and the cost of sequencing genome, start watching the video at 13:08.