FBI to Create International Cyber-Law Enforcement Agency

Link to us http://snipurl.com/uz44x
Source from http://mashable.com/2008/03/20/fbi-cyberlaw/

One of the beauties, if you can call it that, of organized crime is that while the criminal organizations of the world respect none of the boundaries that we call jurisdictions and countries, and by definition, the rule of law must respect those boundaries. These criminals, whether they be the traditional mob that we all know and love or the terrorist organizations bent on the destruction of civilization as we know it, have for more than a decade or two have known about and exploited this fact.

In fact, during the last decade and a half, organized crime has collaborated amongst the various sects (Italian, Russian, Columbian, etc) according to their various specialties across international jurisdictions and boundaries, much to the consternation of law enforcement of all nationalities. What’s even worse is the explosion of digital crimes that take place on a grand scale (as ‘inconsequential’ as spamming or bot-nets or as significant as money laundering) thanks to advances in the Internet and communication technology.

Technovelgy today is reporting that the FBI has finally had enough of this problem, and is hosting a gathering of the world’s intelligence organizations this May for a three day conference. Invited to participate is, aside from the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Australian Federal Police, New Zealand Police and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Amongst other goals of the conference, the most interesting is to set up a special area on Law Enforcement Online, the FBI’s secure Internet portal, to share intelligence internationally and create a bulletin system that will make member agencies more aware of accidental leaks that occur from thefts or accidentally dropping classified documents into your porn thumb drive or shared folder on your P2P client.

On the one hand, it does seem a bit like an issue of “What, you’re just now getting around to this?”. On the other, though, it does seem like this sort of international collaboration can lead to the circumvention of legal hurdles that we’ve constitutionally created preventing international spy agencies from becoming domestic spy agencies, and vice versa (separation of powers). Unfortunately, I’m not up on my domestic spying laws and regulations, so smarter policy wonks than I should be tackling this issue soon, but it is a significant development in terms of online law enforcement, and worthy of note.