Dr. David Fouse attended the International Conference on Transnational Crime and Terrorism (ICTOCT) hosted by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)   in  Las Vegas, 13-18 April, 2014. The ICTOCT is one of the largest elite law enforcement gatherings worldwide with international delegates representing law enforcement agencies from many countries around the world.  United States government agencies participating in the conference included not only the FBI, but also the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department, Department of Justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Homeland Security Investigations, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security Service, along with a variety of municipal and local police departments. The conference featured both plenary sessions for all participants and an interesting variety of elective presentations by specialists in various Asian crime organizations, narco-terrorism, human trafficking and smuggling, counterfeiting, fraud and cybercrime.

Conference keynote speakers, Thomas Fuentes, former Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office of International Operations, and John Woods, Assistant Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, highlighted the growing problem of transnational crime organizations ability to launder their substantial illicit proceeds and invest in sensitive areas of the legitimate economy, including the energy sector. With billions of dollars of annual profits to invest, transnational crime organizations are now moving into the manipulation of securities exchanges to further increase their impact on the legitimate economy. Concerns were also raised over the increasing willingness of various transnational organized crime organizations to cross over ethnic lines to cooperate for “business” purposes. Today’s transnational organized crime organizations understand they have more to gain through working together, which makes it all the more important for law enforcement agencies to share information and establish their own networks in order to combat the rising tide of organized crime.

Many of the presentations at the conference included case studies of recently completed investigations that emphasized the use of law enforcement networks and multiagency task forces in combatting transnational crime and terrorism. In his discussion of the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013, Robert Merner of the Boston Police Department detailed how increased cooperation between the local and federal law enforcement agencies developed in the post 9-11 era allowed for an extremely rapid response that quickly identified Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnev as the perpetrators. Kimberly Frayn of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Las Vegas  lauded the use of an interagency task force including the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Computer Crimes Division as a “force multiplier” enabling the recent indictments of some 39 alleged cyber criminals involved with the Carder.su online website, which was recently charged in an unprecedented manner under RICO statutes as a transnational criminal organization that has been engaged in large scale trafficking of compromised credit card account data and counterfeit instruments, such as counterfeit identification documents and counterfeit credit cards, as well as various types of computer crimes, including intrusion and hacking.

In keeping up with transnational crime law enforcement also recognizes that it is necessary to keep pace technologically with the criminals. In attempting to outmaneuver technologically savvy criminals law enforcement must keep abreast of the newest developments in social media, which can be used to conduct either criminal or counter-criminal activities anonymously. One such innovation discussed was Google Voice, which allows officers to establish numerous phone identities for undercover casework that, if set up correctly, can remain completely anonymous. Such devices can be of critical value during a time of declining budgets in which many law enforcement agencies cannot afford to buy separate phones for undercover work.

The International Conference on Transnational Crime and Terrorism was full of valuable insights into the operations of transnational crime and terrorist organizations as well as the sharing of current approaches and best practices being used by the dedicated people who make it their life’s work to stop them. I believe anyone interested in these topics would benefit from attending when the conference meets again in Boston in 2015.

Submitted by Dr. David Fouse