The success of worldwide law-enforcement operations this week redefines the way investigators must work - and how legislators, Australia’s included, will need to accommodate them, writes PeterHartcherAO | OPINION
The good guys announced that they’d struck two heavy blows against the bad guys this week. In the first, 9000 crooks from more than a hundred countries were revealed to have spent two and a half years conducting criminal transactions on a police communications network.
“We were able to actually see photographs of hundreds of tons of cocaine that were concealed in shipments of fruit,” a senior FBI official in The Hague, Calvin Shivers, told reporters. “The results are staggering.” Once An0m was proven to work, police agencies in a total of 17 countries actively joined the US-Australian effort and the net brought in Mafia groups, Mexican cartels, Triad gangs and illegal bikie gangs. The operation was named Ironside in Australia, Trojan Shield in the US and Greenlight in Europe.It’s the digital equivalent of an old-school ruse.
This demolishes the long-lingering myth that digital currencies are anonymous, untraceable and somehow beyond the reach of the law.In this case, the Russian-based DarkSide group inserted malicious “ransomware” code into the systems of the Colonial Pipeline company, which supplied 45 per cent of US east coast petrol, diesel and jet fuel. That crippled the company and the pipeline shut down, causing immense disruption to the fuel supply. Colonial paid $US4.
In both cases revealed this week, it’s the eternal cops and robbers routine, the same old game of cat and mouse, but written in computer code. There are three bills before the Australian Parliament right now likely to be affected by the newly energised debate over police powers. The committee responsible for scrutinising such bills is the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, or PJCIS, one of the most effective and successfully bipartisan parts of the Australian legislature.
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