Cooperation And Crime

It took four years and the cooperation of dozens of law enforcement agencies to bring down an international computer crime ring.  The malefactors had victimized people in 180 countries and reaped hundreds of millions of dollars by one estimate.  This take-down has a lesson in it for the legal community and that is the need to work together, the need for proper relations among agencies to focus on crime and eschew backbiting and bureaucratic infighting.  It is not a matter of who gets the credit for bringing down computer crime.  It is whether it is done or not and people are protected.  With so many agencies involved, there was inevitably miscommunication and misdirection in the process of tracking down the thieves.  International authorities will get better over time as they concentrate on disrupting botnets, but not if they stress local concerns over world-wide fraud.  Cooperation requires a world-view, exactly the opposite of the populism and nationalism sweeping western countries.