From: Simon Gardner <juniper@cix.compulink.co.uk>
Posted To: aaa-list@access.org.uk
By JOHN MORRISON, Reuters
LONDON (May 14, 1998 12:32 p.m. EDT) - Leaders of the Group of Eight
nations will interrupt their summit meeting this weekend for a video
presentation by a senior British detective on high-tech computer battles
between international criminals and police.
Chief Constable Roy Penrose, Director-General of Britain's newly formed
National Crime Squad, will speak for 10 minutes to the eight world leaders
and show them video clips based on real cases.
The fight against international crime is one of the items Prime Minister
Tony Blair has picked out for the Birmingham meeting from May 15-17.
"What he will be showing them is trailblazing stuff," a British official
said. "It involves ensuring that electronic data can be processed and used
as evidence to bring criminals to justice."
Last year's summit in Denver, Colorado put electronic crime on the agenda
and this year the eight leaders will be giving an extra push to work
already under way to cooperate against international crime syndicates.
Officials said they wanted to highlight the issues involved and broaden
support for international crime-fighting outside the G8 and the 15-nation
European Union.
Penrose's briefing will show how criminals are increasingly using
international e-mail and computer links to conduct their activities, and
how law enforcement bodies can hit back.
High-tech crime also involves money laundering, theft, fraud and child
pornography across national borders.
Finance ministers of the G7, meeting without the eighth member Russia,
agreed last Saturday in London to step up the fight against international
financial crime, which Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown
described as "one of the major challenges of our time."
"We can only tackle it successfully if governments work together to combat
it as effectively as increasingly sophisticated criminals work together to
commit it," Brown told journalists.
This weekend's discussions on crime will review progress on a package of
measures approved at a meeting of G8 interior and justice ministers in
Washington last December.
British Home Secretary Jack Straw said after that meeting: "The challenge
is from moving one step behind these criminals to being one step ahead."
All G8 countries have agreed to review their legal codes to make sure
there are adequate penalties against "cybercrime."
Each nation has committed itself to develop faster ways to trace attacks
by computer hackers and to try criminals on their own territory when
extradition is not possible.
Straw said one of the problems governments had to address was that one
person could "commit crimes in a number of different countries without
having to move out of an armchair."
Governments are also working to ensure that computer criminals cannot
commit the perfect crime by destroying electronic evidence before police
catch up with them.
Straw told journalists at the Washington meeting that computer expertise
was vital in combating old-fashioned crimes such as drug dealing, armed
robberies and trafficking in people:
"The criminals ... then have to move the proceeds of crime and launder the
money. And it's at this point that old-fashioned crime turns into 21st
century crime."
[Copyright © 1998 Nando.net]
[Copyright © 1998 Reuters News Service]
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Received on Sat May 16 14:48:49 1998