Fergie's Tech Blog

Cyber Cops Without Borders

Andy Greenberg writes on Forbes.com:

For years, profit-motivated cybercrime has been exploiting the geographic flexibility of the Internet, migrating from the U.S. and Western Europe to Eastern Europe and Asia, where digital crimes are equally lucrative and far harder to prosecute. But over the last year, U.S. law enforcement has been increasingly willing to follow cybercriminals to those far-flung destinations, both to help local authorities track down and arrest cybercriminals and to extradite them into the American legal system.

Though the U.S. Department of Justice doesn't track cybercrime statistics--domestic or international--department officials insist the number of computer crime prosecutions that reach beyond U.S. borders is on the rise. "Unquestionably, we're seeing an increase in the international cases of cybercrime and intellectual property crime," says John Lynch, the deputy chief of the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS). "As a result, we're increasingly cooperating with our international partners."

posted by Fergie @ 6/02/2009 06:17:00 PM