Contained within the pages of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2014 are provisions for countering transnational criminal cartel organizations.
According to the report:
“The committee is aware that the complex pathways and instrumentalities of the global economic system provide both a source of revenue and backdrop in which to hide for a number of nation-state and non-state actors. In particular, Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) have increasingly been able to use the global economic environment to their advantage. TCOs have grown more complex over time, and so has our ability to defeat them, however, this complexity has challenged our ability to access and use collective information available.”
In addition the report notes that these criminal cartel organizations are “hosting” themselves in U.S. cities (plural):
“The committee believes that criminal cartel organizations are hosting themselves in U.S. cities and may be teaming with terrorists also embedded in the United States to fund terror networks overseas. These networks provide sustained and substantial funding to pay operatives, support families, purchase and traffic weapons, indoctrinate and recruit new members, train, travel, and bribe officials and also perpetrate billions of dollars worth of fraud against banks, businesses and Governments.”
“The list of crimes that the new international criminal organizations are involved in includes the trafficking of narcotics, humans, weapons, illegally poached animal remains, and chemical, biological, and nuclear material.
Disrupting the means and mechanisms through which these networks move money will significantly disrupt their operations, but remains the most challenging piece of the puzzle to unravel.
The key to dissecting these financial networks is to identify the “brokers”: a category of individuals who facilitates financial activities.
Brokers may be employees of a single TCO, such as a terrorist group or drug cartel, or they may be independent operators charging variable fees based on external factors such as interest rates, dollar amount, and denomination of currency. These individuals may work in banking, real estate, insurance, own small businesses, or simply have legitimate access to the financial system. The information needed to unravel these global networks is available through various technical, commercial, open source and Government-owned means, yet require experienced subject matter experts to “connect the dots”: an ability directly proportional to their access to information across the community of interest.” Source: House report 113-102 http://thomas.loc.gov
See related video: The Dark Side of Globalization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYvOg41P4Pw