The Foreign Service Journal, October 2018

22 OCTOBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Illegal trade is a growing threat to the community of nations, the world’s population and earth’s environment. Recognizing that criminals don’t stovepipe is the key to an effective response. BY LOU I SE SHE L L EY Louise Shelley is the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair and a professor at George Mason University. She is the founding director of the Ter- rorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center in the Schar School of Policy and Government. She is a leading expert on the relationship among terrorism, organized crime and corruption, as well as human trafficking, transnational crime and terrorism, with a particular focus on the former Soviet Union. She also specializes in illicit financial flows and money laundering. She was an inaugural recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. She is the author of Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future (Princeton University Press), a book on illicit trade, cybercrime and sustainability that will be released in November. N ew computer technologies, com- munications and globalization are fueling the exponential growth of dangerous forms of illegal trade—for example, the markets for narcotics and child pornography online, the escalation of sex trafficking through web advertisements, and the sale of endangered species for which revenues total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The illicit economy exacerbates many of the world’s destabilizing phe- nomena: it helps perpetuate local and regional conflicts, the proliferation of arms and weapons of mass destruction, and environmental degradation and species extinction. Illicit trade consists of both tangible goods—drugs, human beings, weapons, wildlife and timber, fish, antiquities and ubiqui- tous counterfeits—and intangible goods bought and sold in cyber- space, such as passwords, botnets and malware. These intangible goods, poorly understood by most, cost consumers and organiza- tions billions worldwide in the form of lost identities, funds stolen from bank accounts, computer data accessed and pilfered from private accounts and stolen intellectual property. No longer primarily an urban problem or one confined to ports of call, illicit trade now extends into the most remote villages and smallest towns all around the globe. The connectivity of the world’s population has increased geometrically during the past two decades—today, some five billion out of a global population of 7.4 billion use cell phones that can connect them to the inter- net, to social media and to the global marketplace. One recently investigated cybercrime case involved a ransomware attack that victimized many thousands of individuals in at least 189 countries. Illicit Trade and OUR GLOBAL RESPONSE ON COMBATING TRANSNATIONAL CRIME FOCUS