From: Simon Gardner <juniperat_private> Posted To: aaa-listat_private 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] -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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