The Hindu Business Line : Welcome move

The United Kingdom has a brand new criminal investigation outfit that was inaugurated by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on April 3. It is the Serious and Organised Crime Agency or SOCA as it is going to be known.

Described as the UK's FBI, it is a crack force of about 4,000 that amalgamates the National Intelligence Squad (NIS) and National Crime Intelligence Service (NCIS). In this process it will bring under its ambit the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU). Apart from policemen, experts from Revenue, Customs and Immigration will work for SOCA.

Causing some concern

Ironically, while immediately after 9/11, the feeling in the US was that it should copy the UK policing model (especially the Scotland Yard), now we find the British trying to give their police the teeth that America's FBI is known to possess for handling hardened international gangs. The decision to set up the SOCA is also a reaction to acquittals suffered recently by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the UK in some major investigations. (We in India have a nascent SFO whose work is yet to be assessed.) Whether the experiment will succeed is a matter for conjecture.

What has caused concern in the UK, however, is the fate of cyber crime investigation in the country. The worry expressed in some quarters is that a specialist organisation such as the NHTCU, created in 2001 to focus on cyber and allied crime committed with the help of modern technology, could get subsumed by the larger SOCA. The NHTCU had given a good account of itself during its five years of existence and had set up 43 regional units. Its crowning glory came last year when it got two men sentenced for a total of 10 years for an identity scam in which they stole £6.5 million through `Phishing.' I myself have interacted with them on occasions, and found them to be highly clued up.

Will SOCA make use of cyber crime specialists or will it relegate them to a secondary position? There is a feeling that a victim of cyber crime in the UK will hereafter have only the lowly police station to approach and not an elitist group that the NHTCU was. And it is widely known, as in the case of India, the average policeman in the field has a long way to go before he becomes computer-savvy. The apprehension is strengthened by the following notice at NHTCU's Web site: The National Hi Tech Crime Unit has now become part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. As a result the NHTCU is no longer providing individual responses to enquiries either via this Web site or direct e-mail contacts. If you are a member of the public wishing to report a crime or criminal attempt, please contact your local police force within your country of residence.

No ground for fears

My own feeling is that fears the NHTCU expertise in computer crime will be lost or under-utilised are imaginary. SOCA is dedicated, apart from the conventional organised crime such as smuggling, kidnapping and prostitution, to demolishing international gangs that are engaged in financial crime (money laundering and phishing) and child pornography. These two categories of deviance are highly computer-driven and will, therefore, need the specialised knowledge involved in tracking down specific e-mail traffic and intrusions on secure networks belonging to banking establishments. Also, SOCA will itself have to build a hacker-proof information system that will facilitate easy communication between its operatives at home or when they travel abroad for investigation purposes. The NHTCU's skills will come in handy not only for setting up a sophisticated state-of-the-art network but also maintaining it.

Whatever be the charter or infrastructure disabilities that a modern organisation such as SOCA may suffer from, reports from different parts of the world do point to the growing complexity of cyber crime and the ingenuity of those whose livelihood depends on making a mockery of cyber security. An instance in point is the recent vandalisation of three small banks in Florida. It was a case of phishing with a slight difference. Normally, in phishing, customers are led to a bogus Web site of their bank and then made to credulously surrender their personal information to the glee and benefit of tricksters. But in this Florida case, what the criminals did was to hack into servers run by an ISP for the banks and divert customers to a bogus server resembling the bank sites where the compromise of personal data took place. This is a modus operandus that has startled experts. Also significant was the trend highlighted in this case of hackers shifting their focus from large financial institutions to the really small ones such as the Florida banks. Don't we now realise that SOCA and agencies such as the FBI and CBI have their work cut out for them!

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.

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