convergence

Fighting Networks with Networks
and narcotics trafficking, transnational organized crime, and terrorism are no longer acting in
isolation, but converging faster than governments can deploy responses to keep up with them.
Third-party facilitators grease the revolving door between converging threat networks.
One type of criminal activity often depends on, stimulates, and feeds the capacity for a wide
range of illicit conduct. Transnational criminal organizations may strike up a relationship
with technical experts who occupy a gray zone between the underworld and the legitimate
market, such as lawyers, business owners, bankers, scientists, and other specialists. Some of
the best-known facilitators are full-time brokers. These facilitators are crucial to the ability
of illicit networks to move goods, launder money, and acquire funding, falsified documents,
weapons, and logistical support.
Other groups have entrenched themselves in so many diversified criminal activities that
they can no longer be identified by a single specialty. Some drug cartels previously specializing
in cocaine are now also involved in intellectual property rights theft, wildlife trafficking, and
human smuggling. Human smugglers are involved in the production of fraudulent documents,
corrupting public officials, money laundering, drug smuggling, and facilitating clandestine
terrorist travel. Local mafias are involved in international financial fraud schemes. Somali
pirates are believed to be involved in many other criminal activities including smuggling, arms
trafficking, and human trafficking. The interwoven strands of such illicit transactions make
it almost impossible to separate one from the other, like unzipping a double helix of DNA
using a pair of scissors.
These networks are structured more fluidly than traditional hierarchical organized crime
syndicates, and this makes them strategically more difficult to target. Network organizers are
harder to identify than syndicate leaders, and the loose links among network elements can
impede efforts to identify the full range of activities in which they are involved. Some transnational
criminal groups, such as the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, have been networked,
loosely coordinated organizations since their inception, while traditional organized crime
groups such as the Albanian Mafia, Chinese Triads, and Japanese Yakuza are increasingly
restructuring their vertical organizations into horizontal networks.
The Convergence of International Crime and Terror Pipelines
The nexus between organized criminal activity and terrorist groups has long been debated
and remains a threat requiring urgent attention. The Department of Justice reports that 31 of
the 71 organizations on its fiscal year 2011 Consolidated Priority Organization Targets list,
which includes the most significant international drug-trafficking organizations threatening
the United States, are associated with terrorist groups. Criminal syndicates have long been
known to support terrorist groups by facilitating their clandestine transborder movements,
weapons smuggling, and forging of documents. Of particular concern would be the ability
of some of these groups to acquire radioactive materials or chemical and biological weapons.
Despite differences in motivation and ideology, terrorists and insurgents increasingly
turn to criminal networks to acquire financial and logistical support. These crime-terror
pipelines run two ways. In one direction, terrorist organizations overcome differences in
motivation and ideology as they turn to transnational illicit networks such as drug-trafficking
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