Tag: Crime

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Wrong Turn or Right Lane? Defending Forward against Cybercriminals Abroad

Image courtesy of TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense on 9 May 2020.

On April 7, the Australian Minister of Defense acknowledged – for the first time ever – that the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) used its offensive cyber capabilities to disrupt foreign cybercriminal infrastructure responsible for malicious cyber activities exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic.1 While details on the operation are sparse, what we do know is that ASD “stopped the criminals from accessing their own systems and prevented them from accessing information they stole.”2 What we do not know is the how, the where, the when, and what exactly triggered ASD into action.

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Humanitarian Issues

The Military is Not the Answer to South Africa’s Xenophobic Violence

A South African soldier with an ammo belt. Image: Cpl. Jad Sleiman, U.S. Marine Corps/Wikimedia

This article was originally published by the Fund For Peace (FFP) on 22 April 2015.

A rapid rise in anti-immigrant violence has emerged in South Africa, with at least seven people killed and many more local immigrants’ properties and businesses destroyed. In response to this wave of xenophobic crime, the South African government announced the deployment of troops to areas that have been most affected by the violence, including parts of Durban in Kwa-Zulu Natal and the impoverished district of Alexandra in Johannesburg.

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Latin America’s Wired Activists Take on Crime

2011 Peace march in Mexico City. Image: Wikipedia.

Buenos Aires, 5 November 2013 (IRIN) – In Latin America, where violent crime rates are six times higher than in any other region and where most residents have reported distrust in the state’s ability to fight crime, a number of communities have taken to social media to boost security, say analysts.

“Violent crime in Latin America undermines the social fabric of communities [and poses] a major human security threat to populations who live in slum areas,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a US-based non-profit security policy group.

Violent crime has soared in the past decade with murder rates for Latin and Central America four times the global average in 2011, at 29 per 100,000 people, according to a 2013 UN Development Programme (UNDP) report.

In parallel, internet access in Latin America has multiplied thirteenfold in the past decade, providing communities with an alternative way to report crimes in near anonymity, share information on violence hotspots, mobilize community policing and organize protests calling for greater security.

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China’s Antidrug Policies in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle

Dried Poppies. Image: Wikipedia.

The notorious illicit opium-producing area—the Golden Triangle—between Myanmar, Laos and Thailand in the heart of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) has become the focal point for China’s external antidrug policy. Connected by the Mekong River—which flows from the Chinese province of Yunnan through Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam into the South China Sea—this subregion is now the new frontline in China’s war on drugs, especially along the borders of northern Laos and northern Myanmar. The area is endowed with an ideal climate for opium poppy cultivation, the prime ingredient for heroin. Drug trafficking from the Golden Triangle into mainland China through Yunnan is currently perceived by the Chinese government as a serious nontraditional security challenge as it is estimated that between 60-70 percent of the drugs consumed in China come from this region.

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São Paulo: Insecure Citizens, All of Them

Primeiro Comando da Capital 15 33
Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) is a non-state armed group in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo: Marco Gomes/flickr.

In recent years, São Paulo, Brazil has like many other Latin American cities, been held up as a model of public security for other cities in the global South. Dramatic declines in homicides by more than 80% in some urban districts, has created a sense that the city is safer than ever. By extension, many have supposed and some explicitly argued that heightened public security policies are the reason for such declines.

A recent spate of hundreds of homicides, killings by the police force (known until recently as resistencias seguida de morte), and assassinations of police officers, tells a much different story. This violence lays bare the sub-structure of homicide regulation in the city. Since the early 2000’s, São Paulo’s decline in homicides has been intimately intertwined with the increasing influence of a non-state armed group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). The PCC, which controls many of the historically violent parts of the city, has its own regulation of death. This underscores the breakdown of the monopoly on violence in the city and exposes the relative impossibility of public policy advancement. More importantly, though, this new wave of violence reveals the degree of insecurity in this city where those most responsible for delivering public security policy – the police – are not secure.

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