Stanford CIS

International Cybercrime (Of The Horse)

By Ryan Calo on

A colleague and I were just discussing a new international working group, chaired by the FBI, which has “band[ed] together to fight cyber crime in a synergistic way.”  The group is called the Strategic Alliance Cyber Crime Working Group; it even has a tagline: “Cyber Solidarity: Five Nations, One Mission.”

One can’t help but feel that the Canadians, in assigning cybercrime to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, took Frank Easterbrook’s “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse” analogy a little too literally.  And I wonder at leaving out Asia and Africa -- Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Russia being four of the top ten nations to house perpetrators of online crimes.  But this is probably a positive development with respect to combating some types of crime.  Additional thoughts welcome.