2
WHEN THE “TELECOMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION” AND THE DRUG WAR
COLLIDE: MONEY LAUNDERING AND THE PROLIFERATION OF
SURVEILLANCE
With the passing of the Soviet Union from the historical stage, concerns about organized crime,
particularly drug trafficking, joined with terrorism to dominate the domestic and international security
agendas of the United States. As Naylor (1995) wryly puts it, having faced down Comintern, the US State
quickly became embroiled in a new twilight struggle, this time with “Crimintern.” For a decade, US law
enforcement agencies as well as many policy makers, academics and journalists have taken the position
that the “telecommunications revolution” is undermining the US State’s capacity to prevail in this new
struggle.
Much of the concern is based on claims that developments in telecommunications have greatly
exacerbated the problem of money laundering. Widely perceived as the sine qua non of drug trafficking
and other illicit businesses, money laundering refers to “the process by which criminals or criminal
organizations seek to disguise the illicit nature of their proceeds by introducing them into the stream of
legitimate commerce and finance” (Department of Treasury, 2000: 2). An Office of Technology
Assessment report asserts: “Terrorists, as well as drug traffickers and other criminal organizations need to
launder money. It takes money for weapons and explosives. It takes money to get terrorists to their targets,
and then into hiding…” (1995: 129). Accordingly, following the “money trail” is viewed as a critical
strategy in combating drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime.
Initially, law enforcement agencies complained this strategy was being undercut by the electronic
funds transfer systems deployed throughout the financial sector of the world economy in the 1970s and
1980s. This infrastructure, it is said, has provided money launderers with a swift, silent, almost risk-free
pipeline for moving and hiding vast amounts of illicit funds. Attempting to staunch this clandestine flow,
law enforcement agencies and regulators have responded by seeking to bolster their ability to
systematically monitor financial transactions.
More recently, alarm bells have been ringing over the fact that emerging “cyberpayment” systems
are threatening to greatly aggravate law enforcement’s money laundering woes. Developed to address the
Convention