Terrorist Financing: Big Time/Small Time

A quick link to these two posts by Dennis Lormel at the Counterterrorism Blog. I wanted to highlight these two paragraphs at the bottom of Lormel's first post:

Intelligence sharing by law enforcement with the banking industry has long been an issue with industry experts. This is particularly true in dealing with terrorist financing. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies and FinCEN have been wrestling with the challenge of providing intelligence information to financial institutions to better position them to identify terrorist financing. There are numerous impediments and considerations that must be addressed before an information flow can be established. I encourage my former law enforcement colleagues to make intelligence sharing a more important priority in the coming year.

The greater the degree of information sharing, cooperation and coordination between government and the financial sector, the greater the potential to disrupt the flow of funding to terrorists.

Terrorism is like anything else: Without money behind you, you're little more than a dreamer. Even small-time operators need access to cash, and the quickest and easiest source of fast cash is often crime.

While it's vital for financial institutions and law enforcement to be on the lookout for large-scale fraud and money-laundering, local law enforcement should also keep in mind that less ambitious criminal activity can also have a potential link to terrorism.