DARKMARK

address in one country against an individual or corporation in a second country, before being realised (or cashed out) in a third. A police officer in Colombia, for example, may be able to identify that the IP address coordinating an assault on a Colombian bank emanates from Kazakh- stan. But then he discovers that this is not considered a crime in Kazakhstan, and so his opposite number in the Kazakh capital will have no reason to investigate the crime.

Many cyber criminals have the intelligence to research and exploit such discrepancies. 'I never use American credit or debit cards,' one of Sweden's most successful 'carders' told me, 'because that would put me under the legal jurisdiction of the United States wherever I am on the planet. So I just do European and Canadian cards, and I feel both happy and safe with that - they will never catch me.'

The divide separating the United States from Europe and Canada is most important, as these are the areas where the highest concentra- tion of cybercrime victims live. The latter territories have much stronger laws in force to protect individual liberties and rights on the Web. Successive US governments have granted greater powers to law enforce- ment than most European governments would contemplate, allowing officers easier access to data from private companies, in the name of fighting crime and terrorism.

The implications of this are both profound and, for the moment, impenetrable. Concerns about crime, surveillance, privacy, the accu- mulation of data by both private and state institutions, freedom of speech (step forward WikiLeaks), ease of access to websites (the so-called net neutrality debate), social networking as a political tool, and national- security interests constantly bump up against one another in cyber- space.

One might argue, for example, that Google's multi-platform, multi- tasking omnipresence violates the principles of America's anti-trust legislation and that the agglomeration of all that personal data is both an opportunity for criminals and a threat to civil liberties. Yet Google might well respond that the very essence of its genius and success lies in its multi-platform, multitasking omnipresence and that this in itself promotes America's commercial and security interests. If it wishes, the US government can access Google's data using legal procedures within hours and, because Google gathers data from all over the world, this gives Washington an immense strategic advantage. Other