How Information Technology Will Topple the World's Biggest Drug Cartel Aliya Sternstein - Nextgov
go to original February 28, 2014

An upgrade of the information technology systems running the nation's financial intelligence wing - set to finish this year - should bolster efforts to dismantle the Sinaloa cartel, now that authorities have captured the enterprise's leader, former top U.S. officials say.

Mexican authorities over the weekend announced the arrest of narcotics kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who helmed what has been described as the world's largest drug-trafficking business. He had been on the run for 13 years.  

“The extent to which we're seeing greater activity and ideally greater effectiveness in our targeting is clearly going to be in part due to improvements in IT,” Chip Poncy, the Treasury Department’s director of strategic policy for terrorist financing and financial crimes until last spring, said during an interview.

Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has been undergoing a computing overhaul since 2010. According to FinCEN officials, the project will “provide a modernized IT foundation to collect, store, safeguard, analyze, and share data collected," in compliance with privacy regulations to, among other things, dethrone drug lords.

The $120 million software and hardware overhaul is on budget and expected to be finished later this year, according to a September 2013 Treasury inspector general report (PDF).

Read the rest at Nextgov

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!