Illicit networks cross the boundaries our organisations rely on. A shipment of counterfeit goods, illegal wildlife products or sanctioned materials can touch banks, online marketplaces, freight routes, property and social media before any one organisation sees the whole chain.
That was the thinking behind Connecting the dots, the first event of its kind run by Blackdot, held at RSA House in London on 14 October. In the room, there were people from police forces and regional crime units, government departments and regulators, major banks, global retailers and infrastructure operators. Alongside them sat analysts from risk consultancies, lawyers, maritime and data specialists, conservationists and researchers. On the surface, those are all very different jobs, but they all face surprisingly similar problems.
A speaker from RUSI opened by naming what ties all of that together: money. Someone pays for the equipment, someone profits from the crime, someone eventually spends the proceeds. "If I give you $5 or I give you $5 million, you and I are connected," he said. In an age of encrypted communication, few things reveal who is working with whom so clearly.
As the talks continued, I noticed organisations arriving at similar methods from opposite directions. An investigative journalist geolocated television footage using a phone mast and a petrol station sign. A European tax agency’s digital investigators placed a publicly available social media video from the road signs it showed. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) used 25 open-source datasets to build a risk matrix for illicit gold. The questions differed, but the investigative craft overlapped.
The same warning surfaced throughout the day: no organisation can see the whole picture alone. IISS said that law enforcement, environmental authorities, mining regulators and financial intelligence units "often operate in silos". The European tax agency team described passing on whatever falls outside their remit, "because everyone's got an element that we don't know about." The Open Source Centre’s reason for publishing was simpler: "you let the whole world know." From a different angle, an Valinor Intelligence argued that treating the beaches of northern France as the goal line for stopping people smuggling means intervening too late, there are whole networks of activity before that point.
There was a healthy note of caution too. One researcher reminded us that OSINT "is not a magic wand", it can be wrong, and as the information around us gets more polluted, the onus falls on investigators to check what they're looking at.
After the event, several attendees noted that speakers from completely different industries seemed to be describing versions of their own work. They recognised the same blind spots and workarounds, and sometimes heard another organisation describe the piece they had been missing.
Illicit networks benefit when information stops at the boundary between a bank and a police force, a regulator and a retailer, or one country and the next. When these gaps exist, an organisation can deal successfully with its own part of a case without ever disrupting the wider network behind it.
Closing those gaps starts with people, not systems. During the panel I suggested we begin by sharing the question rather than the data: simply asking each other what we know about a given entity before worrying about how to move information around. But that only works if you know who to ask and trust them when they answer. That trust gets built in rooms like this one.
Thank you to every speaker, attendee and colleague who made the day happen. Day-to-day, Blackdot builds investigation software, but on 14 October our most useful contribution was bringing people with different pieces of the same problem together at RSA House.
If you'd like to join us next time, or have something to share from the stage, register your interest here.