Serious Organised Crime Agency website launch signals a very low priority for Computer Crime
The Serious Organised Crime Agency has now officially come into force and has an official website www.soca.gov.uk
They have also published their SOCA Annual Plan 2006/07 (.pdf)
This lays out the top priorities (Class A drugs and human trafficking), the top level structure and the governance of the new organisation
However, there is now no mention of the word "computer" or even of the National High Tech Crime Unit, which was part of the National Crime Squad which has been subsumed into SOCA either on the SOCA website or in their Plan.
The www.nhtcu.org website now displays a SOCA logo and says:
The National Hi Tech Crime Unit has now become part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. As a result the NHTCU is no longer providing individual responses to enquiries either via this web site or direct email contacts.
It is bad enough that the Home Office has refused to properly consult on and publish an internet aware replacement for the obsolete Computer Misuse Act 1990, and to just rely on unworkable amendments via the Police and Justice Bill,
(see Liberty Central influences the "computer hacking tools" amendment in the the Police and Justice Bill)
This withdrawal of any public point of contact for businesses or individuals to be able to talk to someone who understands the IT technical issues signals that Computer Crime is no longer a priority for UK law enforcement.
Even the NHCTU Confidentiality Charter (.pdf) which tried to assure businesses that they will not be uncessarily disrupted by the seizure of all their production and business critical computer systems if a police investigation of part of them is required, and the advice on how to foresnically preserve computer evidence without ruining the judical chain of custody and therefore legal admissability in court, have been censored from public view.
What is the NuLabour government playing at ?
The old National Criminal Intelligence Service website www.ncis.gov.uk is still online for now.
As with the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 website, the SOCA website is not as good as the Security Service MI5 one, since there is no online feeback form protected with SSL/TLS encryption, nor indeed any non-English language versions.
Contact details for the Serious Organised Crime Agency:
The postal address for SOCA is:Serious Organised Crime Agency
PO Box 8000
London
SE11 5ENMedia enquiries
Media enquiries only to telephone number 0870 268 8100 Office hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm.
Note the lack of any general enquiry email contact address, or public phone number except for webmaster@soca.x.gsi.gov.uk
For a supposedly modern intelligence agency, SOCA is making itself unecessarily hard to contact by potential informers or intelligence assets or by potential staff recruits.
By way of contrast the Federal Bureau of Investigations in the USA, with which SOCA has been compared, has contact details in every phone book and on their multiple websites.
Comments
How can you bring together 4 agencies and hope to retain operational effectiveness?? Answer: You can't. So, expect a lot of hot air from SOCA for the next couple of years whilst everyone gets trained to the same standard. Meanwhile the criminals will rub their hands at a welcome break.
Posted by: Robert Peel | April 2, 2006 8:45 PM
@ Robert - trained up to the highest possible standard, or down to the lowest common denominator ?
Posted by: wtwu | April 2, 2006 11:41 PM
Tony Blair appears to be taking the credit for launching SOCA at a Downing Street media event later on today Monday.
Will it be Charles Clarke or Hazel Blears get to share the platform with Tony Blair and Sir Stephen Lander ?
Will the media ask any hard questions this time, or will they simply regurgitate the Home Office and Downing Street press releases ?
Is spending only £400 million to combat the alleged £20 billion a year that Serious Organised Crime is alleged to cost the country each year the right amount ? (N.B. no actual statistics are available)
What happened to the National High Tech Crime Unit ? Is Computer Crime now a very low priority ?
Why is SOCA hiding from the public , with no easy means for the public to contact them with information ?
Posted by: wtwu | April 3, 2006 1:27 AM
Tony Blair is hogging the breakfast TV news, outside of 10 Downing Street, with no sign of either Charles Clarke, Hazel Blears or Sir Stephen Lander.
Inevitably, firstly the Sky News and then the BBC journalists, who were all back in their breakfast TV news studios and not face to face with Tony Blair outside in Downing Street, have been spending at least half the time asking about the alleged rift with Gordon Brown and loans for peerages etc.
No mention of Computer Crime.
Posted by: wtwu | April 3, 2006 7:45 AM
Even the BBC Radio 4 Today programme major interview slot billed as Home Secretary Charles Clarke talking about the launch SOCA spent literally only 2 or 3 minutes on SOCA, out of 13 minutes.
Neither Charles Clarke nor the interviewer bothered to spell out the full name of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and just referred to it as SOCA.
No mention of Computer Crime.
Posted by: wtwu | April 3, 2006 9:33 AM
Neither Tony Blair nor Charles Clarke seem to have been asked by the media, how come, if Human Trafficking is the top priority of SOCA after Class A drugs, that the United Kingdom has still not signed or ratified the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings which we should have done last May ?
Posted by: wtwu | April 3, 2006 9:55 AM
Tony Blair's comments are reported almost verbatim by the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4870988.stm
Posted by: wtwu | April 3, 2006 10:20 AM
So SOCA is going to financially hurt the "Mr Bigs"??? Unfortunately for SOCA, the "Mr Bigs" of this world are already way ahead of the game. Does Blair and Co think the big crime organisations are not already divesting and cloaking their assets to make any financial investigation into them so difficult and expensive as to render it counter productive???
Any financial damage inflicted will be minimal on their overall proceeds of crime.
The only way to hurt "Mr Big" is to deprive him of his liberty. Simple. Gathering evidence and getting convictions. But that's not "new".
Instead we'll get buckets of money wasted on chasing intelligence and money trails that lead nowhere.Meanwhile the organised criminals will continue and flourish as the inroads made previously by the separate agencies are diluted....
Posted by: Robert Peel | April 4, 2006 7:54 PM
The NHTCU Confidentiality Charter appears to have been torn up by SOCA
http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2153704/british-fbi-drops
What is the point of re-branding the NHTCU as the e-Crime unit if they no longer speak with the public or businesses ?
Posted by: wtwu | April 8, 2006 6:52 PM
If SOCA has existed as a "shadow organisation" in preparation for its launch, why do there seem to be such basic problems as reported by the Sunday Mirror ?
Posted by: wtwu | April 30, 2006 1:16 PM