Today, in a post-9/11 environment, agencies like Customs and Interpol understand that the international underworld is a breeding ground for terrorism, providing groups like al Qaeda, Hammas, Hezbollah, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) with funds generated by illegal scams, and with opportunities to launder millions in terrorist dollars. Behind the army of hijackers, suicide bombers, and terrorist gunmen stands an even greater number of "company men"-criminal entrepreneurs and financiers in suits who understand the best way to bankroll Armageddon is through the capitalist system.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Counterfeit "designer bags" can generate profits for terrorists.

They run what look like legitimate businesses, travel to "business meetings" in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and New York, and pay fictional "employees" with money that feeds and houses terrorist cells. They run computer manufacturing plants and noodle shops, sell "designer clothes" and "bargain-basement" CDs. They invest, pay taxes, give to charity, and fly like trapeze artists between one international venture and another. The endgame, however, is not to buy a bigger house or send the kids to an Ivy League school - it's to blow up a building, to hijack a jet, to unleash a plague, and to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

Interpol and Customs join forces against IPR violations
Financing terrorism is a topic that Customs and Interpol are taking seriously. Last year, soon after the attacks on New York and Washington, Interpol hosted the 1st International Conference on IPR in Lyon, France. Enforcement and security experts outlined the relationships between global commerce and global crime - instances in which profits from counterfeit merchandise funded terrorist activities - and participants agreed that Interpol needed to create a Group of Experts on International Property Crime.

Interpol hosted the first meeting of the multi-agency, IP Advisory Group on July 23. The group met again on October 3, and law enforcement officials from U.S. Customs, Finnish Customs, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined forces with the corporate community to hammer out concrete responses on an international scale. The World Intellectual Property Organization, the Motion Picture Association, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, Procter and Gamble, the World Customs Organization, the Pharmaceutical Security Institute, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry, the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group, the European Union, and REACT Services (UK) all had representatives at the table.

"Our objective," says Erik Madsen, a crime intelligence officer with Interpol, "was to raise awareness, to create a strategic plan to fight this kind of crime, and to take action."

In the end, all agreed the evidence was indisputable: a lucrative trafficking in counterfeit and pirated products - music, movies, seed patents, software, tee-shirts, Nikes, knock-off CDs, and "fake drugs" - accounts for much of the money the international terrorist network depends on to feed its operations.

New York's Joint Terrorist Taskforce reported a counterfeit T-shirt ring had used sales profits to subsidize the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In 1999, an International Chamber of Commerce official reported the IRA was financing its operations by selling pirated videos, including a copy of "the Lion King." In 2000, a naturalized Paraguayan citizen born in Lebanon was charged with selling millions in counterfeit software out of a headquarters operation in the notorious piracy haven of Ciudad del Este; allegedly, the proceeds went to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah. Last year, Microsoft officials based in London charged counterfeiters were using the Internet to sell pirated software, an effort they described as one designed to support drug running and terrorism.

Losses from counterfeiting and piracy outstrip 9/11 impact on airlines
For years, legitimate manufacturers have cited huge financial losses, the run-off from IPR violations, as a primary reason to pass tough IPR legislation and enforce anti-counterfeiting laws. What policy-makers sometimes failed to note was the sheer enormity of those losses. After 9/11, leaders in both the public and private sectors described the loss to the U.S. airline industry as "catastrophic." While the airline industry accounts for about 10 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, copyright industries generate more foreign sales and exports than the aircraft and aircraft parts industries combined.

The new link between commercial-scale piracy and counterfeiting has redirected public attention in 2002, and law enforcement agencies like Customs and Interpol are going after the organized crime syndicates in charge of what was too often viewed as a "victimless crime." September 11 changed the way Americans look at the world. It also changed the way American law enforcement looks at Intellectual Property crimes.