Thank you, Chair.
The first point I'd make is that if you really want a longer presentation from me, I did a lecture tour of Australia a couple of years ago and you can see a YouTube video of my doing a 40-minute presentation, with jokes, on the mix of terrorist financing, but I'm going to spare you the jokes and the 40 minutes. For the sake of the interpreters, I'm going to try to make six or seven quick points.
The first point is that my present interest is the increasing overlap between terrorism and organized crime, that they are engaged in very similar sorts of activities, that they are both networked and organized as networks rather than as Weberian pyramids, and that they are primarily cellular.
My second point is that we need to remember that most terrorist operations now are self-financed. The cell finds its own financing for the particular operation. There is seed core financing for what we might call spectaculars, and for setting up an organization for the purposes of recruitment. If we're going to talk about terrorist financing, we need to recognize those differences.
My third point is that states are back as terrorist financers. There was a period when it appeared that we were dealing with organizations that were non-state actors. As things have changed over the past five years, increasingly the big organizations are being funded by states. I'm not going to name them because I don't know whether I'm under the Chatham House Rule or whatever, but they're fairly widely known, and if you're going to stop terrorist financing you need to address the question of those states.
My fourth point mirrors something one of the earlier speakers said. We're dealing with a series of new technologies. Social media represents one of those technologies, but we also need to remember there are alternative forms of payment, such as bitcoin, and there are all sorts of money substitutes used in games, like Second Life. An awful lot of attention by the security services is focused in the wrong place. We don't need gathering of general social media. The bad guys have now gone to Tor; they've gone to the deep web where the pedophiles are and where all sorts of dissidents hang out. We need to know a lot more about how to investigate what's going on there.
My fifth point is that again over the last five years we've seen the rise of the terrorist accountant. It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Accountants are supposed to be terribly dull people and terribly worthy, but accountants are now very important in assessing businesses for the tax or extortion they're going to pay to the terrorist organization. We need to remember that not just banks lend money, but also accountancy firms and firms of solicitors. We need to pay more attention to the accountancy profession.
My sixth point again mirrors something somebody else has said. The most important thing is better trained investigators. We have enough laws. We don't need more laws; we need more competent investigators to produce evidence and prosecute. One of the big traces you need to follow is, who is now dealing with the suspicious activity records? Is anything being done with them? Are they genuinely being analyzed, or are they just piling up on a computer somewhere?
My seventh point is that we should remember the objective of countering terrorist financing is the same as the objective of all counterterrorism. It must reduce the number of terrorists.
If we use blunt instruments that hit non-terrorist targets that hit spectators, we will end up increasing the number of terrorists.
My final point is the Islamic State point. The Islamic State since it captured Mosul has access to large funds and doesn't really need to raise a lot of money elsewhere, but it's also able to sell oil. We need to know where that oil is going, we need to track it, and we need to make sure the money is not getting back to them.
Those are my eight points. Thank you very much for listening. I will enjoy taking questions.