Physical border security, human trafficking, or narcotics trafficking represent significant threats to the nation. Being complex, all of them put Americans’ lives at peril and abuse civil rights and democracy. This paper aims to emphasize drug trafficking as the main threat for the nation and outline intelligence collecting methods on drug and human trafficking, border security, and cybersecurity. Additionally, the research will provide with INT’s effective in gathering information against the threat.
Narcotics trafficking includes smuggling and selling drugs prohibited by law on a black market. The distribution of drugs exposes thousands of Americans to the risk of addiction and overdose. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (2019), an average number of deaths from substance use equals almost 200 people per day and six thousand per month. Drug poisoning death rates annually (70,237) exceed suicide (47,173) and homicide rates (19,510) considerably during the period from 2000 to 2017 (DEA, 2019). What is more, the number of overdose deaths is increasing from year to year.
The main threat of drug trafficking is that distributing illegal substances is frequently connected to terrorism. As Chigora (2018) claims, narcotics trafficking appears to be one of the primary forms of deriving funding for terrorist groups. Two Middle East terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been proved to be supported by drug traders. Through bank accounts, in 2005, Hamas has been detected to be connected with narcotics dealing in the United States Midwest (Clarke, 2016). Thus, combating drug dealers will intermediately lead to undermining global terrorism. Moreover, narco-traffickers exploit terrorist tactics of fear and violence, often accompanied by carrying illegal weapons. Detecting drug suppliers is a challenging task for legal bodies. They possess the money to fight back and find loopholes in the law, bribe judges, or even kill anybody who may interfere with their “business.”
The U.S. border is a point where the government fights drugs and human trafficking. Human trafficking and border security threats pose no lesser danger to the nation. One million people are reported to be trafficked across the U.S. border annually (Qiu, 2020). There is progress in the field of fighting these issues. Combating human trafficking is facilitated by the external help of non-profit organizations. For example, Polaris is an organization that launched a human tracking hotline that proved to be effective (Bayer, 2020). Bayer (2020) emphasizes that to fight human and drug trafficking, the government needs to “increase defense spending, tighten borders, and increase military missions in foreign countries” to avert danger before it enters the country (p. 6). Thus, the military and Homeland Security are to control the borders and monitor what leaves and enters the country.
It is now generally recognized that technological advances are changing the way of collecting intelligence and combating national threats. Thus, the U.S. Border Patrol has long-range radars, cameras, drones, and high-accuracy sensors at their command (Government Accountability Office, 2018). Big data, which is a collection of a large amount of information with Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, was devised to tackle an issue of human trafficking (Landon-Murray, 2016). Traffic Analysis Hub (TAHub) is a method based on big data to track human trafficking routes (Qiu, 2020). Now it is used in counterterrorism and predicting climate change and pandemics (Landon-Murray, 2016). One more problem significant for the nation today is cybersecurity.
2020 is the presidential election year; therefore, cybersecurity will be prioritized as protecting democracy is crucial for the nation. Cybersecurity information can now be reached through Open Source Intelligence method that allows gathering information from public sources and analyzing it based on NLP and language models to detect planned cyberattacks (Vadapalli et al., 2018). This technique is also used to collect information on other threats nowadays. What is more, innovations in cybersecurity may function as the counterintelligence tool.
The use of intelligence by violent parties may hinder the struggle against drug dealers. Therefore, counterintelligence (CI) efforts are as important as collecting data. Cartels can explore technical capabilities and surveillance methods of law-enforcement agencies and reach the information by paying bribes (Ekici, 2016). To prevent espionage on behalf of a drug dealing organization, counterintelligence is expected to double-check informants and agents. The threat of foreign intelligence concerns present-day agencies the most; however, cyber technologies devised for international security also help protect data collected from drug dealing groups.
Advance in technology changes the ways of implementing intelligence. Therefore, data collecting conducted with the help of A.I. is one of the main ways of combating narcotics trafficking. OSINT (open-source intelligence) uses information obtained from available sources, preferably social media. Through scanning blogs, twits, forums, and open data sources, it is possible to restore the chain of information through link charts and detect the suppliers (Vadapalli et al., 2018). However, intelligence operations should consider appropriate protection of civil privacy while conducting data collection.
Human sources (HUMINT) are still a comparatively reliable source of information. Often citizens detecting criminal activities can help to find a hot-spot district of drug trafficking. Informants and undercover agents also fall into this category. The informants should have access to vital information to help decrease trafficking and be motivated to share it (Wright & Morehouse, 2019). Nevertheless, the unofficial collaborators cannot be fully trusted, for they are still members of a compromised society. Such a person may either provide non-credible information or be detected and eliminated. The case is famous for Philadelphia agents hiring an informant among drug dealers, Manual Cruz, who appeared to be providing false data for a long time (Melamed, 2019). The faulty intelligence caused dreadful consequences and proved that any informant must be checked before and during the operation.
A more complex type of intelligence collecting is an undercover officer. This type of operation is expensive; as a rule, it takes a long time to infiltrate into a group (Wright & Morehouse, 2019). Additionally, there is always the danger of being discovered. Being an undercover agent is highly challenging for officers and often detrimental to their private life. Nevertheless, the difficulties are remunerated with the reliable data that law enforcement will hardly ever collect with this level of intelligence veracity.
Summing up, narcotics trafficking can be considered the most dangerous to American society as it has ties to border security and terrorism. Human trafficking, however, is also under the concern, and the government is coming up with solutions to this complex issue. Intelligence collecting methods, devised for border and cybersecurity, and human trafficking proved useful for combating varied threats that the United States face. HUMINT and OSINT, in turn, contribute to fighting drug trafficking and, indirectly, terrorism. Thus, steps to defend the nation from hazardous external and internal threats are being made.
References
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