Manuel Medina
Publications and news by Manuel Medina.
Publications
Corruption risk assessments and illegal wildlife trade enforcement
This Practice Note:
- Summarizes experiences and lessons from conducting corruption risk assessments (CRAs) with authorities responsible for investigations and prosecutions of illegal wildlife trade (IWT) cases in three countries in Africa and Latin America. It seeks to demonstrate the value of adopting a collaborative approach to CRAs, illustrates potential avenues for pursuing such an approach when the right factors are in place, and demonstrates how mapping the criminal justice process provides a solid starting point to identify critical vulnerabilities. The note also highlights factors that might recommend another approach, for example where collaboration cannot be assured.
- Highlights some common risks that emerged from the CRAs in the three countries and that may negatively affect the progress of IWT cases in other countries. Still, corruption risks vary among countries and agency contexts, and it is not always feasible for practitioners to conduct or initiate a CRA. These general insights can help point practitioners to possible vulnerabilities to look out for.
The practice note was developed by team members of the Basel Institute’s Green Corruption programme as part of a wider research collaboration between the Basel Institute and the TNRC project consortium.
Takeaways
- Effective enforcement against illegal wildlife trade (IWT) and related crimes is a vital component of wildlife conservation, but corruption risks within law enforcement agencies can undermine their ability to investigate and prosecute such cases. Supporting agencies to identify, evaluate, prioritize, and mitigate their corruption risks can help improve enforcement outcomes, assign scarce resources to areas that pose the highest risks, and build trust and cooperation with other agencies and stakeholders.
- This TNRC Practice Note describes the lessons and insights from a three-country corruption risk assessment (CRA) exercise, using a collaborative approach that involves engaging with agency staff and relevant stakeholders to illuminate and systematically evaluate major risks. This is a sensitive process that requires strong relationships with agency leadership and a deep understanding of local political, social, and economic factors.
- In all three countries, mitigating high-priority corruption risks in law enforcement agencies required a constructive, pragmatic, and sustained approach. Working jointly and acknowledging agencies’ political, capacity, and resource constraints can therefore represent a viable alternative to simply penalizing corrupt practices through investigations and audits.
- Experience suggests that mapping the criminal justice process’ decision points is a crucial first step that builds shared understanding across stakeholders and helps identify corruption risk areas. It can take substantial investments of time to produce such maps, but that investment is usually warranted as it ensures researchers and stakeholders are speaking the same language.
About the TNRC project
The TNRC project seeks to improve biodiversity conservation outcomes by helping practitioners to address the threats posed by corruption to wildlife, fisheries and forests. TNRC harnesses existing knowledge, generates new evidence, and supports innovative policy and practice for more effective anti-corruption programming on the ground.
A USAID-funded project, TNRC is implemented by a consortium of leading organizations in anti-corruption, natural resource management, and conservation: World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, TRAFFIC, and the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at George Mason University.
Quick Guide 17: Open-source intelligence
Anti-corruption, transparency and freedom of information initiatives over the last decades have significantly boosted the value of open-source intelligence for both the private and public sectors.
In this quick guide, Intelligence Analyst Manuel Medina explains what open-source intelligence is and explores some of the tricky questions it raises.
About this Quick Guide
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Quick Guide series, ISSN 2673-5229.
Quick Guide 2: Intelligence
Manuel Medina, specialised Intelligence Analyst for our Illegal Wildlife Trade programme, sets out the basics of intelligence analysis and why we do it. Key questions are:
- What is intelligence in a nutshell?
- What types of intelligence are there?
- How does intelligence reduce information overload?
- How do you know whether intelligence is reliable?
- How is intelligence produced?
About this Quick Guide
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Quick Guide series, ISSN 2673-5229.
News and blog
Want to stop illegal wildlife trade? Be more like Malawi
As we have all become painfully aware, our lives can be brutally disrupted by animal-borne viruses like covid-19 that can sicken and kill people and devastate the global economy – in only seven months. We also know that the current pandemic is only the latest in a series of such wildlife-related diseases that are occurring more frequently and becoming more deadly. While scientists are still trying to work out exactly how the coronavirus jumped from bats to people, it’s pretty likely the virus travelled through pangolins, the world’s most heavily trafficked mammal. These are now endangered everywhere they exist. And where do people interact with pangolins? Mostly through the illegal wildlife trade, involving transnational criminal syndicates making billions of dollars trafficking endangered wildlife. It turns out the areas most threatened by wildlife trafficking are also areas at the highest risk for infectious disease emergence. While solutions revolving around banning wild meat markets and more tightly regulating the sale of wildlife might help in the long term, Malawi and other developing and emerging countries might be enacting a simpler and more immediate solution - putting wildlife poachers and traffickers in prison. What is Malawi doing right? In short, Malawi is beginning to hold wildlife traffickers more accountable for their actions by imposing deterrent custodial sentences for high-level offenders. Malawi just identified, investigated, arrested, tried, and sentenced a wildlife trafficking syndicate, including its kingpin, in less than a year. The convicted Chinese and Malawian traffickers were sentenced to a combined 56 years in prison in June 2020, and the Chinese criminals face deportation upon release. One reason their sentences are so long is that Malawi convicted them of financial crimes and conspiracy as well as wildlife trafficking. This is something that needs to happen systematically across all affected countries to deter organised crime. And Malawi is not alone - some of its neighbours have increased penalties and enforcement for poachers and traffickers. In 2019 Tanzania convicted ivory trafficker Yang Feng Glan and two members of her criminal syndicate to 15 years each in prison, as well as a fine of double the ivory market value they were caught trafficking. Meanwhile, in Vietnam a repeat trafficker had her prison sentence doubled on appeal to five years for trafficking king cobras, monitor lizards, turtles and other rare species earlier this year. Even better, in the same month a Vietnamese court sentenced a pangolin trafficker to 13 years in prison, a sentence practically unheard of in the West for wildlife trafficking. Often presented as the bad guy for their role in wildlife trafficking, even China has stepped up, in 2019 sentencing 11 traffickers between 6 and 15 years for trafficking ivory from Mozambique. While many states in source countries are still struggling to address poaching and trafficking, particularly in the forestry and fishing sectors, the significant efforts to strengthen laws and enforce them are starting to reap benefits. Do as I say, not as I do…. Europe and the US have worked for decades with governments in areas at high risk for wildlife crime in Africa and Asia to improve investigations and achieve meaningful convictions. But they have been less effective at home. In Western countries, laws and penalties are often weak or unenforced. Criminals too often get away with little or no jail time. Fines, where applied, are not commensurate with the value of the trade or the damage to wildlife and biodiversity. Sentencing has likely never taken into account the risks traffickers take in exposing others to pandemic disease. Perhaps the most egregious example of punishment not fitting a crime comes from the UK. Earlier this year, a wildlife criminal received a two-year suspended sentence for trafficking USD 63 million in eels to China. Also this year, in Germany a Dutch bird trafficker caught with more than 70 exotic birds of various species poached from the wild received a fine of less than EUR 5,000. The paltry fines and non-custodial sentences in many places make the two-year prison sentence a Vietnamese tiger trafficker operating in the Czech Republic received in 2019 seem more reasonable… until you learn that he was involved in a significant transnational tiger trafficking ring which included a tiger zoo that bred tigers for slaughter, a butchering facility where tigers were turned into gelatin to supply traditional medicine markets, and the transnational sales of skins, bones and claws. Investigators spent five years unravelling the network, three more years than the traffickers will spend in jail. Australia and the US could also learn from Malawi. In Australia, a repeat offender convicted of illegally importing and exporting wildlife was forced to pay about AUD 38,000 in fines for his second offence involving the trafficking of animals worth many times the fine. On his third conviction, he received a suspended sentence. Unsurprisingly the same individual was charged as recently as June 2020 with wildlife trafficking in a new case. In the US, a rhino horn trafficker convicted for trafficking a horn at USD 50,000, and trying to sell 10 more horns worth at least that much each, received a one-year sentence. Another man in the US convicted of trafficking 1,000 box turtles to China worth around a million dollars paid fines and fees totaling USD 350,000 and received two years of probation . So let’s practice what we preach, and start acting like Malawi Very few countries have taken wildlife crime seriously, despite the threats to biodiversity and pandemic disease, or connections with serious transnational organised crime. Low-level offenders make up the bulk of arrests and convictions, while intermediaries, kingpins and corrupt officials enable them to go free. Far too often, convicted traffickers immediately re-offend, assured that the low fines and weak penalties will continue to simply be the “cost of doing business”. Custodial sentences and fines that reflect the seriousness of the crime, including the monetary value of products trafficked and the associated risks to human health and biodiversity, serve as a deterrent to would-be criminals. That will save wild animals and help preserve our fast-diminishing biodiversity. And it may just help stop the next pandemic before it occurs.
Manuel Medina's quick guide to open-source intelligence
Anti-corruption, transparency and freedom of information initiatives over the last decades have significantly boosted the value of open-source intelligence for both the private and public sectors. In this quick guide, Intelligence Analyst Manuel Medina explains what open-source intelligence is and explores some of the tricky questions it raises. How OSINT fits into the intelligence cycle Open-source intelligence, or OSINT as it is known in the intelligence community, is the systematic collection, processing and analysis of open-source information. This means information that is freely available to the general public, such as media articles, research reports or company records in an open business registry. As I explained in my previous quick guide to intelligence, it is helpful to think of intelligence not as a static object but as a process. The output of this process can be a strategic or operational product. In both cases it is designed to help decision-makers understand a specific topic or threat in order to decide how to act to reach specific goals. If intelligence is a process, then open-source information is one of several possible inputs that can go into that process. Open-source information alone can be a powerful tool to support evidence-based decision-making. But depending on the context and need, analysts can also combine open-source and confidential information in the intelligence cycle. For example, an informer or whistle-blower may give a tip-off that a particular person has undisclosed and suspect business interests. Open-source information from company registries, websites and media articles can be used to try to corroborate this. Can OSINT support law enforcement? Yes, in fact it’s essential. In many countries public media reports, especially by investigative journalists, can trigger investigations into suspected financial crimes. In some cases, individuals even give themselves away with information they make publicly available on social media. This happened in the case of the Ambuila family in Colombia, whose daughter posted pictures of herself online with luxury goods and a Lamborghini. And as my colleague Tom Walugembe describes, the first money laundering case in Uganda started with a widely distributed WhatsApp video showing the criminals posing next to bundles of US dollars in their apartment. Not very intelligent. Where does OSINT come from? We tend to associate the term “open source” with digital information, but it can also be physical. Analysts and investigators used to have to go to libraries and government offices to get hold of public records and articles. You’ve seen the films where police leaf through piles of old newspapers in dusty archives? Now, a lot of this information is available on the internet and analysts spend more time behind their desks. But there’s still a lot of open-source information on paper in the world, especially in countries with less developed IT systems. Note that freely available doesn’t mean free. Lots of journals and media articles are behind paywalls, for example. Paying for freely available information is a bit of a grey question and frankly a headache for intelligence teams without a lot of resources. But as long as the cost isn’t so huge that it’s prohibitive and there are no other restrictions on people’s access to it, we still generally classify this data as open-source. The value of OSINT for both public and private sectors Open-source intelligence is immensely valuable to law enforcement. It generates leads, corroborates information received from other sources and backs up evidence used in court cases. It’s also incredibly useful to businesses and financial institutions for conducting risk assessments and due diligence on clients, employees and third parties. Open sources can be used to identify fraud or counterfeit schemes, or to investigate the claims of a whistle-blower. Strategic business intelligence is also usually based on open-source market data. Is information power? Not any more The fast expansion of the internet and search tools over the last couple of decades has made masses of information more easily available to the public. A few clicks now take us to newspaper archives going back several years, records of court judgements or downloadable databases of statistics and measurements. But paradoxically, having fast and easy access to huge amounts of data means that the old saying “information is power” is not so true anymore. First, there’s the issue of fake news – i.e. deliberately misleading articles or social media postings with no factual basis. Fake news that goes viral adds fuel to the fake fire. Analysts have to go through extensive procedures to verify the reliability of open-source information, both when initially collecting it and again during the integration and processing stages. Second, too much information can easily infoxicate us and cloud the decision-making process. Being able to gather relevant data and extract useful patterns is power, not information alone. How to fight infoxication Infoxication-fighting is a serious issue. If you have spent hours getting lost down rabbit holes on the internet while researching a topic, you’re not alone. Tools that help speed up the search process, extract relevant information and connect the dots are really valuable here. Our own Basel Open Intelligence tool is designed to do exactly that. It performs one-click automated searches of an individual’s or organisation’s name in combination with over 200 keywords on financial crimes, judicial actions, other criminal offences and custom keyword lists. It also trawls the deep web, picking out any references on lists of sanctions and politically exposed persons. Helpfully, you can search for multiple aliases and different name variations at the same time. It’s both amazing and frustrating how many different variations and transliterations of names there can be, especially for languages with different alphabets or complicated name structures. Some people use aliases to disguise their real identities. The algorithm uses natural language technology to extract entities and show related persons, companies, locations and professional positions. The documents found in the search are listed along with the extracted main text of the website, excluding irrelevant content like advertisement, menus or cookie notices. Keywords are highlighted for easy skimming. The user can quickly filter and sort the documents according to relevance. All this saves a huge amount of time and lets users gather just the information they need - and no more. Open-source information plus automated translation – problem solved? Basel Open Intelligence is also designed to help overcome other practical challenges faced by investigators, analysts and compliance officers conducting background checks or due diligence using open sources. Language is a big one. Until recently, the problem has been the language barrier – that analysts don’t understand information in languages they don’t speak. Translation takes time and is costly, especially if you don’t know whether the source is relevant or not. Automatic translation tools like DeepL and Google Translate have made understanding open-source information in other languages faster and cheaper. But now we have a new problem: regular search engines look primarily for results in the user’s own language. This makes it likely that analysts relying on regular search engines won’t even find potentially crucial information in other languages, let alone have the chance to analyse it. To help solve this, Basel Open Intelligence conducts searches in multiple languages. It also gives users the option to automatically translate articles into their own language for easier analysis. A word of caution When it comes to open-source intelligence, tools are there to help humans and not replace them. Language is a good example: multilingual search and automated translation are hugely valuable but don’t replace human understanding of the context and cultural or political connotations. A word like “paramilitary” or even “corruption” can have very different meanings in the context of Colombia, Ireland or China. Humans also have a better idea of the information they’re missing, not just the information they can find using open sources. Although many company or beneficial ownership registries are online and accessible, for example, others lack transparency. Most of all, open-source information is a powerful beast but it needs harnessing. The ability to extract relevant information from the mass of openly available information on the internet and elsewhere, and to turn it into something useful… now that’s power. That’s intelligence. Find out more Read Manuel Medina’s quick guide to intelligence… …and see all our quick guides, a series of short guides to complex topics in corruption and financial crime. Learn more about Basel Open Intelligence and sign up for a free demo account. Our free eLearning course on Operational Analysis offers an interactive, hands-on introduction to the intelligence cycle. Download a PDF of the quick guide or view on LEARN in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Manuel Medina’s quick guide to intelligence
What is intelligence in a nutshell? Intelligence is simply the systematic collection, processing and analysis oaf information to understand a specific topic or threat. Decision-makers and other stakeholders can then use that knowledge to decide how to act in order to reach their goals. It’s less about James Bond and more about drafting reports, evaluating data, mining databases and investigating complex trails of transactions and other relevant connections. What types of intelligence are there? The type of intelligence produced depends on the goals. It can be strategic – a general assessment of challenges faced by an organisation – or operational to counter specific and detailed challenges in the short or medium term. Most of the time, decision-makers need a combination of both. Let’s take an example from the Illegal Wildlife Trade programme I’m involved in at the Basel Institute. Say a shipping company wants to stop its containers being used to transport illegal wildlife products. To adjust its strategy and align resulting actions, it first needs a series of strategic intelligence reports about the main trafficking routes, the type of people and companies involved, loopholes that are being exploited, typologies and red flags to look out for, among other things. This is strategic intelligence. The company can use it as input for strategic planning and to support concrete general actions, such as closing loopholes in its procedures or adding extra screening in high-risk areas. On the other hand, a confidential operational intelligence report might alert the company to a specific shipment, for example a container sailing from an African port and destined for Asia that is linked to previous companies involved in IWT and has other red flags. Actions resulting from this intelligence might be physical examination of the container. How does intelligence reduce information overload? Intelligence analysis cuts out the masses of irrelevant or unreliable data that we are flooded with today. In my parents’ time, the main difficulty was finding enough information on which to base a decision. These days, decision-makers frequently suffer from infoxication – information overload – that overwhelms their ability to think clearly and see the big picture. We are lost in a sea of data and information – and criminals know this very well. By processing and integrating this mass of disparate information in a targeted, consistent way, intelligence analysts can weave a coherent picture that allows the end user to take effective, evidence-based decisions. How do you know whether intelligence is reliable? A good intelligence report will make it clear how reliable the intelligence is. The most common method for evaluation is a matrix that ranks the reliability of the information and the reliability of the source s . Other methods include indicators of depth or bias, for example. Just as importantly, intelligence reports should also point out limitations in the available information and gaps in our knowledge – what we don’t know as well as what we do. Decision-makers should note these limitations and avoid taking decisions that are skewed by the availability or lack of information. Even more dangerous is when a decision-maker simply acts blindly “on a hunch”, ignoring the nuances of intelligence reports and knowledge black holes. History shows that this can lead to catastrophic business decisions and even to war. How is intelligence produced? Intelligence analysts usually manage the process of creating intelligence by following an “intelligence cycle”. The cycle is pretty flexible and can be adapted to different workflows, but the basic steps are: Direction: It is essential to have a clear purpose and a set of specific goals so the analyst knows what knowledge is required, who will use it and what it will be used for. Plus the most important point: what question does the organisation need answered? Data collection: Based on a collection plan, data and information are gathered widely and systematically. They could come from a range of sources, including open-source databases, the media and people knowledgeable about the subject. Processing: Sorting, filtering and evaluating the data to identify what is most relevant and reliable. This is the infoxication-fighting bit. Analysis: Weaving together separate pieces of information, identifying links and creating a coherent intelligence report that clearly identifies the key points as well as limitations and unknowns. Dissemination: Delivery to the end user – law enforcement, the military, business leaders or the policy-makers who will use it to help take a decision and support effective action. If the same report will be received by different types of user with different goals and functions, the analyst might recommend specific actions for each different user group. For example, the same intelligence report about a suspected incident of wildlife trafficking in an African port would recommend different actions by law enforcement officials, financial institutions and shipping companies. Further resources on intelligence analysis Our free eLearning course on Operational Analysis on the Basel Institute LEARN platform offers an interactive, hands-on introduction to the intelligence cycle and how to use it to gather intelligence in a structured way. For super-powered open-source intelligence research, check out our newly developed Basel Open Intelligence tool. Download a PDF of this quick guide in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.