US intelligence agencies are considering whether to provide information, analysis and possibly tactical assistance to African governments about how to attack wildlife poaching networks, according to a top official.
“We are looking for opportunities” where “we can contribute,” Terrance Ford, the national intelligence manager for Africa in the office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper, said in an interview last week.
“We haven’t settled on [the next opportunity, but] it’s an issue of where we can make a difference,” Ford said after speaking to an intelligence conference in Washington. “We have a role to play in this, so we are trying to do that.”
Infrared and photographic imagery from satellites and other data could help locate and track herds of animals and bands of poachers and wildlife rangers would benefit from better equipment and by adapting some of the techniques, tactics and procedures used by military intelligence officers, Ford and other US officials said.
Ford said that in many respects, networks of illicit poachers and buyers resemble the terrorist networks that US military intelligence has developed tools to counter.
The tools used to “understand and defeat these networks can be shared with governments and wildlife services,” he said.
These include the methods, known collectively as geospatial intelligence or “GeoInt,” used to analyze, correlate and disseminate large amounts of data “to understand relationships that are not immediately evident,” Ford said.
“As we focus on terrorist activities, weapons proliferation and illegal drugs, we obtain information on how the contraband is acquired, transported and sold, plus data on the organization itself and its leadership,” Ford said in his speech. “There is certain information” about networks profiting from the killings that “we’d like to share, and we do share.”
There is increased interest in the US Congress in harnessing the intelligence community to assist in counter-poaching. The US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2016 defense bill said trafficking, particularly of African elephant ivory, can be used as a source of funding by terrorist groups and extremist militias in central and eastern Africa.
The committee encouraged the intelligence community to “share information and analysis on transnational criminal organizations” and others “that facilitate illegal wildlife trafficking.”
As many as 40,000 African elephants were lost to poaching in 2011, a major factor in the illegal wildlife trade that has become the world’s fourth-largest international organized crime, according to a University of Washington study published this month by the journal Science. The wildlife trafficking market is worth an estimated US$8 billion to US$10 billion per year.
More than 1,200 white rhinoceros were killed last year in South Africa’s Kruger National Park, compared with 13 in 2007, International Fund For Animal Welfare director Kelvin Alie said at the forum.
“The potential is there for the US intelligence community to assist with anti-trafficking and anti-poaching responses,” Alie said in an e-mail when asked about Ford’s remarks.
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