A little less than an hour ago I finished up my paper for my security class. Perhaps it's attributable to sleep deprivation, but I gave it a kinda quirky title:
The Impotent Enforcer and the Fisher with a hole in his net:
A Critical Examination of International Efforts
to Combat Terrorist Financing
The "Impotent Enforcer" refers to the United Nations and the "Fisher with a hole in his net" symbolizes the international attempts to suppress terrorist financing by using the same tools they use to detect and track money laundering. As far as my paper is concerned, the fishing analogy is a pretty big analogy. The fisher who has a big hole in his net may succeed in catching a big fish, but the smaller fish swim right through. The same is true with using anti-money-laundering techniques to catch terrorist finances: financial intelligence units (FIUs) are good at catching the large sums of money transferred by criminals and fraudulent sources, but it is much more difficult for them to catch the small sums of money transferred by terrorists, or to even recognize a transfer as money that is intended to fund terrorists. Legitimate sources of money differentiates terrorist financing from money laundering, making it very difficult for FIUs using anti-money-laundering techniques to catch the ‘small fish’. Ultimately, if the fisher thinks he can catch all the fish with his old net, he's nuts. There is a fundamental flaw in his thinking, and the only way he'll be able to catch the smaller fish, as well as the bigger ones, is if he rethinks his strategy, and uses a more appropriate tool. I think it's a decent analogy, but we'll see if my prof buys it.
one paper down, two more to go 
. And joy, they're both due Wednesday. 
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