Decoding Modern Terror: From Ideology to Innovation

James Booth Hello, everybody. It's James Booth at Silent Eight, global head of AML, counterterrorism, and sanctions, here for episode three of Silent Eight Talks. And I'm looking forward to this one. Ross, before I introduce you, do I need to add a disclaimer of explicit content or viewer discretion is advised, do you think, or?

Ross Savage I mean, it could well do, James. Who knows? So yeah, fire away with your disclaimer.

James Booth Viewer discretion may be advised and I apologise for any colourful language, but we'll remain respectful. I'm drinking coffee anyway at the moment, so everything's good here. But I'm absolutely thrilled, Ross, you join us again, you're now becoming a friend of Silent A. And for those of you that weren't, you haven't yet caught the webinar that Ross and I did, Ross is, for me, probably one of the world leading counter-terrorism experts supported by a lot of, well, a very colourful background. I think, Ross, you've served in the British Army. Yeah. I think, Ross, you've served in the British Army for a period of time, you've, the Metropolitan Police, you were a detective and FI and trainer for the NTFIU, worked for the Ministry of Defence, you've been training now for many, many years, but give us a little snapshot why this conversation that we're going to have about counter-terrorism is going to be as valuable with you, part of that conversation. Thanks, James.

Ross Savage And as always, great to speak with you and find some time to have, yeah, it is really important conversation because I think people, certainly in the West, maybe sort of lulled into a slightly false sense of security when it comes to the threat from terrorism. I mean, if you're of a certain age as I am, you would have sort of grown up around the threat posed from so-called Islamic inspired terrorism, the sort of heyday of Al-Qaeda and then the so-called Islamic states following that. So, you know, the early 2000s and really for 20 years, that was that was the thinking, you know, certainly from, you know, from the West where, you know, we live and work that that was what the threat was. It was around these sort of big, spectacular attacks, you know, 9/11, the 7th of July bombings in London, the Madrid train bombings, the attack in Bali. And it was, you know, it was manifesting itself, I think, in people's minds that this was the threat. This is what terrorism is, was. And then, with the decline of al-Qaeda after bin Laden was captured and then the rise in Daesh or so-called Islamic State and then subsequent diminishing of that organization as well because of the allied effort to seek control back from the territories ISIS or ISIL controlled. I think everyone sort of started to believe, well, you know, the threat from terrorism has gone, diminished. And maybe even sort of disappeared, you know, we're not we're not hearing about it that much in the media sort of cycles. So I do think it's important then to take a pulse check and say, well, is this true? Has has it completely disappeared? And the answer really is it hasn't. Now, you know, those those those mass spectacular attacks, thankfully, are something of the past. But the threat hasn't gone away. It's just evolved. It's morphed. Yeah. West. I know you're aware of this and we've sort of talk for various organisations, you know, financial crime compliance topics, including terrorism, finance and very much talk about the fact that, you know, with the decline of these these these kinds of religiously motivated terrorist groups in the West, there's been a surge in other forms of terrorism. Other forms or brands of terrorism, so so-called far right branded terrorism, nationalistic forms of terrorism, honestly, has been surging so much across all Western countries, not just UK or or America or Canada, but all across Europe. I mean, as we're recording this now, we can see that there's real trouble in France with the current situation there.

James Booth So for those that may not be familiar with it, obviously, you and I, we stay close to geopolitics because there's obviously significant disruption around the economic circumstances around France at the moment. So that interpretation, you know, we talk about iterations and versions of terrorism. Here we're talking about a political ideology that's invoking that disruption at the moment.

Ross Savage Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's just another example of... How you have this sort of flow of ideologies over time and you have the rise of one and then that falls away. And actually, one particular ideology can inspire another. And perhaps that has what we've been witnessing over the last decade or so. Now, what this all means is that terrorism hasn't gone away. It's just the particular threat, physical threat from terrorism changes based on who... who the preeminent threat is in any particular territory in which you sort of live and work. And because that threat is there, it's just... it's really important that people understand what does that threat look like? Who is it coming from? What are their methodologies when it comes to attack? But also, really importantly, around recruitment and who they're looking to recruit, how they're looking to do that, how they're spreading propaganda. And I know we're going to come on to technologies and AI-enabled tools because there's a whole conversation... There's a whole conversation we can have there around how different terrorist groups are looking to exploit technologies in today's landscape. But also, for our regulated sector and even non-regulated sector professionals that will be tuning into this, the fundraising typologies and the movement of funds and how that manifests itself from organisation to organisation differs as well. So it's really important that we acknowledge, yes, the threat from terrorism has changed, it hasn't disappeared, and the threat actors have evolved as well. I just don't believe, unfortunately, we would ever live in a time where there will be zero threat from terrorism. There will always be some form of threat.

James Booth Unless politics, geopolitics, religion, race, all of that disappears, which it's rightly not going to, that's never going to evolve, is it? Look, I've set this... Sorry, but listen, Ross, it's my podcast. I need to get a bit of order. No, no, this is good because this is going to lead us to the first part, right? So if it's okay with you, Ross, I'm going to set the scene, get your view if you're comfortable to go down this route, and then I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curveball to get started. So we're going to set the scene quite nicely. I think we're already on to that, and I'll throw that out there. You've said that technology might be a nice segue, so we'll talk about not just how technology and AI are going to help us, but actually how it's been exploited by terrorist or extremist groups as well. We can't have a conversation about counterterrorism without talking of geopolitics, particularly because of the pockets of conflict, but that'll lead us nicely into sanctions evasion, which I know is a really strong area that you speak very regularly about publicly as well. And then we'll bring in this human factor, and what I mean by the human factor is thinking about we, as counterterrorist financing experts, like what we should, you know, are we doing a good job? Can we do better? Where do we need to evolve? Where do we need to adapt? But how does all that sound?

Ross Savage Yeah, that sounds like a great running order. Yeah. Cool.

James Booth Now, I know you very well. I'm very privileged to call you a friend, and I know that you've met many people through your career, your training ventures, conferences, but I want to spend a couple of minutes just getting to know the real Ross. And you're probably panicking now, thinking what on earth, what the bloody hell is James going to do? But I just have some simple questions so we can get a feel of who you are and the audience can get to know you a bit intimately. So what was the last thing you watched on Netflix?

Ross Savage Oh, the last thing. Actually, I'm a little bit late to the party, but my wife and I watched Adolescence, which was, you know, really emotive subject. You know, I'm late to the party, so no spoilers here. But yeah, the way that that was shot was absolutely incredible. Some sterling performances. Can't believe it's taken us this long to get around to watching it. But yeah, that was the last thing I watched. Quite raw, isn't it?

James Booth I had to stop a couple of times during that one. Stephen Quim's a fantastic actor, but the young boy, I mean, he's incredible. What we're going to have to do there, Ross, is we're going to have to take your word for it and it's not something controversial like Love Actually or that you're going to do to us.

Ross Savage No, that'd be you, James, not me. Yeah, anyway, let's move on.

James Booth So if we... Okay, next question. You've worked in counter-terrorism. If you could have a completely different career, what would it be?

Ross Savage Do you know what? It may well have been something more physical sport orientated because that's another big sort of thread throughout my life. Exercise, sports. I've sort of done triathlons in the past and played a lot of sort of racket sports and bits and pieces like that. And I toyed with the idea when I was a lot younger of maybe going down maybe like the sports coaching or physiotherapy route. So something around that probably would have been in a sliding doors moment I would have gone down that door. Helping others

James Booth is a theme of your career, right? I'm kind of not surprised at that answer. I know you didn't ask me but I'll tell you anyway. It's a bit of a cliche isn't it to say you wanted to be a footballer or something like that but I was having a conversation about this a couple of days ago. You almost were, weren't you? Well, not really. I mean, not really. I mean, no, no, no. I mean, I played it good standard as a kid, but that was what it was. But I thought about this long and hard. One thing I wish I could do is I wish I could sing. And I'm only inspired by that because I went to go see my favourite rapper, Dre, not so long ago, three times in case you're asking. And he just absolutely dominated the floor. It was an experience and everybody, and what I really like about it, being a musician and what appeals to me is in that arena, I mean, it helps if you like it, it's music, but it doesn't matter who it is, you're anyone's artist. I know you're big into music, aren't you as well, Ross? But when you're in that moment...

Ross Savage I just went to see Oasis, their final Wembley gig on 28th of September. It was incredible. Growing up with that band, never actually saw them live first time around in the 90s. So that was an emotional night. It was amazing. Loved it.

James Booth There you go. Emotional. Such a key word. And that's obviously going to be a theme throughout our conversation. But nothing else matters in that two-hour window, does it? You're just taken away by the lyrics. Each song has got a different meaning to you. And being able to have that gift to put people in a really good place, I think would be incredible. So, yeah, that's what happens.

Ross Savage I think you've taken inspiration from these questions, James, from another favourite podcast of mine, which is Sidetracked with Annie McManus. We're on the verge of sidetracking, aren't we? Which is fantastic.

James Booth Now, I need to promise all of our listeners that this was not planned, but that was definitely my next question. So if you had to listen to one podcast forever, why should our audience, what would it be?

Ross Savage Well, honestly, you've segued it nicely by introducing the music concept, and if this was a televised podcast, you'd see a guitar in the corner of my office here, because, yeah, music is another passion of mine. So Sidetracked is great. Nick Grimshaw and Annie Mack on that podcast just really living and breathing all things music, but having a little Sidetracked conversation here and there, as we've just done. So yeah, Sidetracked, once a week, that's released.

James Booth It's fantastic. Do you reckon we could be in a boy band? I've already thought of a name, wrong direction, so we'll move on to the next question. Just a couple more, then we'll dive into our thematic as well. You get one all-expenses-paid trip anywhere in the world, but you can't think about geopolitics, so don't worry about what's happening. Where are you going?

Ross Savage Oh, man, that is a question. I've been to lots of places. One place I've not been, and putting geopolitics out of my mind, I think as a fascinating culture, the whole continent of China is pretty much an untapped experience to me. I think I've done a lot of the world of the English-speaking world, east and west and up and down, but I've not experienced China at all. You said not to include geopolitics, but how can we not? In terms of what's going on over there and what's been going on over the last five, ten years in terms of the developments, technological developments, etc. Putting aside concerns that we all have in terms of the regime and the surveillance state, etc. But even with that, I think I'd like to experience it with my professional hat on as well as my travel hat on. So yeah, that would probably be my answer.

James Booth As we talk, I have a bit of a habit of wandering around my study at home and I'm always thinking of inspiration. And you are right, actually. How can we not think about geopolitics considering what we do? And I'm looking at a book on my shelf. It was by Michael Palin, who's obviously a famous explorer and actor. He wrote a book called North Korea Journal about his time in North Korea. And I can't help thinking or feeling I would see and understand that and to the regime, and obviously it's caused so much conflict in terms of sanctions over the years. A little bit of a sort of a sinister side to me says I would love to see it. I'd love to experience it

Ross Savage and visit it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Last question

James Booth and then we'll get on to the thematic. Have you got your phone to hand, Russ? I do.

Ross Savage Right. What is the last thing

James Booth you purchased on Amazon? Oh, no, this is probably going to be...

Ross Savage Kid or animal related. I've got a few dogs. Let's have a look. This is a great party

James Booth question for anybody that's interested. Ask your friends around the dinner table for the last five things they purchased on Amazon.

Ross Savage You know what? The last thing... There's been lots of group purchases on our sort of Amazon account but the last thing I bought were two new dog thrower dicks and balls. There you go. I knew it would be something dog related. There you go. So everybody

James Booth you've got a little bit of insight everybody the Labrador loving oasis singing Asian cuisine inspired Ross Savage. So Ross thanks for that buddy. Right let's get back onto the thematic because time runs away but it's always nice isn't it? Right we started to set the scene really nicely and I think that we started to get a flavour of what's going on. Now the last time you and I spoke we painted a quite I think a detailed picture of how terrorism has certainly evolved. Post 9-11, post 7-7, post Operation Over. Bringing it into the today then, what do you think has been the biggest change in the threat landscape around terrorism? I know that's a really loaded question but I think you started to touch upon a few things beforehand. What do you think is the biggest evolution that we've seen?

Ross Savage There's lots of mini-evolutions but I would say that the biggest change is one that I mentioned and I'll caveat this little asterisk in terms of you and I probably will speak predominantly from maybe a western viewpoint and I'm not apologising for that because at the end of the day I live in the UK my professional experience is around the western culture and the western world UK, Europe North America etc. So that's my little asterisk that if we were recording this podcast in China or elsewhere we'd probably have a very different response to this so there's something in that right that depending on where you are in the world will inform your view to this question so there's something there I just want everyone just to appreciate that you know there's also this concept of one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter there's something in that. Remind me James I want to come back to that dynamic because that's almost like my horizon scanning macro geopolitical I've got some views on that but in terms of what I've seen sat here and you know working with companies around understanding their risk exposure to terrorism terrorism finance as well as financial crime and compliance issues money laundering etc what we can't fail to recognize is the relationship between the decline of so called religiously motivated terrorism inspired by the ideologies of Al Qaeda and Daesh otherwise known as ISIS or ISIL depending on you know the publications that you read the decline of those kind of ideologies at the same time we've seen a breakdown in the sort of internationally recognized rules based you know system so we've had a you know decline in cooperation at the United Nations we've had a rise then in nationalistic policies and views you know if you live in the UK like we do you can't you know you can't move without seeing you know media commentary of you know stop the boats and you know anti-immigration views so in this melting pot we've then had a rise in sentiment of you know nationalistic views and I'm not here to you know disparage or cast views or assertions on anyone's particular political beliefs but what I will say is that any kind of terrorist ideology thrives on a radical interpretation you know of any kind of political view it's not about being about being centrists and understanding all these things we teach our kids right you know that you need to listen to people's views and you need to you know you've got two ears for a reason one mouth for a reason you know listen first you know try and put yourself in other people's you know shoes to you know live a day in their shoes to then understand where they're coming from whatever yeah all of that seems to have gone by the wayside and now you've had a you know ever increasing rise on sort of blame culture on people trying to say well we're not going to do anything to help anyone else it's all about us and now we've seen that sort of you know rise in that kind of politics it's no surprise to me that we've seen then that decline in religiously motivated terrorism and in the void we've now seen that you know rise in far right inspired ideologies white nationalistic views across Europe and the UK so in my professional career over the last 20 years that is what I have witnessed and as I said at the outset terrorism hasn't disappeared it's just a different brand different flavour depending on where you live and work James before you come in I just want to say one other thing as well around because I've mentioned the decline in religiously motivated terrorism. What I don't want people to be left with the conclusion of is that it has disappeared because that is not true what you may be familiar with again if you're a listener of a certain age you would have understood perhaps that Al-Qaeda was a very Middle East centric organisation you know fuelled and funded by certain Gulf states headquarters, bases of operations being around the Middle East Afghanistan training camps what it is worth saying as well is that as a microcosm of a change rather than a big trend so Islamic inspired terrorism religiously motivated inspired terrorism hasn't gone away Al-Qaeda still exists ISIS and ISIL still exist there are franchises of both of those organisations and what we have now seen is a shift away from base of operations or headquarters of operations being in the Middle East and that brand of terrorism has now firmly set up shop across the Sahel region of Africa so really across that middle band of the continent of Africa where there's ecological shock there's a lot of civil wars, breakdown of governments this is like an amazing recruitment ground and set of criterias for a terrorist organisation and so it has now seemed to be the case that religiously motivated terrorism of that brand is now firmly set up camp around that particular region and I'll come back to that because I just wanted to introduce that because when we talk about the threats from evolving technologies and things like drones and AI I just want to mention that particular area because there's some recent commentary which is quite worrying coming out of that particular part of the world. So I'm

James Booth drawing from this and I'm furiously trying to make notes and compartmentalise some of this there are a few particular issues and I'm going to coin a term as well that might bring this together it feels like that we've either got a single issue an identity form of extremism so we can talk about whether that's eco-extremism misogynistic terrorism or whether it's racially motivated or politically motivated so we've got branches that operate with that. What I'm hearing and what my instincts are telling me though that we've got this ideological fragmentation and I want to give an analogy to what I mean by that if I use the analogy of salad bar and what I mean by salad bar is rather than many of these groups now sort of having or adhering to like a single coherent ideology that we've traditionally associated terrorist groups with many of these actors now are kind of mixing their motives so combining a far right anti-government or conspiratorial or maybe anti-tech or climate or an interpretation of a religion or a form of extremism or if you sort of get what I mean by that analogy and I guess that fragmentation probably makes it harder to profile or pigeonhole a specific threat so do you feel that just we're doing that segue sort of thing again is the mixing of ideologies do you think tactical or is it actually driven by a much deeper psychological or social driver because it just leads to more unpredictable behaviour

Ross Savage right? Yeah it's a really challenging one and there'll be academics that have been debating this, will be debating this in terms of what the landscape looks like and why it is developing the way it is and why it is attracting certain individuals I suppose if we try and unpack at its core what terrorism is maybe what it isn't three main ingredients really you've got ideology, you've got then motivation and then you've then got the actions that those individuals and groups take so within those three areas I suppose terrorism represents what is going on in society and where you have disenfranchisement where you have concern maybe stoked by various conspiracy type theories that are spread propagated online which was not able to be done to the same extreme and to the same degree and the same reach 20 years ago so we've got a change in the environment across societies there's lots of fear around the future with regard AI displacement of roles and jobs for me just looking through it for a terrorism lens you're probably going to have you know new inspired you know terrorist causes perhaps extremist causes as a result of that you know it's not a stretch of the imagination at all to believe that if people have a devoid of purpose they have they feel no self worth or value you know these are the kinds of vulnerabilities that that terrorists and terrorist organizations thrive on you know targeting people that you know are feeling these kind of disenfranchisement so you know it's not a surprise to me that we're in a place now where there's a lot of extreme views held across a lot of different areas and people feel if they feel out of control they want to get that you know that feeling of control back and one of the ways that some people decide to do that is to adopt a cause and then take action you know so the ideology is well you know I'm feeling vulnerable across a whole number of areas I'm maybe blaming this section of a community a government an idea I have formed an ideology that you know that is against that now I'm motivated to you know to act and I'm now going to do X Y and Z you know my actions could be physical harm they could be you know financially motivated in terms of you know trying to carry out some kind of action for your group that raises funds your activities could be you know a protest extreme protest you know it could be damage to property etc etc so you know there's a lot in there isn't there around what's happened over the last 20 years the rise of social media platforms information that then is open to abuse perhaps or interpretation in a way that it never was before and I know James you've got you know you've got a big passion around sort of AI and AI tools and and maybe we're already moving towards the conversation where we can touch upon maybe some of the fears that we probably both have in terms of this space terrorism radicalization exploitation of you know messaging and what technology is on the cusp of doing for a terrorist perhaps at this moment in time

James Booth yeah and I'm just I'm thinking about how these methodologies are evolving over time and um we we have association to it where we have this concept of turning clean money into dirty money or clean value into dirty value I think is a much more apt term we've got this financing through charities we we have the old that gets associated with this but I believe that these methodologies have so radically shifted now and I want to throw a few ideas out there and maybe just get people thinking slightly different about this issue and I'm really what I'm trying to do is tease out that this is an inherently more complicated issue than just small denominations of funds moving through an account because I just don't feel that is happening. It's just the state sponsor or the state actor or groups. So you alluded to technology and AI and automation. I think many of our sort of financial crime professionals will think about things like deep fakes and voice synthesis as being a bit more fraud and trying to extort from people but I think we're probably already there when it comes to AI being used to recruit. We are. There's been examples

Ross Savage since 22, 23 of reported examples of various terrorist groups utilising AI generative tools and by that audience of course we mean not just large language models that are just processing data, tokenising it and giving a sequential sort of response. What we're talking about here with AI generative tools are your more sophisticated models that are offering new content new imagery new video footage, new vocal footage so it's generating content and we've seen it with Al-Qaeda's media publication where it has been noted that certain imagery has been debunked as being false and generated by AI generative tools to spread a false narrative and false message we've seen it in response to the 7th of October attacks in Israel by Hamas and we've seen various publications there also doctoring and producing false imagery to support their messages so it's already there, it's already being utilised by these extremist organisations for the purposes that they wish to seek to achieve either recruitment or fundraising so the caddy's out the bag already I have to say

James Booth and actually a lot of what AI is doing actually is enabling what's already there and what I mean by it's supporting the capacity in terms of dissemination of propaganda so you could take a piece of content, you can transpose it into countless languages include videos that can be generated by AI much much much quicker than you used to be able to do but here's another angle and I want to contribute this to an article that was in the Guardian I believe it was I don't want to pass this as my own but there was a particular report where certain AI bots were able to use to generate I don't know if the right terminology, forgive me, is a code or a map for downloading and printing weapons using 3D printers. So very easy, very covert you're not going to appear on any registers as well so I know

Ross Savage we don't want to go too doom and gloom do we but I mean this is the reality of the world in which we now live and I'm also worried obviously I've done some previous work associated with sort of military and I was working in cancerism around the time of the Salisbury poisonings Novichok type viruses being utilised by state aggressors to achieve their own sort of messaging I have also seen reports of but this is a positive so I can't remember which tool it is, I'm doing this off the top of my head but I think it's a Gemini, I think it's a Google based AI model that is looking at sequencing sort of genomes and producing new viruses so that sounds bad but the thing these viruses are to treat various sort of cancers so they're working out new delivery mechanisms to actually target and destroy these various horrible conditions so this is a really positive thing but it's not directly the imagination to see how these tools can potentially sequence new deadly toxins you know so obviously there's a lot of worry out there around the adverse use cases for this technology and if you are a criminal or if you are a terrorist you're of course going to be looking for opportunities to leverage this you know in a terrorist perspective maybe to cause mass casualties and mass harm and mass panic that's what terrorists want to do if you can achieve mass panic and fear and spread terror then you're going to find tools that enable you to do that so there's a lot of worry out there

James Booth yeah so that emphasises my point that AI is taking what's already there and just using it differently but we'll come on to you're rightly trying to tap the brakes on this sense of negativity that can also be used to combat just very quickly before I come on bring the next thematic into this other methodological shifts as well just to recap what you mentioned I think there's this less emphasis on rigid hierarchies more on these autonomous cells franchise models if you like or lone actors as well this vibrant situation of crime and illicit economies and so on these are always intertwined and we relate terrorism to drug trafficking, human smuggling extortion and so on as well I think this narrative around internet facilitated operational tradecraft I just thought of that on the spot that's quite impressive but this DIY approach of manuals and bomb making encrypted tools this simple low sophistication of attacks but with a symbolic effect and of course we saw the horrific incidents that took place in Manchester only a couple of weeks ago vehicle ramming and as we approach a particular festive period in December a lot of cities around the UK where we are of course and the US where I visited recently are taking a lot more steps to put controls in place to stop this and this sort of use of remote and proxy approach if you like to to combat in terrorism or to infiltrate with specific terrorist issues as well so let's think about how this is evolving then we've got we've started to tease out now this technology and terrorism aspect so let's put this into two buckets let's start with how terrorist networks are operating but I want to think about then how the emerging technologies whether that's encrypted communication or whether that's AI are reshaping how some of these terrorist networks operate

Ross Savage yeah no I mean absolutely it's impossible to think about a network or an organisation in today's landscape without considering the role you know technology plays in enabling supporting growing you know such a network nothing's new under the sun they always say and you know back in the day terrorist organisations would go about their you know their building of a network sort of old school you know it would be you know human beings identifying fellow human beings that they thought maybe shared a similar mindset ideology there'd be targeting of individuals based on various vulnerabilities that they had you know the radicalisation process would take place very slowly over a long period of time and you know you'd have that network then growing sort of organically like that you'd then if you come one level up you'd have then a group or a cell that would then associate with another sort of organisation again because there's a shared ideology that sort of moved into the ISIS space where ideology was a little bit more flexible in terms of Al-Qaeda back in the day they very much wanted what were known as clean skin so new recruits that have no former criminal record or associations with criminality at all believing that would generate too much heat for the organisation ISIS took a different approach they were more pragmatic about it and thought well actually if we've got individuals that are in the criminal fraternity already they might have access to firearms, more novel ways of raising funds etc etc so there was a slight flexibility to the ideology or the ideological requirement and components of that now we're in a position where you've got you know you've got active cooperation between criminal activities and terrorist groups activities so JNIM who I just can never remember what they so JNIM are the group Jemmat Nusrat Al Islam Wal Muslimin an Al Qaeda affiliate sweeping across several Western African nations especially Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, this is that Sahel region I mentioned, really deadly organisation they are actively working with organised crime elements around drug trafficking we can stick with this one as well because we're looking at technology here and I'll come back to it they're very much experimenting with advanced drone technologies that are coming out of Ukraine we're not seeing fully AI automated swarm attacks yet but that is the concern with various security individuals that that's not far off now why should this matter we're set in the UK I'm talking about an organisation that is in the Sahel region of Africa we've already seen that what's going on in the Ukraine is having an impact on the technological capability of Janim because they are learning from the drone lessons that are coming out of that particular conflict now you introduce the world wide web and availability of spreading information technological information communications, radicalisation messages, false messaging on world wide available messaging systems, social media platforms you see where we're going with this nothing is now happening in isolation in a remote region if there is connectivity there is a risk of that kind of tactics, technology, messaging spreading to first of all diasporas that maybe support that message vulnerable individuals that are then compromised and start to believe that message and then the tactics and the weaponry and the technology can proliferate around the globe we have to be students of geopolitics we have to take note of what is going on around the world I've got fairly young children and we all, especially parents, you need to be aware of what's available out there and how the algorithms work and what information is being pushed to individuals, what's being shared because it's now not remote like it used to be 20, 30 years ago

James Booth Well also we see incidents that happen almost real time uploaded within a matter of seconds as well and that can help us I want to shift this now into we obviously do a lot of work with financial institutions around the world and I want to bring this into something quite relatable that people, transpose this into things that people understand and I want to bring this conversation now into how AI is helping combat some of this but I also want to tease out some of these limitations and again as you've been sharing some of these thoughts Ross, I've been making some notes and I want to flush some of these out. AI is it can be the secret sauce, there's no question about it and I'm a huge advocate of it, no doubt about it which is why I do what I do but this evolution all these evolutions that we've spoken about and we've brought together are going to present some challenges and I want to go through this list of them that I've been generating but I want to turn a negative into a positive and I want to then think about also the great work that AI is doing but just some practical challenges, you know false positives aren't anything that we're not already dealing with across financial institutions so we get an alert that shouldn't be an alert and we spend human hours trying to decipher that and make decisions and in truth we're not generally we're very good at spotting false positives but because we can't generally justify it we end up reporting and that causes all the problems that we spoke about I guess the risks here are too many false positives in road trust that we know the worry I would have

Ross Savage it builds complacency and stuff as well if they're just constantly dealing with false positives human nature you can expect people to lower their defence slightly you know I think we all would if day in day out you're dealing with dozens and dozens of false positives and by this audience of course we mean a requirement for financial institutions to spot and detect suspicious transactions and individuals perhaps that have various restrictions placed on them perhaps they are a designated sanctioned individual for terrorist purposes you know it's illegal really to allow financial activity to carry on for a customer that you have got that is now on a government watch list or is sanctioned you're not allowed to do that it's open source it's public information every sanctioning body out there will tell the financial sector what they can and can't do now the problem with the false positives dynamic is that for argument's sake you are called John Smith and you end up on a government watch list you become part of a prescribed organisation you have a membership to Al-Qaeda and there are going to be a lot of institutions out there with individuals in the name of John Smith and that will hit on an alert it will generate an alert and it will say to a human investigator is this person the John Smith that is on this watch list it's worth mentioning that James

James Booth yeah no it is absolutely the only thing I would potentially counter on the complacency aspect is I don't think people are more inclined to close things down I think the more likely to report because it's less paperwork less headache and so on but obviously that's where again AI supports that I guess linking it back to our thematic then of terrorism I guess there is a real risk again different approaches to risk across different organisations across different jurisdictions there is a danger particularly because of the significant rise in extremist activity it's not the same legal designation if it's a politically sensitive or a diverse community there is a risk that it can label things potentially incorrectly the next thing is where AI is very strong is explainability and accountability but this is where there is a balance between the role of a person and the role of AI as you and I know Ross from our experience that terrorism or terrorist financing or extremist financing through an organisation is likely to be lean value that's moving to dirty value but why that's important that I do is that that can make it easier to report because you're talking about a transaction that is unusual in the flow of the funds but if this is just the behaviour of an individual it may be harder for just a black box AI solution to say why a person was flagged but then that's where the role of a person comes in as well, it's obviously very high stakes so if there's an evolving situation human oversight is going to be critical as well third challenge data quality, that's not the fault of AI that's because the decisions are only as good as the data it's fed and I think we've been really honest with ourselves when we say data can be sparse or segmented or slightly unreliable yeah, all wrong and that can not be on purpose, let's just add it can be based on errors or cycles of reviews or reviews not taking place as well an interesting dynamic I thought about is terrorist deliberately feeding poison data to camouflage patterns so overwhelming an algorithm to make it think that something negative is actually a positive as well because it's like a bit of an arms race isn't it essentially as well it's the over-reliance as well I think over-reliance on AI could be challenging I mean it's exceptional I believe for money laundering but I think terrorism is a very very challenging rhetoric to deal with you're not going to have a designated terrorist walk into a bank and say open an account and send me money it's just not going to happen

Ross Savage it was described to me James and I think this is true that trying to spot terrorism finance is like trying to find a needle in a haystack full of other needles and I think that's sort of where you're at you know the reality check for people working in the financial services sector to rely on transactional indicators to spot terrorism finance is you know it's unrealistic with the best will in the world you know it's difficult for any one single organisation to have access to the vast amount of information and data to actively understand what is going on there are however indicators, behaviour indicators that can give rise to concern and suspicion but it is so important that there's like a multiple sort of lateral and a multi sort of body and industry sharing of information and data where it can be done and I know the UK has done it quite well with some industry public and private sector partnerships that model would be fantastic if it was replicated in every single jurisdiction but of course that isn't necessarily the case but it takes a network to defeat a network was an old adage from a comment I had within the Ministry of Defence when you're looking to defeat a terrorist network the acknowledgement is you need a network to do that that is in the financial sector, it's the FIUs the financial intelligence units other government departments and law enforcement it's then replicated it from jurisdiction to jurisdiction you have trade bodies the other issue the difficulty around dealing with terrorist cases and terrorism finance cases is that often there's a lot of sensitivities and confidential information and intelligence that is in the background as well so it just makes it, it's not insurmountable but it does make it challenging obviously because you know you have to be very careful about what information you share and who you share that with because it could compromise on going you know assets and investigations and it's you know a fascinating environment to work in but it is hugely challenging as well for all these reasons you're introducing yeah

James Booth let's split this onto how the AI has combated terrorism as well or it's disrupted terror networks and we'll try and nip in a thematic here of how financial institutions are benefiting from this as well so I've come up with a series of different points as we've been debating this and I just want to throw out there, I'm thinking about all this in real time, so Ross as you're speaking I'm chucking out these and trying to lean on resources and a couple of resources that I want to reflect on and when this gets uploaded to Spotify I'll add them into LinkedIn as well when we push it out content moderation and extremist content detection so I think look, AI models are good at image recognition video, audios and it can scan flag remove which we know is adopted by social media, we also know that there's always room for improvement but generally it picks up hate speech or extremist propaganda there is actually a report that was, I'm trying to remember when it was now, it was by an organisation called Tech Against Terrorism I want to say it's two or three years old but what they've been able to do was archive thousands of pieces of AI generated content that were produced by terrorist organisations and extremist actors as well and I'll share that report in the in the comments to go as well predictive analytics and anomaly detection so that's a little bit of public sharing of information and then we can bring those into our financial institutions and I think what's also really good as well just on the AI aspect in an FI here we know the concept of an agent and the agent is essentially the AI that you can create and you can make it do anything that you want so you tell it what to do and that's what it will do number of these reports that will detect patterns or deviation or financial flows or travel patterns you can plug AI an agent into that report to spot this behavior as well so that will give you very good predictive analytics it will help you improve your anomaly detection the other side to that as well of course is that not only can we feed those agents with that information but human beings will spot this activity as well and that's kind of where you know if you think about this if you can map in your financial institution you likely have a complex investigations team if you can develop a network or like a link analysis or a graph model that maps social or financial patterns that is only going to improve your ability to manage the risk which leads to resource allocation you know you're going to be able to put things on that as well a little bit more combative so drones you've mentioned AI can produce very large volumes of imagery so satellite or drone that will detect movement of weapons, shipments, for example and using the example of Ukraine of course there's a lot of AI powered systems that are being used to detect ambush drones or supply routes of some of these as well so there's a lot of really good things that this is happening as well and I don't want this narrative of today to be about that AI is a negative, it's a real positive as well isn't it Ross?

Ross Savage It's the double edged sword isn't it that society is grappling with right now and these are the existential threat type questions that are out of all of our control it would seem to have any sort of impact upon our job I believe as citizens and as professionals is just to be aware of both sides of that sword, the good side in terms of the applications, the positive applications that are being generated and the use cases and the ability to support in complex investigations work with lots of data in a way that human beings just can't make connections rapidly as long as it's got access to an agent that's got access to a lot of data in an institution it can spot patterns and reveal hidden networks in a way that investigators just wouldn't have been able to do or it would have taken them months if not longer so there's medical advancements, there's some amazing applications for it but it is a coin with two sides so we also then have to be aware of the threat side of things as well look, arms races have been around, technological arms races tactical arms races have been around forever and terrorists traditionally have learned from criminal advancements in typologies and tactics when things become available in an open court proceeding then the tactics are sort of revealed by and large and this has always been the case forever more there's been advancements on the adversary side and then there's catch up and then maybe we make some gains on the compliance the investigation side and then it swings around again. I think what's evident in today's technological landscape is just the speed of development I can't be I take quite a keen interest in technological advancements on machine learning and AI and I play around with lots of tools but I can't be the only one that finds it a struggle to keep up from week to week so it's just the speed that is concerning to everyone it's not that it's out of control, it's just it takes an awful lot of horsepower I think to try and stay fully abreast of what the threats are what the advancements and assistance and dynamics can be introduced by these tools that's where we're at, the genie's out of the bottle I don't think it's going to go back the technology is there it's reinventing existing technologies, it's inventing new technologies and yeah we just have to harness it as best as we can and advance with it and use it to our advantage

James Booth yeah, let's bring this back onto the financing and sanctions aspect because I think that's going to lead us very nicely into this framework approach that we have in our organisations you and I both know that money is the lifeblood of terrorism and of course that goes hand in hand with sanctions evasion, what are some of the new methods that you're seeing in terms of the sanctions evasion and is this timely actually because of course we saw yesterday the United Kingdom announced that they're going to merge their two sanctions lists into one and we'll talk about what that means in our organisations in a moment but what are the friends or the most innovative or the concerning methods of evasion that you're seeing at the moment involving terrorism again it's a massive

Ross Savage subject isn't it because because it's sort of depends on what is being circumvented or evaded that then leads to the typologies that are being deployed to evade so I suppose if we look at the rise in trade based restrictions that we've seen across the west we've seen the UK the new office OTSI the office of trade sanctions implementation formed as a realisation has dawned that a lot of the adversaries I'm really here, I'm focusing predominantly on Russia from the west point of view what we've seen is just how much evasion circumvention activity has revolved around the movement of goods and technologies technologies could be as you or I know, around things like defined dual use goods, dual use goods are a good, an item a technology that has both a military application and an everyday application, for example a GPS sort of microchip can be obviously used for completely legitimate navigation based equipment, civilian based equipment, but also missiles need to know where they're going and there's a whole range of these so this whole aspect of trade and the movement of goods and technologies and the need to restrict it through sanctions measures and trade restrictions has then brought about perhaps a bit of an arms race in circumvention and sanctions based typologies so there's lots of reports out there around the rise in the abuse of bordering countries ex-STAN based countries, ex-CIS states all of a sudden we've now got a lot of these high priority items, defined items of high risk these sort of dual use items obviously shipments out to Russia, completely gone but now we've got lots of shipments out to these bordering states have gone through the roof. The theory of course is that that's not the end destination of them and they're actually then for movement on to Russia so you've then got technological advancements around how to pull the wool over individuals eyes who are involved in the movement chain of those items could be if you're involved in the finance side of it. Are you being told the whole picture? Are documents and user certificates bills have laid in at customs declarations. There's now lots of opportunities for the criminal to utilise and abuse these evolving technologies to produce fake documentation, to change documentation. So document manipulation and technological capability there, that's absolutely been seen and will continue to be utilised to help evade and circumvent sanctions restrictions. You've probably got a few examples in the financial services sector as well, James. I'll throw it back to you.

James Booth I think, to be honest, Ross, you've covered a lot of it as well. I mean, trade finance is a thematic that we're certainly looking at at the moment. And it comes with challenges. And forgive me, I feel like I'm sidestepping this one slightly, but I just feel that this is a point now to bring it into how a bank is setting up their frameworks, their AML frameworks around this. And I just want to, forgive me, I don't know, it does sound like I'm sidestepping that, but if we're bringing it down to an FI, then I think it's apt that we talk about these AML frameworks in organisations as well. Hey James, why don't we say

Ross Savage this? So, you know, we could put a request out there now, or maybe we can reiterate it in the show notes. If any listener has any particular desire to explore any of these concepts that we're going into now in more detail, please just put, you know, put that in the comments if, you know, if sanctions, if trade-based money laundering, if, you know, evolving threat typologies across whatever kind of financial crime dynamic is something you're interested in, you know, put that in there because we've only got a limited amount of time to cover off today's topic. But we can come back and we can have more conversations, can't we? Yeah, absolutely.

James Booth So let me strip this back then to the frameworks. So everybody's clear. I know we'll have some listeners that aren't part of financial institutions and actually a lot of these controls you will also have as well. But I actually want to answer what you've asked me, but I want to transpose that into something that complements what you've already said. So what does an AML framework, does a good AML framework look like, or at least the basis of an AML framework, not just in a bank as well? So see the AML framework about the defence system. So it's preventative, it helps detect reports and mitigates these risks of money laundering or terrorist financing. You're going to give us a football

Ross Savage analogy, aren't you? No, no, I'm not. You're tempted. No, no, so

James Booth that component, the three line of defence is one, but we're not going to go into the granular detail, but maybe episode two we'll do a football in there. Oh man, I'm going to have to do it now. You're going to have to do it. Oh, let's see, let's see. I don't know if we're going to get time, but look at governance and oversight where your three line of defence might sit. So here you've got the accountability versus risk, culture, management, support and alignment with the strategy. So you've got those sub-elements, haven't you? So like your risk appetite, your escalation protocol, your independent review, your board review, and then of course your three line of defence could be shaped like a football team. You move the formation around. There we go, we got it in there. Risk assessment, so understanding where the firm's vulnerable and built on those four pillars of risk, of the risk-based approach, which is customer, product, geography, delivery channels, CDD programme, make sure your customer is who they say they are, your enhanced due diligence programme, which is for your higher risk customers, and I prefer the term higher risk to high risk because everybody's different. Your transaction monitoring and screening programme, sanctions, watch lists and screening, your SAR regime, your record-keeping and audit trail, training and awareness, quality assurance and validation, your technology infrastructure and your continuous monitoring. Have I missed any off, Ross?

Ross Savage No, I think that environment, that technological environment you mentioned, would be almost like the fifth pillar of risk that I would introduce. You mentioned four and for me that fifth pillar is the operating environment. So that could be the technological operating environment and the actual physical environment in which a firm operates. I think it's important that we don't forget that that can, in and of itself, create risk.

James Booth So let's then tackle this head on. This is a big question so maybe I'll share some thoughts and give you a moment to just breathe. And think about this. But the question is, and actually I'll put this out to the audience as well. Pause the podcast after I've asked this question and gather your own thoughts and maybe compare and contrast it to what Ross and I are going to speak about. So the question is, do AML and CTF frameworks in an organisation actually work in disrupting terrorism? So the question again is, do AML and CTF frameworks in an organisation actually work in disrupting terrorism? So I'll everyone pause, just a minute or two, write some thoughts or form a view and I'm going to try and give a balanced perspective on this. So, short answer, they work, but I'll caveat that by saying not perfectly. And what I mean by that is, AML frameworks unequivocally disrupt terrorist networks because they help cut off the funding routes, exposing facilitators and making it riskier to move some of that money covertly. But I think the effect can be uneven because what the system is particularly strong at is catching the visible and formal flows but the informal, so the low value, the digital channels can still evade detection. So think of it a bit like a net. The net's strong enough to catch the big fish, arguably strong enough to catch some of the smaller fish as well, but if you have an adaptable predator that knows what the net is, knows how to circumvent the net, then it is capable of slipping through that net essentially. So if I break these down into two rhetorics, the bit that works well, and it must be worth adding at this point that financial institutions, especially banks, are probably, I'm going to change that and say, they are definitely much better at preventing terrorists from accessing or abusing the financial system. We've got way better sanction screening capabilities, much better KYC, much better EDD, but I think for me, the culture is the winner here. Culture across financial institutions has fundamentally shifted how we're able to disrupt it. We have at a national level and an international level far better intelligence sharing capabilities than we've ever had. So UK, you've got Gimlet, in the US you've got FinCEN Exchange, in Australia you've got the FinCEL Alliance. These have all formed as agencies to help offer support and collaboration as well. And those platforms have directly led to asset freezes, arrests dismantling the facilitators. So we've got solid concrete results as well. AI network analytics is constantly improving detection so we are seeing more and more financial institutions more willing from a cultural perspective to embrace AI and that is replacing old rule based clunky archaic systems as well. And our capability of SAR filing is often that first piece of intelligence and we've spoken about this whether it's a phone number, an email address, a transaction that's helping us identify those logistical cells or those travel facilities or those hubs as well. And intelligence has actually predicted attacks by tracing these sort of pre-incident financial movements as well. I'm going to balance it and then come to you Ross and maybe some of this is going to consolidate what you think or provoke a thought in your mind. Where it's struggling of course is this small and informal transaction pattern and we know that financing involves low value high frequency, often crowdfunded or halal or crypto that will help us slip through some of those thresholds. The formal AML regime, so looking at how all this was set up, I think was originally built to catch money laundering as opposed to that micro financing aspect. So distinguishing the genuine against the old or these complex especially in conflict zones is particularly challenging as well. And then that over compliance I think has led to some form of de-risking and we've seen that haven't we in the charity sector as a particular issue as well. Emerging technologies are difficult. Emerging technologies come very rapidly. Cryptocurrency privacy, DeFi and it can be difficult for regulatory frameworks to play catch up and as a bank we can only monitor what actually happens. We've talked about global cooperation and collaboration but let's be candid it's still fragmented as well. We've got differences in legal definitions reporting standards, interpretation of risks as well. Final thought, the volume of noise is just overwhelming. I'll come back to my question. I've thrown a lot out there and I'm confident you're going to agree. Do AML and CTF frameworks actually work in disrupting

Ross Savage terrorism? I will be controversial and just give a one word answer. I'm not going to give a one word answer. I'll elaborate but I will say sometimes and I think that is accurate for a number of reasons and the word I underlined in that question was disrupt and that means I think we can be semi-positive on the regime and that it does on occasion disrupt terrorism and terrorism finance and I'm speaking from first-hand experience of dealing with disclosed information that has led then to successful investigations and prosecutions so I cannot say the answer is no, it doesn't but you ended with a word about volume and volumes and there is an awful lot of rhetoric out there now from very experienced commentators in the compliance landscape who are arguing for the fact that the entire regime is a little bit broken or creaking at the seams that is no fault of the institutions themselves of course who are complying and actually whenever I deliver training to people on the front line I say the wrong way to think about the AML regime is that you need to stop, the regime needs to stop and prevent and eliminate all forms of money laundering because that is an impossible task the way to think about it is in your day jobs what can you do to make a difference today what can you spot and detect how can you have a positive impact because you can so it's a more empowering message around what you can do some other thoughts for me on this if you had said do AML CFD frameworks actually prevent or stop terrorism the answer would clearly be no it would just be that's an impossible task for all the reasons we've talked about do they help 100% there was a post 9-11 US congressional report into the World Trade Centre attacks that said that post event what was discovered and found out about the network and the bombers 90% of that information or there or thereabouts I can't remember the exact figure it came from financial intelligence and financial information I've actually got the book in my hand

James Booth bizarrely the 9-11 commission report is what it's called and I was actually going to mention that but Ross thank you

Ross Savage so there you go so I can tell you first hand the information that is disclosed is hugely helpful the word disrupt is the key one we can achieve some disruption through keen efforts within the regulated community in terms of people knowing what to do how to spot suspect behaviours and transactions who to report to how to report what information to put in how to liaise effectively with law enforcement and counterparts and I've seen first hand investigations as well where people from the industry are live time assisting in investigations and there's been a huge amount of successes that have been wholly reliant on that support so I want to be really positive here as well what the regime is and has done of course is if you think about it if you remove that regime it would be the wild west right I mean people would be moving whatever they wanted through their accounts there'd be no you know detection of anything they could do what they want you know pay whoever they want send money wherever they want so of course it has an impact and what it's probably done in some quarters is push people into the unregulated space or the underground economy certainly you know on the criminal side you know things like the black market peso exchange you've got Chinese underground banking networks it's been an awful lot reported around the use and abuse and false narratives around you know crypto assets being completely untraceable which we know is not the case they're pseudo anonymous and there's loads out there about that we can maybe go into that in more detail another time so I am just adding a little bit more colour and first hand operational view to your commentary there James and I would say it does sometimes have an effective disruptive component to tackling terrorism but just the sheer weight of transactions and activity and the fact of course that a lot of terrorist finance money is generated through legitimate sources, wages loans, it means it's really difficult to spot and detect you know so there's that reality to it as well

James Booth we could talk about this for hours and I think we're doing a very good job of that but let's start to round this off with a final thought around I initially thought this question about the next generation but actually I want to think about this as what we can be doing right now, we've already spoke about this concern that AI displaces people and it's not necessarily the case, there'll be an evolution how can the next generation or even the now of counter-terrorism professionals just be better prepared and do our roles better?

Ross Savage Good broad question, I think the discipline first and foremost attracts individuals with a key desire to do as much as they possibly can to disrupt the ideologies that are underpinning and dispel some of the myths underpinning ideologies that are spread I think people who are involved in counter-terrorism really want to make a difference they move heaven and earth in my experience to be as professional as they possibly can using the toolkits that are given to them by whichever government they're working for so I think holding on to that passion from people that are involved in the discipline is key, it is important it is sometimes a bit of a vocation rather than a job often if you're at the sharp end involves some amount of personal danger and jeopardy involves long hours it's sometimes not for the faint hearted and thankfully we have people across the world that do want to protect innocent civilians from harm by people that have adopted these very vicious and malignant types of ideological ways of thinking so I think be a keen student of geopolitics and understand the environment in which you're working understand one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter and how what's going on in different parts of the world would impact upon your society because of different diasporas that are from those parts of the world that we live in a multicultural society so you can't just be thinking well I only need to care about what's going on where I live and the country where I live because that's just not how the world works so you know maintain that interest the thing is there's a whole other sidebar conversation we can have around the weaponization of legislation innocent members of societies people might be listening to this with these thoughts in mind based on what's going on around the world there is definitely that dynamic around terrorism legislation in certain countries and I think where that is being seen you have to have your own moral compass as well and try your best to ensure that that doesn't happen in the areas that you live and work but by and large if we strip it back to its core terrorism and terrorists are all about spreading fear and violence and destruction of people who are complete innocents, women, children whoever it may be the rest we can get sometimes lost in a little bit of the noise so if you're working in whatever capacity in government, in intelligence in the military in the regulated sector and you're looking to spot suspicion you do have a role to play here and I can tell you from first hand working in operations, terrorism operations that information that is reported does lead to the identification of unknown terrorist networks and leads to prosecutions and therefore saves lives and that might seem quite grandiose but it does and I have seen it so maybe that's a nice way to sort of think about this that doing nothing will not work doing something will help

James Booth Yeah absolutely and actually you've shifted slightly my thought process I think it's very clear that we are comfortable with geopolitics with psychology but I think we and the next generation of counter-terrorism professionals need to be just as comfortable with data and technology as we are currently with geopolitics and psychology I think the threats today are hybrid which I think has been the silver thread hasn't it through this they move across borders digital platforms and financial systems so the skill set's got to be hybrid too so we've got to think about becoming that analyst who understands behavioural patterns but who can possibly read a blockchain or interpret an algorithm or work with AI driven tools not all of them I mean if you can do all of them you can have a decent network

Ross Savage to defeat a network you need a network with people with different skills and abilities to create an impact against an adversary network so you're right that might be individuals needing to broaden their skill sets and be a bit more hybrid but certainly does mean organisations need to have that hybrid dynamic in terms of their skill sets yeah because I wouldn't want

James Booth an individual listening to this thinking oh my god I need to learn blockchain I need to read an algorithm I need to do this that's not what we're saying we're saying that as a team you need to have that branch of you know of diversity but bringing that into then the human element we cannot lose sight of that and I think that was a nice wrap up you did empathy cultural awareness critical thinking are still what separate an investigator from a great one technology gives you the signals but people give it the context collaboration big you know the old silos between intelligence law enforcement finance and private sector are at their capacity I believe so I think that next generation thought process that we've got to have is be comfortable with information sharing or creating solutions and we've seen that we spoke about some of those US, UK, Australia initiatives and learned from those disciplines so if I had to sum it up the next wave of counterterrorism professionals have got to be data savvy globally minded ethically grounded endlessly curious because this landscape we're on right now won't stay still and neither can we we are we've I think we've come to the end of our time Ross because we you know the mental capacity of listening to a podcast and we want to catch people on trains on planes driving in their car we could go on

Ross Savage can't we you know you just pick another subject you know in the world of financial crime compliance and on we could go but as I say I think it might be useful to get a steer from the audience in terms of if there's some predominant thematics of interest and maybe we can revisit in a future episode but it's been it's been great to talk obviously well I say obviously but hopefully it's evident from people listening that you know these are these are things we're passionate about you and I you know I've been involved in financial crime compliance in investigations and training delivery for 25 years now and it's you know it's definitely vocational as well as you know professional because it's just you know an area that is of huge interest to myself and to you so thanks very much for inviting me on and yeah if you want to invite me back at some point then I'll clear the diary

James Booth it would always be a pleasure and we've done very well not to swear Ross so thank you for that as well and I'm going to treat myself to a coffee for that but thank you everybody for tuning in thank you like, subscribe all the usual stuff and we'll be back to you with some more interesting content soon take care everyone and thank you for listening