U.S. and Europe Jointly Establish Cyber-Crime Force - WSJ.com

From the headline in this article it sounds like the US and Europe are joining in a anti cyber crime task force. However if you read the details then it become clear that this is not really a giant project that will "prevent identity theft, computer hacking and other computer-based crime".

What is happening is that the Italian post office (PTT), who like all other European PTTs has a banking arm, has build some interesting software to track all the money flowing over the Internet between their 14,000 branches. Other PTTs in Europe are now joining this effort and will use the Italian software to monitor all European money transactions on the Internet. Since a lot of this money flows between Europe and the US, the US secret service has decided to participate, so they can potentially track money transactions that are either illegal or money to be used for terrorist type of activities.

Now don't get me wrong, all of this is very good news, but this is not a pan-European/US joint task force on Internet Security as the headline seems to suggest. Although one could hope that this cooperation will eventually lead to a real task force that will battle "identity theft, computer hacking and other computer-based crime". Because the cyber villains themselves are organized globally across the world the only way to fight cyber crime is by having everyone across country boundaries participate.