Posted 2015-May-31, 20:18
About who should prosecute (not this is not a determination of innocence or guilt) crimes reaching across borders:
1) The case of remotely controlling a car in Germany can be quite different from money laundering through an account in a US bank. The car is actually in Germany. It's very possible that the money laundering takes place in a Swiss branch of the bank, with managers who are Swiss, with data stored in servers in Switzerland (or, say, India), all denominated in Swiss Francs (or Euros or pounds), with essentially no effect on the US financial system other than the tiny risk this might somehow lead to bank failure. However, it has to be noted that the failure of a major Swiss bank has pretty much just as much effect on the US financial system as the failure of a US bank.
2) In the US, when a crime is committed, generally only the state in which it is committed has jurisdiction. There are two main exceptions. One is when the crime is committed on federal government property, in which case both the state and the federal government has jurisdiction. A second is when the crime crosses state lines in some way, and in this case usually only the federal government has jurisdiction, and the state has no jurisdiction. If I, for example, fraudulently sell a car to someone else in my state, I can be prosecuted only by my state government. On the other hand, if I fraudulently sell a car to someone in another state, and we do business over the telephone, then I can be prosecuted only by the federal government. (If I tow my non-functional car to another state, and then fraudulently sell the car to someone there (without having talked about it from my state beforehand), I can probably be prosecuted by both the state I sell my car in and the federal government.)
3) The US may claim jurisdiction when someone hits 'Enter' on Swiss soil, but there is a very strong safeguard in that the Swiss government (and or courts) have to approve extradition to the US.
4) The current situation in which transnational crimes are covered by multiple overlapping jurisdictions is indeed very messy. Probably it would be best for a series of international treaties to resolve the issue. Setting up an international court would probably not be possible (and leads to a large number of thorny legal issues), but some kind of uniform legal rules and procedures could possibly be established. Setting up procedures (to figure out how to apply the rules in any particular case) is probably harder than setting up the rules.