High-Tech Cops and Robbers

The facts were these: a frantic husband, a missing wife and a home computer with its files deleted. But the Maryland State Police computer crimes unit had the answer: A software program that restores deleted files discovered evidence of the wife’s secret messages to a man met on the Internet. Electronic mail exchanges had led the two to meet in person, not far from where her body was found later. A check of online service billing records led to the arrest of a government computer analyst in North Carolina, who now faces a murder charge.

That October 1996 case could be a model for what state and local police can do with the proper computer know-how, training and equipment. But much of the rest of the nation is still trying to catch up.

In Nevada, the state’s attorney general is gearing up to seek money for high-tech crime units in Reno and Las Vegas, where the gambling industry faces a considerable threat. As usual with big-ticket computer crimes, casinos are victimized mostly by employees, not outside hackers. “We live in the age of the Internet. High-tech crime is there,” says Nevada Atty. Gen. Frankie Sue Del Papa. “This is just the beginning.”

In Massachusetts this year, officials decided to form a team of state police and prosecutors to help localities solve computer-related crimes and to help protect the state’s vital computer industry.

California’s much larger Silicon Valley industry has long clamored about thefts of computer software and hardware. Now the state Legislature is poised for a blitz of computer crime-related bills in 1998. The state would do well to consider the travails of other legislatures that focused mistakenly on outsiders as the main threat or puzzled over online computer break-ins in which nothing is stolen.

“For states, the details can be very important. When you consider a break-in that does not technically involve the theft of physical material, it may make perfect sense to have a cyber-trespass law,” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor specializing in cyberspace law.

In most instances the crime hasn’t changed, just the means used to commit it. To Douglas Thomas, a USC professor specializing in cultural studies of technology, it comes down to finding a transition from laws that protected against the theft of physical objects to sanctions that protect the privacy and integrity of information such as your credit record or a company’s breakthrough software program.

Local law enforcement needs help to keep up, including state funds to train and equip local departments to help them match cutting-edge criminal tactics. In Los Angeles, the Police Department’s sexually exploited child unit has just one (pre-Pentium) computer and does not have a staff person who is skilled with digital information. The LAPD’s computer fraud unit makes do with a single designated expert and still runs aground on budget constraints when using a commercial online information service. But what it needs is generally the same thing required to combat computer-related crime at the international and federal levels: better private and commercial information protection and security, additional police training, improved resources and a few new laws.

Add up these measures and police will find they can fight as effectively against computer-literate sociopaths as against the traditional, low-tech criminal.