The Associated Press
HANOVER, (AP) -- State Attorney General Peter Heed says he is concerned that law enforcers are not keeping up with law breakers who use computers to commit their crimes.
“The computerized world has brought with it ... a whole new set of crimes and criminal capabilities which we never had to deal with before,” Heed said during remarks Thursday at the state’s first computer crime summit.
Not only have computers bred new types of crime, such as identity theft and Internet fraud, but they also force law enforcement to find new ways to investigate even traditional murders, thefts and rapes, he said.
“Every homicide our office has now has a computer ... Every stalker stalks by e-mail now,” Heed said at the conference sponsored by his office and Dartmouth College’s Institute for Security Technology Studies.
“We are behind the curve in learning how to deal with these kinds of threats,” Heed said, noting that the state has only one person in law enforcement trained to retrieve computer information for use as evidence in a criminal trial.
Martin Wybourne, executive director of the federally funded institute founded in 2000, said much of the technology developed by its faculty and researchers could be used to help law enforcement.
Gov. Craig Benson commended the public-private partnership that he said is necessary to combat cyber crime.
Benson said he is concerned that the opportunities technology has made available “may get derailed by some bad entrepreneurs who may want to go out and use these tools in a negative way.”
Technological briefings were given in a range of disciplines, from dealing with cyber attacks to progress being made in the development of human antibodies to anthrax to detecting hidden digital messages in images.
What’s emerging, said Andrew Macpherson, a Dartmouth researcher who is studying cyber attack investigative technologies, is a “cyber war. It’s an information war that’s going on behind the scenes.”