By Laura Crimaldi
The Boston Herald
MASSACHUSETTS — cybercrime explodes and cops must ferret out digital evidence to bust bad guys, Attorney General Martha Coakley is plotting a tough statewide assault on computer crooks and the electronic clues they leave behind.
“There is a mountain to climb, but we want to tackle it,” said Coakley, who began surveying law enforcement in April to devise a Bay State strategy for defeating cyber outlaws. She sees the effort, which will require major increases in manpower and money, as a central initiative for her term as the top state law enforcement officer.
From 2004 to 2006, the number of financial crimes committed on the Internet more than doubled, with the number of complaints by Massachusetts residents skyrocketing from 1,331 to 3,430, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Data from the ICCC, which is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center, show those crimes amounted to some $2.2 million in rip-offs of Bay State residents in 2006.
Although child pornography and child enticement on the Web garner headlines and draw manpower, old-fashioned schemes to fleece people by soundrels using new-tech tricks are the wave of the future, Coakley said.
“This is where the ball game is,” Coakley said in an interview with the Herald. “There’s probably more money stolen on the Internet now than with a guy pointing a gun at a bank. So the real question here is, How can we not do it?”
So far this year, state police have received 277 reports from the CyberTipline, said Detective Captain Thomas Kerle, coordinator of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The CyberTipline is a program of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that tracks child pornography, child prostitution, sex tourism, molestation, online enticement of children for sex acts and unsolicited obscene material sent to children.
“Pretty soon, almost every case will have a digital component,” said Kerle, who has coordinated cybercrime training for 900 police officers and 85 prosecutors since the beginning of the year. “It’s a growing problem and it’s certainly not going to be going away. It’s only going to get much worse.”
With cybercrime expertise scattered among cops and prosecutors across the state, Coakley wants to launch a centralized state-of-the-art computer forensic lab and training program to tackle the problem from every angle.
Police last year conducted 13,184 investigations with a cyber component, according to the AG’s cybercrime survey, which drew responses from 150 Massachusetts law enforcement agencies.
The most common investigations dealt with fraud, which netted 4,484 reports, followed by 1,892 reports of criminal threatening and 1,641 reports of forgery, the survey said. Cyber components also surfaced in some 205 violent crime investigations, among them homicides, rapes and assaults.
Online enticement of minors and child pornography, the survey results indicate, prompted far fewer investigations, with 624 cases being opened in 2006.
“Although that dominates the media, the reality is that law enforcement is spending a lot more time on other crimes that are economic crimes,” said Andrew MacPherson, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire and Coakley’s consultant on cybercrime initiatives.
Among the obstacles standing in law enforcement’s way are a lack of equipment, training and familiarity, but there are also legal impediments. Unlike the case with phone records, prosecutors must go to a grand jury to obtain warrants to access records maintained by internet service providers.
Prosecutor Dana Leccese, coordinator of the Cyber Protection Program for Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr., said that between 2002 and 2005 state police received more than 5,000 tips related to child pornography that went “largely uninvestigated” because of that law.
“We’ve been trying to have this changed for some time now,” said Leccese. A bill under consideration by the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee would update the law and make it legal to access records with an administrative subpoena.
“We can no longer afford to view (cybercrime) as a speciality,” said Assistant Attorney General Tom Ralph, chief of the AG’s Cyber Crime Division. “It’s virtually a part of every crime.”
Copyright 2007 The Boston Herald