• 31
  • December
    2011

As discussed in the previous post, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal outlines how prosecutors and law enforcement across the country are beginning to devote entire investigative units toward cracking down on cybercrime. The district attorney's office in Manhattan has a cybercrime unit and four prosecutors who devote 80 percent of their time on Internet crimes.

The investigators spend much of their time trolling through data from smartphones, laptops, iPads and the Internet in general looking for Internet crimes such as child pornography, computer hacking and fraud. The unit also teaches other law enforcement units how to uncover and prosecute cybercrimes.

One thing that law enforcement and prosecutors must remember in investigating cybercrimes is that evidence of a cybercrime does not always easily reveal the perpetrator of the crime. It happens that people are wrongfully arrested for Internet fraud or child porn when they did not commit the crime, but only had their computer networks hacked into by the actual perpetrator who wished to throw investigators off their path.

As investigators continue to refine their methods in this new area of law enforcement, they have learned that it is not enough to find evidence of a crime, but equally important to track down the individual human connected to the electronic data.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, "D.A. Cracks Down On Internet Crime," Michael Rothfeld, Dec. 30, 2011