Defcon, a Las Vegas convention of computers hackers, was crawling with federal agents, says the New York Times. They smiled, shook hands, handed out business cards, spoke on a panel called “Meet the Federal Agent 2.0” and were congenial. Federal agents have been hanging out at hacker gatherings for years to snoop, but this time they came with another purpose: to schmooze and recruit.
The United States Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s Internet defense arm, has "needs that some in this community can solve," a spokesman said. Government agencies especially need computer professionals with cybersecurity skills. At Defcon, these skills were in ample supply — and they can alternately thrill and scare. There were hackers and lockpickers here, problem solvers and troublemakers. Most, whether out of fear or conceit, insisted on using their digital names rather than their real ones: LosT, alien, Abstract. And in their midst were Internet crime investigators representing the Army, Navy, Air Force and NASA. The F.B.I. set up a recruiting table at Black Hat, a related Las Vegas conference of security professionals earlier in the week.
Read full entry »The Internet and the proliferation of screening companies that perform background checks can cause problems for the 65 million Americans who have an arrest or conviction on their record, says the New York Times. The pool of job seekers includes more people with criminal histories than ever before, a legacy of stiffer sentencing and increased enforcement for crimes like drug offenses.
The FBI is taking action against a ring of international computer thieves who stole hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide by infecting over 2.3 million computers with malicious software, reports the Associated Press. U.S. authorities called it the biggest such enforcement action they have ever taken against cyber criminals.
FBI officials said investigators were able to perform a digital sting of their own — taking control of several of the malicious computer servers and sending commands to make them stop transferring pirated data. Millions of dollars were stolen from U.S. computer users. Investigators were trying to contain a malware program called Coreflood, which has been around for at least a decade and can record key strokes, allowing cyber criminals to take over unsuspecting computers and steal passwords, banking, and credit card information. Investigators seized five major computer servers that were controlling hundreds of thousands of infected computers, and seized 29 domain names used to communicate with those servers.
Read full entry »The growth in computer-based crimes if far outpacing resources the U.S. Justice Department has to attack the problem, Jason Weinstein of the department's criminal division told a Senate committee yesterday, according to MainJustice.com. Only 40 of the division's 440 attorneys work on cyber crime exclusively, compared with 90 working on organized crime.
Committee chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said cyber crime is a threat "too dangerous to leave under-resourced." Whitehouse believes "we are on the losing end of the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of humankind through theft and piracy [ ] that is being done through cyber crime."
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By Ted Gest
Complaints about undelivered merchandise ordered online led the list, but a federal report released Thursday says less than half of all complaints were referred to law enforcement.
Read full entry »Louisiana and Indiana are among new states considering conservative-backed sentencing reform, says the Los Angeles Times. The package can include reduced sentences for drug crimes, more job training and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders, and expanded alternatives to doing hard time. The trend started a few years ago in Republican-dominated Texas, where prison population growth has slowed and crime is down. South Carolina adopted a similar reform package last year. A conservative group has identified 21 states engaged in some aspect of what it considers to be reform, including California.
Corrections is the second-fastest growing spending category for states, behind Medicaid, costing $50 billion annually and accounting for 1 of every 14 discretionary dollars, says the Pew Center on the States. The crisis affects both parties, and Democratic leaders also are looking for ways to reduce prison populations. Conservatives have been working most conspicuously to square their new strategies with their philosophical beliefs — and sell them to followers long accustomed to a lock-'em-up message. Much of that work is being done by a new advocacy group called Right on Crime, which has been endorsed by conservative luminaries such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.former Education Secretary William Bennett, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-conservative-crime-20110129,0,627861,full.story
Read full entry »The St. Petersburg Times looks into the use by law enforcers of cell phones, social networking and GPS to investigate criminals. The problem, critics say, is when these technologies are used without oversight — and to erode privacy. A judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently called out his fellow judges on both counts. His rebuke came after the court ruled that federal agents could not only plant a GPS tracking device on a vehicle without getting a warrant, but they could go onto private property to do so. "The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory," Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in a widely read dissent.
The Global Positioning System of satellites in orbit has become ubiquitous in modern life. The private sector uses it to keep tabs on employees. The public uses it to keep from getting lost. Florida uses it to track 2,620 sex offenders. But how often is it used in criminal investigations? None of the Tampa Bay area's major law enforcement agencies would discuss the issue. Their investigative techniques are exempt from public records law. "We do utilize GPS for investigations, and we do have a policy that addresses the usage," wrote Hillsborough sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter in an e-mail. "But we cannot release the policy due to the fact that it reveals investigative techniques." The Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office would only confirm that it has obtained judicial approval to track suspects using GPS. Defense attorneys say they're encountering the technology more frequently. But no one can say for sure how often it's used.
Read full entry »Executive Managing Director and General Counsel
Stroz Friedberg
Beryl A. Howell is Executive Managing Director and General Counsel of Stroz Friedberg, a national consulting and technical services firm that specialize in digital forensics, electronic discovery, cyber-security and data breach investigations, at the cutting edge of law, technology and policy. In 2006, Ms. Howell received an FBI Director’s Award for her “valuable contributions” to the successful investigation and prosecution of a defendant convicted of cyber-extortion against one of her firm’s clients.
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A new online system that allows Tulsa police to track pawnshop transactions will be good news for burglary victims and bad news for burglars, says the Oklahoma city's World. The Business Watch International regional system is expected to be in operation by June 30, linking the Tulsa Police Department to area pawnshops, a police spokesman said. The system could increase by 300 percent the amount of stolen property that is recovered from pawnshops, he said.
The $17,000 system will provide real-time access to pawnshop transactions. Oklahoma law requires pawnshops to make available to law enforcement agencies detailed records of every purchase or pawn transaction. The new real-time system replaces old protocols that included many shops mailing handwritten slips to the Police Department.
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When the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report on February 18 laying out serious shortcomings in forensic science, the nation’s preeminent scientific organization also presented a road map for reform.
The NAS report shows that many forensic techniques which are relied on in courtrooms every day lack adequate scientific support. While DNA testing was developed through extensive scientific research at top academic centers, many other forensic techniques – such as hair microscopy, bite mark comparisons, fingerprint analysis, firearms, tool marks and shoe print analysis – have never been subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation.
Since experts agree that only 5-10% of a crime lab’s work involves DNA testing and that overwhelmingly they rely on other forensic disciplines, it is all the more imperative that these other disciplines be subjected to rigorous evaluation to ensure their reliability.
At the Innocence Project, which assists prisoners who can be proven innocent through DNA testing and works to reform the criminal justice system to prevent wrongful convictions, we’ve seen the consequences of inadequate forensic science first-hand. Of the 232 people nationwide have been exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, approximately half of the underlying wrongful convictions involved unvalidated or improper forensic science. For background on how forensic problems contribute to wrongful convictions, click here.
For a complete chart of wrongful convictions involving unvalidated or improper forensic science that were later overturned with DNA testing, click here.
The NAS report recommends the creation of a National Institute of Forensic Science that would direct comprehensive research and evaluation in the forensic sciences, establish scientifically validated standards and oversee their consistent application nationwide. This new federal agency would begin to fix the problems upstream and avoid so many wrongful convictions in the first place. As a result, forensic science will play a more reliable role in identifying perpetrators of crime, protecting the wrongly accused and ensuring public safety.
Already, policymakers have responded favorably to the NAS report. Members of the House and Senate, from both sides of the aisle, have signaled that the NAS’s findings are troubling and that Congress and the Administration have an important role to play in strengthening forensic science. And all of us have an important role to play in making sure the NAS report is fully studied and that its recommendations are implemented. As the report itself makes clear, the stakes are too high – and the consequences too stark – to miss this unparalleled opportunity for fundamental reform.
Mr. Neufeld is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. For more information, go to http://www.innocenceproject.org/.
Read full entry »After the release of NAS's report on the future of forensics, we continue forensics week by listening to some of the top experts in the field discuss their thoughts.
Read full entry »Everyone expects the National Academy of Sciences’ report on the state of the forensic sciences to mark a watershed in criminal justice, but since the report itself has not been released, the front page preview of the report in the New York Times relied on accounts from various sources that had seen early drafts.
The article presents a succinct example of how despite getting lots of small pieces exactly right you can get the big story completely wrong. The DNA exoneration cases have thrown a harsh light on tragedies in which the analyses of bite marks, hair and fiber evidence, fingerprints and firearm identification have been “handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court.”
With disturbing frequency that slovenly process has resulted in the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of the wrong man.
But what the Times didn’t mention is that every time the wrong man goes to prison, the right man escapes as a result, and is free to find more victims. The perverse effect of this omission is to focus the entire conversation on an illusory Manichean conflict between implacable enemies: the Champions of Innocence in the defense bar and the National Academy on one side, and a conviction-obsessed “law enforcement” monolith on the other.
This conflict is potentially no less destructive for being imaginary. The fact is, no one became a prosecutor, joined the police force, or studied forensic science in order to convict the innocent so that the guilty could go free. Most of the people who actually practice in the criminal justice system recognize a shared interest in good forensic science. Where reforms in investigative procedures have been implemented in the wake of the DNA exonerations—for example, in the area of eyewitness lineup practices—it has been because of the cooperative presence on Innocence Commissions or Technical Working Groups of representatives of all of the criminal justice system’s practitioners: cops, prosecutors, defenders and scientists.
Productive discussion of the NAS report is threatened by another favorite theme that haunts the Times piece: the hunt for the “bad apple.” Since we know there have been tragic wrongful convictions based on bad science—according to this view—there must have been bad scientists. The trick is to find them. The Times leaves the impression that the hunt for—and discipline of—these bad apples is what the NAS Report is (and should be) all about.
Well, there are bad scientists. But no bad scientist on his or her own was enough to cause a wrongful conviction. It took bad hiring, bad funding, bad training, uninformed prosecutors and defenders, and lax legal criteria, to send the wrong man to prison. A wrongful conviction is an “organizational accident” made up of many active mistakes interacting with existing latent conditions.
Aviation and—increasingly—medicine have grasped this point. As Dr. Lucien Leape put it in his classic essay, Error In Medicine: “While the proximal error leading to an accident is in fact, usually a “human error,” the causes of that error are often well beyond the individual’s control. All humans err frequently. Systems that rely on error-free performance are doomed to fail.”
The NAS report will catalogue vivid, horrifying tragedies, but it will also try to confront close and complex questions about the nature of science and of the systems that we rely on to mobilize science in the cause of justice, not a slugging match between good and evil. We ought to read the report before we write about it, and we ought to try and read it with the seriousness the issues deserve.
This month, The New York Times ran a front page article on the highly anticipated National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on forensics based on sources who had seen the draft version. Read the article here .
Two of the country's leading forensic experts, James Doyle and Dr. Peter DeForest of the John Jay College Center for Modern Forensic Practice comment on the article in today's edition of Inside Criminal Justice. Read Here.
Since the Times article was published, the NAS has announced that the report will be released this week. Follow TCR's coverage of the report as we track the release.
In addition, find the best forensics experts, research and previous articles about forensics here on the site in our forensics resource guide.
A good place to start for extensive background information is the Chicago Tribune's excellent series on forensics. Read here.
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Director, Crime Scene Academy John Jay College
212-237-8660
aharper@jjay.cuny.edu
