http://www.lvbusinesspress.com/articles/2006/12/11/news/iq_11224417.txt Las Vegas Business Press December 11, 2006 In May, Las Vegas Metro received information from two children who claimed a live-in family friend was molesting them. Detectives were able to confirm the accusations and, in the process, found what is believed to be the largest collection of child pornography ever uncovered in the Las Vegas Valley. "There must be several hundred thousand, if not a million photos of child pornography," Metro Sgt. Leonard Marshall told a small group of federal, state and local law-enforcement officials in October. "We are still in the process of forensically examining the digital evidence." Aside from the sheer volume of evidence in this case, one other reason police are not finished collecting all of it may be because Nevada employs only one forensic computer analyst for the whole state. One. Two task forces made up of federal and local investigators do co-exist -- one in the north and another here in the south -- and they utilize a wide array of computer forensic tools. Lately, those two groups have become far more focused, however, on high-profile financial crimes and terror investigations than on anything else. HELP ON THE WAY? It is for this reason the state's seven-year-old Technological Crime Advisory Board has voted to push legislation authorizing the employment and training of at least five new computer forensic specialists. If authorized, they will work in the Nevada Attorney General's Office, assisting agencies across the state in collecting evidence that might otherwise go undetected. That need has grown exponentially as functional digital devices, such as PDAs and cellular phones, have increasingly come onto the market. "I don't want to denigrate the services of the federal folks assigned to us. It's just that those assets are becoming fewer and fewer as Nevada's need is burgeoning," said Jim Earl, the advisory board's executive director. Earl said he has not yet seen the draft legislation and admits the issue remains "up in the air" right now. The budget adopted by Governor-elect Jim Gibbons could conceivably ignore the request; the incoming governor is known to be less than enthusiastic about some parts of his predecessor's draft budget for the coming biennium. But the need for new computer-evidence analysts remains large, regardless of the political climate, Earl said. A HIGH FEDERAL PRIORITY Federal agents who work here, particularly the FBI, Secret Service and Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency, are more than happy to see an expansion of local resources. According to minutes of the advisory board's July meeting, new FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Martinez, who was previously deputy director of the FBI's vaunted cyber-crime program, said the the G-Men are having difficulty handling the vast amounts of digital evidence it is getting. "The volume will only get larger and larger. Hard drives continue to get larger. This also vastly increases the amount of evidence that must be examined," he told the board. Cyber crime prevention and investigations rank very high on the FBI's list of priorities. "We are working very hard to establish cyber issues as one of the four operational programs in the FBI. The others are counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence and traditional criminal work," he said. Earl hopes to fill the five computer-examiner positions with experienced agents. The new investigators would not only have to be highly skilled in technology issues and the use of special forensic software, but also be able to testify in court about investigative procedures and methods. "The good news is that, unlike five years ago, there are a lot of colleges and universities (that) recognize this as a specialty," Earl said, hopeful the positions could be filled in a short time. Beginners, he added, would learn the ropes by assisting the federal task forces for a while. Earl, apparently, is not in the mood to be too picky. "All of this is really high priority," he said. Copyright 2006, Las Vegas Business Press _____________________________ Subscribe to InfoSec News http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isn
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