This is an excerpt from transcript of Monday's hearing of the Senate Judiciary committee. "Free Sklyarov" activists had hoped that the case would be brought up during the confirmation hearings, but I suspect this isn't what they had in mind. Robert Mueller, of course, is President Bush's pick to be FBI director. Info on hearing: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hr073001f.htm Politech archive on U.S. v. Sklyarov: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=sklyarov Politech archive on DMCA: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=dmca "Congress is more than doubling number of federal copyright cops" http://www.politechbot.com/p-02321.html -Declan ********* SEN. HATCH: One of the areas of prosecution for which you are particularly known is that of computer and intellectual-property crime. As U.S. attorney for the northern district of California, you created a section called the Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property, or CHIP. Recently Attorney General Ashcroft recognized your success in the most sincere and flattering way possible by announcing the formation of nine additional CHIPs units around the country. And as you know, a subset of this area, criminal copyright enforcement, is of key importance to this committee. We've devoted considerable energy over the past number of years to Internet enforcement in particular. In 1997, we enacted the No Electronic Theft, or the NET Act, combining criminal penalties for certain non-commercial Internet pirates. In 1998, we passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or the DMCA it's called, which helps combat trafficking and hacking devices designed to defeat technological protections for copyrighted material. We also enacted the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act to speed the implementation of the NET Act and to improve on-line theft deterrence generally. And we have even earmarked additional funding for DOJ specifically for the investigation and prosecution of cyber-crime. The committee's work is starting to bear fruit in the form of criminal prosecutions of Internet piracy. So far this year, the number of NET Act prosecutions appears to be up, and we have just recently seen the first criminal prosecutions brought under the DMCA. Just this week, the Department of Justice announced a series of new prosecutions of Internet crimes. I commended the Department of Justice for what I hope is a commitment to cyber-crime enforcement, and I hope this becomes a priority for the FBI as well. Would you please outline for us, if you can, your plan as FBI director on protecting the nation's computer infrastructure and intellectual property? MR. MUELLER: If I may go back briefly to what I saw when I took over as U.S. attorney in San Francisco. We had Silicon Valley in my district, and one of the great issues was how do you protect -- or how do you not protect, but how do you combat high-tech crime? And the first thing I had to do was determine what do you mean by high-tech crime, and I came to the conclusion that it should be broken down in four ways: First of all, computer intrusions, denial-of- service attacks; secondly, theft of intellectual property, economic espionage; third, frauds on the Internet, distribution of child pornography on the Internet; and fourthly, the theft of high-tech components such as computer chips, hard drives and the like, all of which are critical to the high-tech industry. We put together a unit in San Francisco and in San Jose because it was important to develop the expertise in the United States attorneys, the assistant United States attorneys, who would be handling these cases. It was important that we develop the relationship between the FBI agents, who had the expertise to do these cases, the assistant United States attorneys who were doing these cases, and the community. In addressing high-tech crime, it is critically important that we develop the relationships with those victims of high-tech crime in the high-tech industry. And consequently, we will support -- should I be confirmed as the director of the FBI, the FBI will support not only the unit that was set up in the northern district of California, but also the other units to be set up, announced by the attorney general last week. One other point I might make, and this goes to the issue of working closely with the state and local authorities. There are too few investigators with the skills we need to address this. And one of the developments that has been useful is what has been known or called a computer forensics lab, which was established in San Diego with a number of contributing participating agencies, both federal and local. And it is that type of combined enterprise that we are going to have to adopt if we are to address this new wave of separate technological crime in the future. SEN. HATCH: Thank you. Mr. Mueller, as you know, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, they're going to be the largest planned public safety and law enforcement in our country in the foreseeable future. The law enforcement community, including the FBI, has been working on the plans and preparations for several years. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. 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