The FBI fights computer crime

The FBI fights computer crime with weapons that are at least ten years old, according to one insider with contacts deep inside the "hacker" community.

Hampered by the lack of a single federal law that specifically prohibits computer crime, and hamstrung by the fact that probably three quarters of the computer mischief is done by juveniles who can't be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the famous federal police force nevertheless leads the fight against computer crime in the U.S.

The agency's chief weapon is training, according to John Lewis, the supervisory special agent who teaches a special three week course, "Investigative Techniques of Computer-Related Crime" at the ca-p|s-like FBI Academy Quantico, Virginia. Lewis and his fellow instructors train FBI agents, local police and foreign agencies like Scotland Yard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the basics of computers and how to investigate computer crimes. Most of the students go in knowing nothing about computers and come out "computer literate" three weeks later, according to Lewis.


The FBI course is aimed at giving agents a general knowledge of computers and how they operate, with a focus on how to find evidence of a crime. An old IBM System 3, using transaction records supplied by a friendly bank, simulates real banking records. Instructors build frauds into the simulated transactions and challenge students to go in and detect the frauds. Students then build a criminal case based on the evidence they uncover. Telecommunications, bulletin boards and "phone phreak" tricks used to defraud the telephone system are touched on only very briefly or not at all.

Bureaucracy appears to be one of the main obstacles to bringing agents up to date on computer technology. Like many federal agencies, the FBI suffers from budgetary and organizational inertia that keeps it behind private industry. For instance, Anthony Adamski, chief of the financial-crimes unit, still relies on a secretary to pound out his correspondence on a typewriter- no computer terminals or word processors are evident in his big, new office in Washington D.C. A bulk buy of some 6,000 Burroughs microcomputers mean that desktop computers will be showing up on the agents' desks soon, however.

Adamski says the FBI has only recently begun to keep statistics on computer crime. Therefore, no one can say officially whether computer-related crime is going up or down or staying the same. Yet the gut feeling of Adamski and training specialists at Quantico is that there has been no big increase of computer crime in recent years. The movie War Games and the arrests last July of Neal Patrick and the "414s" fueled interest by the media in computer break-ins but has produced no substantial increase in the crimes, they say.

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