Predators flock online: Officers battling problem see it continuing to grow
From the Sierra Vista Herald (online). By Gentry Braswell. Herald/Review. 06/17/07.
Sierra Vista, Arizona — The Internet has drastically changed the way people live and interact in most walks of life, and it has definitively brought crime and law enforcement into the cyberage.
Virtual neighborhoods are understood to be dangerous places for children, where they are exposed to predators who enjoy potentially unsupervised online hunting grounds. By all accounts, most computer-related police work involves either online fraud or crimes involving sexual predators seeking young victims.
The mission of the Arizona Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which comprises police agencies throughout the state, including the Sierra Vista Police Department and the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, is to bring to justice Internet sexual predators and Internet child pornographers. Participating agencies cooperate with one another in state, with other task forces throughout the United States, and through international police connections as well, said Phoenix police Sgt. Frank Kardasz. As the Internet is virtually without borders, online crime reaches across state and national borders, and investigators must follow, Kardasz said. Kardasz is the Arizona ICAC project director. He describes the task force’s caseload as “very big and growing,” though he said statistics are tough to provide because of under-reported crime involving victimized teens and children. This lack of thorough and uniform historical crime data turns out to be a common obstacle in studying crimes that involve child and teen victims of abuse, neglect, molestation or exploitation.
Kardasz clarifies the operating procedure for ICAC’s online stings, and contrasts the ICAC ethics with those of such popular television programs as NBC Dateline’s “Perverted Justice.” Bungled media investigation can potentially cause problems with prosecution and follow-up investigation, through such mistakes as violation of suspects’ rights or unprofessional methods, Kardasz warns in his in-depth online ethics analysis at www.kardasz.org. He describes a potential lack of oversight for the safety and civil liability of respective accusers, and a risk of so-called “trial by media.”
The task force is partially grant funded through the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Local agencies also contribute funds. The organization began in 1998, as the impact of the Internet grew obvious, when 12 agencies throughout the United States received the first block of ICAC grants to fund the law enforcement and public safety education effort. “Our undercover detectives who go online to catch predators find no shortage of deviants who wish to victimize teens. Our investigations into child pornography indicate that traffic in unlawful images is rampant,” Kardasz said. “I don’t know about the future of ICAC, but the future of Internet crime is that the crimes will continue, and continue to increase,” he added.
Growing caseload, new investigative field
Local investigators see computer-related crime and police work increasing, too. Cochise County Sheriff’s Office Detective Bobby Gerencser, the computer forensics investigator for the county, said the Internet age has made it much easier for predators of children to perpetrate their crime and network among themselves. “Prior to the Internet these child-porn people, they had a hard time getting their stuff traded back and forth. Once the Internet came along, it’s all over the place,” Gerencser said. He said much child porn is imported electronically from foreign lands such as Holland and Russia, for example. “Yahoo! Groups is another place where this stuff gets sent around, and MySpace.com has become a big problem. You get these kids who put their full name and address in their MySpace.com profiles,” Gerencser said.
Popular social networking Web sites like MySpace.com have become lurking zones for predators because so many underage people frequently surf them, often free from watchful eyes of parents and teachers and unaware of the real presence and danger of online predators. Online supervision of children by their parents is a new but necessary part of life. “Parents should watch what their kids are doing, that even includes cell phones and computers. Kids are very vulnerable,” Gerencser said. Nearly every week in Phoenix there is an arrest for trying to “lure a minor,” Gerencser said. “Our caseload is steadily increasing, as far as Internet crimes,” he said. “Usually, Internet crimes are a little bit harder (to investigate) because of having to locate where things are coming and going.”
Many identity-theft cases also are Internet related. “Our meth heads have computers, and these meth heads are trading in identities,” Gerencser said. For example, the detective said, convenience stores have hired drug addicts, who add to the growing ID theft problem by stealing customers identities to fund their addiction. People foolishly leave sensitive nformation in their vehicles, and personal information is now the target of auto burglars just like stereos and radar detectors.
To protect children from victimization and predators, families need to take extra caution for a safe online experience. Common sense on the consumer’s part, reiterated Sgt. Randy Arthur, goes a long way online. Arthur is with the Arizona Department of Public Safety computer-forensics unit.
There are many Web sites, such as www.netsmartz.org, to help parents learn to provide a safe online experience for youngsters. “There are all kinds of ways parents can keep an eye on their kids,” Gerencser added. Parents can clandestinely observe their children’s Internet activity, just as police can observe suspects’ traffic online.
Traits of cybercrime; police priorities
Like in Cochise County, Arthur said his office’s casework mainly involves crimes against children or fraud- and forgery-related crimes. There also are some arson and homicide computer forensics needed at times because of the common use of e-mail and instant messaging these days. “It’s growing more and more down here, as far as identity theft,” Gerencser added about Cochise County. Right now, he is the only computer forensics detective for the county. Detective Angela Davis serves that role for the Sierra Vista Police Department. It’s tough for police agencies to keep up with the growing field of computer investigation and forensics. “We currently have a backlog of probably 70 or 80 cases, and some of them are a year old,” he said. The backlog occurs as higher priority cases, such as those involving homicide, child pornography or child molestation investigations, must be taken on first, Arthur said. Gerencser said he sees the same sort of backlog locally and at essentially every agency he interacts with. The DPS forensics unit in Phoenix consists of a sergeant and four officers. The one in Tucson comprises a sergeant and two officers. In response to the growing caseload, the DPS office is adding a new examiner in the next two months, Arthur said.
In keeping up with the changing face of law enforcement, the already familiar problem of payroll and staff recruiting remains, while crime changes with the times.“To keep up, it’s going to be tough. Patrol enforcement’s even getting more expensive,” Arthur said. He reiterated that recruiting in the field of law enforcement is very competitive in Arizona. It’s a challenge agencies in Southeastern Arizona must continually face.
And police must keep up with the technology of the day. Throughout the computer industries, all fields understand the implication of “Moore’s Law,” which predictively asserts today’s cutting-edge computer technology grows obsolete in mere months. The Internet age has placed law enforcement in that perpetual technological race, just as it has the criminals police pursue in cyberspace.
Gerencser said police investigators must reckon with the fact that people who perpetrate crimes online band together, network, departmentalize and “have their own hackers.” There are Web sites dedicated to networking for computer users, or hackers who seek to keep ahead of police computer forensics or other proprietary and security guidelines in general, Gerencser said. For example, Web site www.metasploit.com describes the Metasploit Project as providing useful information to people who perform “(security) penetration testing, IDS (intrusion detection systems) signature development, and (operating-system flaw) exploit research.” Using forensic software, police can, for example, search online chat-room histories for evidence and recover deleted files.
“There are several different types of forensic software,” Gerencser said. “A lot of cases are solved by cell phones or computers.” Cell phone forensics currently are more complex and time consuming because their proprietary operating systems vary more diversely than do personal computers, Gerencser said. Gerencser’s office contains investigative hardware such as a test hard drive, a thing called a “shadow box” that examines contents of suspect hard drives, and a “write-blocker” that prevents investigators from being able to place content on hard drives under investigation and hopefully preventing suspects from claiming police planted evidence.
The hazards of this kind of detective work can be different than those of traditional police work. “It’s rewarding because the work we do helps put pedophiles and major criminals in prison for a long time. The bad part is the images and stuff the detectives need to look at,” Arthur said.
REPORTER Gentry Braswell can be reached at 515-4680 or by e-mail at gentry.braswell@svherald.com.
Retrieved June 17, 2007 from http://www.svherald.com/articles/2007/06/17/news/doc4674c9250bf85984433636.prt