The FBI on Thursday announced creation of a major unit to fight computer criminals from hackers stealing money to terrorists seeking to shut down urban power grids.
Cyber-crime has become one of the greatest concerns of law enforcement. With large companies and government agencies increasingly reliant on elaborate computer networks, they are more vulnerable to any hacker with a computer and some ingenuity.
“As society as a whole is moving on-line, so are criminals,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Michael Vatis, who is heading the new operation. “Why is that? As Willie Sutton might have said today, `’Cause that’s where the money is.’ “
The FBI has 453 pending computer cases, more than double the number from just two years ago.
Cyber-crimes present problems that are far different from crimes such as bank robberies or homicides: They can be perpetrated with a computer in the United States or any other country, for that matter; many victims can be targeted instantaneously; evidence can be erased simply by turning off a computer.
Hackers–or freakers, as they are sometimes called–can not only transfer millions of dollars from one account to another for personal gain. They can also wreak havoc on, for example, the telephone or electrical system of a large city, sending emergency services into disarray and leading to disaster.
“This is not just a crime issue, but a national security issue,” Vatis said. “Reliance on new technologies comes with a price, and that price is a new vulnerability to those who would cause harm.”
Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is especially concerned with this problem, Justice Department staffers said. While Reno is notoriously unskilled at using her own computer, when the subject of cyber-crime comes up at meetings she shows a wide-ranging grasp of the details, they said.
Reno went out of her way to raise the issue at her Thursday news briefing.
“One of the great challenges–and I think we’re going to have to really continue to focus on that–is that with cyber-tools boundaries become meaningless,” Reno said. “Somebody can affect you in this room, being halfway around the world.”
To deal with this dark side of cyberspace, the FBI’s new unit will consist of 125 specialists, including 40 from other federal agencies such as the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. The team also will manage 75 agents at the FBI’s field offices nationwide.
More important, perhaps, is a newly aggressive approach promised by the FBI. The computer crime center will gather information from around the country, identify potential victims and then issue warnings to those who are vulnerable.
Also being assembled is a new “Cyber Emergency Support Team,” a sort of cyber-SWAT team that can respond quickly if a major network is threatened.
The FBI hopes that corporate representatives will take part as well. “Private industry owns and operates most of the infrastructures, so it has to be involved in helping us defend them,” Vatis said.
The rules for cyber-sleuthing remain somewhat murky. The world of the Internet raises novel questions such as whether FBI agents should be allowed to enter private chat rooms or areas that require a password without a warrant. Guidelines on such issues are still being developed, FBI officials said.
The new unit is being created against the backdrop of a battle between the Justice Department and the computer industry over the use of encryption. This is technology that allows users to encode information that they send over the Internet.
Investigators want industry to provide them with “keys” to enable them to decode such information when they are pursuing a crime. The industry says such keys would weaken their ability to protect their proprietary information.
“There seems to be a blatant inconsistency between this (cyber-crime initiative) and the FBI’s position on encryption,” said John Scheibel, vice president and general counsel of the Computer & Communications Industry Association. “If I can protect my system using encryption, the FBI should want to protect that use.”
But FBI officials said access to encryption keys is crucial to the agents who will be working on the new cyber-crime unit.
