Knocking down walls

ARLINGTON, Va. – Raise your hand if you’ve heard of “Second Life,” police Lt. Charles Cohen asks a room of about 75 law enforcement officers from around the country. “Second Life,” a sprawling online universe, has had technology circles abuzz for a while. But here, it might as well be a watch repair shop. Only a few hands go up. Cohen has some explaining to do.

And so begins another session in the traveling classroom of this fast-talking Indiana state trooper at the forefront of the idea that cops need to be better at incorporating the online world into their patrols.

Many police departments have computer crews that perform skillful forensic analysis on hard drives and specialize in nailing online predators. Cohen’s lectures are not for them.

Instead he’s trying to reach everyone else in law enforcement: beat cops, homicide detectives and other investigators who might otherwise think monitoring the Internet is not their responsibility.

More and more, such boundaries don’t make sense. Whether it’s on MySpace, Facebook, “Second Life” or other Web flavors of the moment, criminals and victims – especially young ones – are leaving clues in plain sight online, even for offline crimes. Things people once wrote in private diaries now cascade through Web sites that stimulate free expression – and are open to anyone who comes looking.

In one recent example, a detective in Newark, N.J., tracked the alleged killers of three college students by mining MySpace pages maintained by the suspects and their friends.

In an Indiana case in which Cohen helped, a young man wrote on his MySpace page: “I just killed two cops.” (One officer survived the shooting.)

“People under 25 tend to think about what is public versus private information differently from the rest of us, and that is great for law enforcement investigators,” Cohen, 37, tells his audience in Arlington, at a conference of the National White Collar Crime Center. Later, he adds in an interview, “Your computer usage is in some ways a window into your soul.”

But the anonymity and the sheer scope of the Internet also can make it easier for criminals to cover their tracks. And today’s hot online hangout is tomorrow’s dead zone. The trick for cops is to figure out how to keep up – a proactive step that doesn’t come easy, given that most police departments have to concentrate their limited resources on reacting to crimes.

Les Lauziere, a computer crimes investigator for the Virginia Attorney General, suggests police need to incorporate Internet analysis into just about every investigation. In the coming years, he says, asking whether a police department has a distinct cyber-crime unit will be like asking if there’s a telephone squad.

Steven DeBrota, a federal prosecutor in Indiana, argues that too much separation between cyber-specialists and other cops can be dangerous.

Typically, he says, detectives will transfer a suspect’s computer to forensic examiners who might need months to produce a full report on the contents, especially with hard drives ballooning to monumental sizes. In that time, DeBrota fears, the opportunity to find a suspect’s associates or additional victims may be lost.

So DeBrota has pushed an alternative approach in Indiana. Now computer specialists get out of their labs and assist detectives on sweeps and arrests. At the same time, front-line cops have been trained to do some of the basics. They can take hard drives out of computers, attach “write-blocking” clips that prevent data from being altered, and then do initial, targeted searches for evidence – Google searches typed, videos watched – that might be valuable in interrogations.

Whether it’s with social network sites like MySpace or the sprawling Second Life world, investigators need to know how to stay in touch with its users and site managers. In particular, MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has a former federal prosecutor as its head of security and maintains valuable logs on site activity for at least 90 days. Some sites maintain such logs for much less time, if at all.

At one session, Cohen’s audience nods along as he shows how officers can plumb public pages of social-networking sites to get to know people’s likes, dislikes, friends and hobbies before questioning them in an investigation.

But his pupils have trouble accepting the particulars of “Second Life,” where people chat, shop, trade stuff and have sex – and in Cohen’s estimation, launder money occasionally – through animated characters known as avatars.

“Is this for people who don’t want social contact?” one investigator asks.

Cohen shakes his head as if to say it’s not that simple.

“This,” he says, “is our new world.”