Cracking Down on Cybercrime: Conway Creates Unit to Track Down Online Criminals
By Adam Shull, The Paducah Sun, Ky.
Jun. 18–It was a crime that wasn’t supposed to happen in a place like McCracken County.
Sheriff Jon Hayden still gets a catch in his voice when he talks about the Oct. 12, 2007, arrest. That’s when his office arrested and charged Michael Todd Lafave, 39, of Paducah with sodomy and using electronics to induce a minor to engage in sexual activities.
Lafave is accused of talking with a Lone Oak 15-year-old in a Yahoo! chatroom to arrange a meeting and to rape the girl behind a local garage.
The case goes to trial in July, and Hayden said it’s cases like these he plans to see more of in the next year.
Cybercrimes — crimes involving computers, the Internet or electronic data — are happening locally and nationally more often. So much so that Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway announced a special investigation unit aimed at cracking down on cybercrimes ranging from online stalkers to scam artists.
Conway said six investigators and a lab space in Frankfort will help process digital evidence from around the state as well as investigate crimes.
“I hope we can provide more assistance to local law enforcement,” Conway said.
“And the second aspect is the child molestation issue,” he said.
In the past year, the attorney general’s office conducted three sting operations with investigators posing as 13-year-old females in online chat rooms. The stings resulted in 29 arrests.
He said while the focus of the new unit is preventing sex crimes on the Internet, it also will handle all the matters falling under the broad cybercrime umbrella.
And when the law lags behind advances in technology, Conway said, problems arise.
Struggles fighting the problem
Recognizing the tangible threat of online crimes, especially sexual predators reaching minors, in western Kentucky is the first hurdle.
“People think because this is McCracken County these types of crimes can’t happen,” Hayden said. “But they do.”
In 2007 Hayden’s office handled 18 cases of cybercrimes, seven of them involving sexual offenses and minors.
In an age when even small-town drug dealers keep records of payments and debts on computer programs, text message to arrange drug orders and drop-offs and e-mail one another, the digital evidence piles up.
“We’re finding approximately 80 percent of all cases involve some type of digital evidence,” said Bob Foster. A 30-year FBI agent, Foster will head Conway’s new cybercrime branch.
And when it comes to handling the digital information, investigators are struggling.
“Kentucky is very underserved when it comes to the examination of digital evidence,” Foster said.
He said only a handful of digital forensic laboratories operate in the state, meaning most evidence is processed in Frankfort.
Hayden said it took six months to send, process and receive back a computer and other digital evidence collected in the Lafave case.
Foster said, “When it takes that long to examine your evidence, that is a big problem.”
Adding more digital forensic laboratories could help, Foster said, but that would require more funding than is available.
Conway said more manpower, with six investigators conducting more stings and training state law enforcers, will be a focus for now.
Foster was in Paducah Thursday giving a training lesson to officers from around western Kentucky.
“We went over the legal aspects of how to handle digital evidence, how to search and seize computers, and sometimes how these electronic devices work,” Foster said.
Foster held three similar training sessions across the state. The most common feedback is the need for more education, he said.
“They’re asking for full days on how social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace work, or how to properly obtain a warrant for a computer.”
Jurisdiction is a problem with online computer scams, with many e-mails and Web sites that ask for personal and banking information originating in other countries. And the smaller the law enforcement office the less likely it will be able to subpoena or prosecute a party overseas.
Conway also is looking to lawmakers to step up legislation against online criminals and sexual predators.
Falling short
“Kentucky is not known necessarily as a tough state on sexual predators,” Conway said.
So he helped to introduce House Bill 367, which among other things would create a database of registered sex offender e-mail addresses and online identifiers. The bill also proposes that social networking sites with children be off limits to sex offenders and makes cyberstalking a crime.
The House passed the bill 94-0. In the final hours of the General Assembly session the bill did not make it to the Senate floor for a vote.
“I was pretty upset about it,” Conway said. The bill’s death especially troubled him because he visited classrooms throughout the state and found that almost all the students 14 and under whom he asked had a page on MySpace, the free online social networking Web site.
MySpace’s regulations require users to be 14 and up but can do little to force them to give their true age.
Conway said he would show the kids, who had to be lying about their age, who else is lying on MySpace: sexual predators.
About 50,000 registered sex offenders were kicked off the network in the past year since MySpace began checking the e-mail addresses of its users.
“I plan to bring back Bill 367 and hopefully get it passed in the ’09 session,” Conway said.
Adam Shull can be contacted at 575-8653.
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