By Mal Leary,Capitol News Service

AUGUSTA – State and local law enforcement officials in Maine agree with international experts that criminals are beating them in the ongoing battle of computer-related technology, and it’s difficult to catch up with the crooks.

“Almost every crime we deal with at this point, we have a computer as part of it,” Lewiston Police Chief Bill Welch said. “At a recent meeting of the International Chiefs of Police association meeting, we heard how criminals are using all sorts of technology – computers, cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) – to conduct their illegal activities. And yes, we are falling behind in our ability to deal with those crimes.”

Welch, who was instrumental in setting up the Computer Crimes Task Force, said the backlog of computers to be forensically analyzed is at least a year’s worth of work at current staff levels. The task force has two full-time state police troopers, two full-time Lewiston Police officers and part-time officers at other law enforcement agencies with various levels of training.

“I think a lot of computer crimes are going uninvestigated because of the lack of resources, “said Waldo County Sheriff Scott Storey, president of the Maine Sheriffs’ Association. “Many agencies, like mine, are too small to have their own computer crimes investigators so we have to rely on the task force and they are really backed up.”

He agrees with Welch that nearly all crimes today have some technology component. One growing area is pornography where experts are warning that criminals are using sophisticated cell phones equipped with cameras to make and transmit pornography. Police need different hardware and software programs to do their forensic analysis of the evidence and trace it to its source.

“I am not sure if we will ever be able to catch up with the bad guys,” state Public Safety Commissioner Michael Cantara said. “We have to set priorities, focusing on the most violent cases, cases that deal with children. We all do it at home to live within our budgets and it’s no different with government.”

He said two positions were restored to the Computer Crimes Task Force last spring when the Maine State Police reset priorities to address the growing problem of computer crimes.

Computers, hard drives, zip drives and other electronic information-storage devices are stacked at the task force lab at the Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro waiting to be examined. A single computer hard drive in a child pornography case may have more than 60,000 images that have to be reviewed, one at a time. That can take 80 hours because images may be hidden throughout any file on the computer.

The complexity of computer-related criminal investigations has many in law enforcement, and the Legislature, worried. Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, who co-chairs the Criminal Justice Committee, says the backlog of cases worries him.

“Here we have a room piled up with computers waiting to be looked at by the experts,” he said. “There could be computers yet to be looked at that will prove crimes against kids. Every month we wait, more computers get stacked up.”

Welch said it may be time to approach the problem of analyzing computer crimes differently. He said the current process of training police officers to do the forensic analysis of computers and other devices may not be the best way to use resources and that the state should make the task force part of the Maine State Crime Lab.

“I think there is value in that suggestion,” Cantara said. “We have, over the years, been moving from having a sworn officer do everything to having civilian specialists in several areas.”

Cantara said he would discuss the idea with Welch and other members of the Computer Crimes Task Force Advisory Board. Sheriff Storey agreed the idea has merit and should be discussed at all levels of law enforcement.

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