New Zealand Police

These comments are excerpted from a speech at Auckland Boys Grammar on June 12, 2002.

New Zealand Police, the Department of Internal Affairs and the New Zealand Customs Department are the three main agencies involved in electronic crime detection and investigation in New Zealand. Nearly a dozen other Government agencies also deal with computer related offences.

New Zealand Police also has an electronic crime detection capability. We have Electronic Crime Laboratories in Auckland and Wellington and one is being established in Dunedin. Until recently our Electronic Crime Labs had four specialist staff. We're increasing that to 17. ECL staff deal with offending from all categories:

• Drug Offending 14%

• Frauds 10%

• Homicide 14%

• Sexual Offending 8%

• Burglary 5%

• Indecent Publications 3%

The rest of the work comprises assaults, arson, bomb threats, Telecommunications Act breaches, intimidation and threats, thefts, and signal processing jobs such as voice messages generally relating to domestic incidents or crimes against the person. The type of offending we?re mostly seeing is where new technology has been used in the commission of traditional types of crime, such as fraud, drug dealing, extortion, harassment and paedophilia.

Every major investigation now has an electronic component to it, with people using mobile phones, laptops, Palm Pilots and other electronic equipment as a matter of course in their daily lives. Auckland ECL staff have been involved in every homicide investigation in the region for the past two-and-a-half years.

Several recent cases illustrate how Internet crimes can be detected and the perpetrators brought to justice.

• Dunedin psychiatrist Dr Colin Bouwer was a high user of the Internet for both research and personal purposes. Ultimately it contributed to his downfall. Both before and after his wife Annette's death from complications surrounding her drug induced hypoglycemia, he used the Net to garner quite specific information on the drugs implicated in killing her. His initial forays were into websites used by the medical profession where he asked for information on a group of drugs known as sulphonylureas, used in the treatment of diabetes related illnesses. He was specifically interested in finding out how sensitive toxicology testing was for the presence of these drugs. A trip to South Africa after Annette's death also contributed to Dr Bouwer's downfall. He emailed his lover in Dunedin asking about the progress of the case against him. When it was all pulled together, the electronic evidence presented at Dr Bower's trial proved compelling. A guilty verdict was entered against him.

• Paedophiles were early adopters of the new technology. Last year Police dealt with a 56-year-old Southland man who had thousands of pornographic images on his computer. He'd downloaded most from the Internet, but some were of two local girls aged seven and eight. The evidence extracted from his computer was sufficient to bring a guilty plea to three charges of rape and 22 other charges of sexual offending involving the two girls. The man was an old and trusted friend of the girls' families. The parents didn't suspect anything untoward until one of the youngsters revealed what the man had been doing, after Police Youth Education Officers delivered their child abuse prevention programme 'Keeping Ourselves Safe' to her class.

• One of the cases of electronic offending Police have dealt with involved a Wellington 17-year-old who was caught hacking. Operation Troy began after an Internet Service Provider contacted Police in Wellington over irregularities with a customer's account. The ISP discovered someone else was using the account and Police traced the phone number. The hacker had used a computer virus to gain access to the computers of a large number of the ISP's customers. Police executed a warrant on the young man's home. He was arrested on a fraud-related charge.

Investigative Challenges

The proliferation of technology has certainly brought investigative challenges. A significant amount of offending is simply not reported, and some may not even be detected. Electronic crime may now be the most under reported form of criminal behaviour. This is because the victim may be unaware that an offence has taken place, or that the attack or intrusion constitutes a crime. Corporates, and in particular financial organisations, are reluctant to report electronic crime because of possible damage to reputation and loss of customer confidence.

Electronic evidence is volatile and transient. Delays in securing it can lead to its destruction as log files, emails and other key data are modified, overwritten or deleted. Crimes committed on electronic devices don't include collateral or forensic evidence such as eyewitnesses, fingerprints or DNA. Besides the basic investigative steps, electronic investigations require new types of questions to be asked, new clues looked for and new rules followed concerning the collection and preservation of evidence.

While Police will always attempt to detect and apprehend criminals to ensure community safety, enforcement alone won't be enough. The first step is to make people aware of the potential dangers. We lock our houses and cars, and mostly we don't leave our wallets lying around. We wouldn't let our young child play unsupervised in a park at night. So why let our guard down just because we're operating in the electronic environment? Most organisations install physical security measures as a matter of course. The same approach needs to be adopted in the electronic environment. I expect that as the awareness of Internet issues grows, safety will bring a competitive edge.

The Internet Safety Group is doing a great job educating New Zealanders about how to keep themselves safe while using the Internet. Police Youth Education Service staff are working cooperatively with the ISG to help students, parents and school staff with Internet safety advice. Internet safety is particularly relevant to the Keeping Ourselves Safe and the Kia Kaha programmes. Such inter-agency liaison and relationships will play a significant role in the Police approach to electronic crime.

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