I’m back in the criminal justice realm today with this story on The Crime Report about challenges for law enforcement in the cyber underworld.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation this month claimed a huge victory in its pursuit of cybercrime, when it shuttered Silk Road—an online marketplace offering everything from heroin to the services of hackers and hit men. Whether this indicates the FBI’s increasing prowess in the effort to curb criminal activity in the vast, uncharted area that specialists call the “Dark Web,” or whether the feds just got lucky, remains to be seen. But the case also highlights the need for law enforcement to ensure that its data-tracking abilities keep up with criminals’ growing sophistication.
“Traditionally, law enforcement has counted on the fact that the criminals will screw up,” says Tyson Johnson, a certified fraud examiner and vice president of business development for BrightPlanet Corporation, a data-harvesting and analysis company is based in Sioux Falls, S.D. “We are getting much better at spending time and energy tracking data. [But] we have to rethink the traditional investigative model of using the surface Web. How do we achieve the same outcomes in the Dark Web space?”