St. Louis’ online cops are netting the bad guys
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
Business has been booming lately for the Regional Computer Crime Education and Enforcement Group. Not only are general hacking and denial-of-service attacks on the rise, but auction fraud involving eBay and similar websites is moving in the wrong direction as well. Ken Nix, a detective with the Clayton Police Department, works as an operations supervisor for the RCCEEG (pronounced AR-seg). It’s a case of Dragnet meets the Internet. “We’ve seen our reports increase twofold, easily,” he notes.
That jump might shock someone tempted to consider cybercrime less of a threat to St. Louisans than to, say, New Yorkers or Angelenos. “Because it is international or because the victim can live in St. Louis and the suspect can live on the other side of the country, it’s pretty much equal everywhere,” says Nix, “so I think St. Louis is getting hit just as hard.”
Cybercrime’s oddly equalizing effect inspired the creation of his group nearly seven years ago. With aid from the FBI, the Secret Service and local corporations, the RCCEEG (patterned after the Major Case Squad) was formed in St. Louis in 2000. Although initially serving just the city and Franklin, Jefferson, St. Charles and St. Louis agencies across eastern Missouri.
With that much virtual ground to cover—and Internet infractions on the increase—it makes sense that Nix and his colleagues at the RCCEEG plan to attend the sixth annual Cyber Crime Conference, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense, later this month at the Renaissance Grand Hotel. A glance at the agenda, with sessions like “Monitoring Electronic Communications: What Every Agent Needs to Know” and “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Warrants: Warrantless Searches of Electronic Devices,” might be enough to raise some eyebrows, but Nix quickly quells any nervousness. Like other police, RCCEEG officers receive regular updates and other training on the legal nuances of their work, he says, and they approach a computer with the same care they take with nondigital evidence.
“You have to have probable cause; you have to have some type of authority to look at digital evidence before you can perform forensics,” he notes. “We just don’t walk in there and tear stuff apart and then say, ‘OK, I found this—now I’m ready to go.’” Jack Webb would be proud.
