Cyber crime unit needs upgrade
After my last excursion to Chennai's Cyber Crime unit in Egmore where the police busted their first criminal in the unit's three-year history, I wasn't surprised to read an article in this morning's paper where officers searched for excuses for their poor track record.
L. Srikrishna's article "Lack of technology hampers probe into cell phone theft" states:
"Officials in the cyber wing told The Hindu on Wednesday that the police should not be seen as inefficient; the problem is lack of facilities to solve such crimes."
Lack of facilities is a bit of an understatement. With three computers in the office, none of which looked particularly advanced, and no obvious tech-nerds a-la Alias, X-Files or even Dragnet, the cyber crime unit could perhaps be a good location for shooting "Police Academy 47: What are we doing in Chennai", but not somewhere to turn to if you run into William Gibson in a dark alley.
When I asked the Assistant Commissioner of Police what sort of cyber crimes happen in Chennai he seemed legitimately perplexed. Sure there were some cases of cyber-stalking, and some threatening e-mails, but he had no knowledge of Internet piracy, black hat hacking, intellectual property theft, phishing, credit card fraud or any the other of your standard internet scams. When I tried explaining that there are several people engaged in click fraud in the city his eyes just seemed to glaze over.
Sure they busted a small gang of credit card fraudsters who came from England to withdraw cash, but they only did so because someone at a bank gave them a tip--it wasn't their own investigation.
The article says that the police are asking for a 1 crore investment for state-of-the-art technology to track down stolen cell phones. Apparently 40 go missing every day and the police haven't been able to solve any of the cases. My guess is that they want the new gadget so they can keep slacking off and let a computer do the work for them.
Instead of an upgrade, how about they do some old fashioned police work first.
posted by Scott Carney @ 9:25 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Indian cops slacking off? No way! They are busy on their feet hassling people for a few rupees as are the rest of tamil nadu govt. servants!
You want the cops to actually work? LOL. Not happening. Especially when they're busy flagging down passing motorists for a few rupees.
It isn't exactly a lack of technology. The Chennai Cyber Crime Unit is of course close to the Hyderabad Forensics Lab, which last I heard spent a few lakhs buying up Encase Enterprise Edition. It's primarily two things - a lack of training in computer forensics methodologies, and a complete lack of any standard accepted procedure for conducting a forensics exercise without damaging integrity of the evidence.
From my experience with the Mumbai Cell, most of the cases are really mundane ones like you mentioned. Apparently, the Indian hacking scene is non-existent? :)
Hai I also experienced in this matter, but chennai cyber crime cell is now equiped with some infrastructures they are now improving they are going to set a forensic lab in chennai for investigating cyber crime cases.
The assistant commissioner of police Mr.Baluis demanding bribes from me for if he should not momiter my net activities and spoil my internet profession.
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