Electronic Crime Partnership Initiative
Technical Assistance
- Technical assistance to State and local agencies for electronic crime in large part is
provided by the FBI or the U.S. Secret Service. However, these agencies cannot always
be available to help State and local agencies. This working group will look to see how
partnerships and interagency/ sector task forces can fill any assistance gaps. The group
also will investigate how assist and technologies can be delivered efficiently to the field.
Partnerships - Law Enforcement, Private Sector, and Academia Partnerships between
law enforcement, private sector, and academia will be critical to combating electronic
crime. However, there are many differences - in culture and motivation - among these
sectors that need to be addressed and overcome.
These sectors have considerable cultural differences. Law Enforcement is a command
and control/ paramilitary culture while private sector entities are often matrix problem
solving organizations. Academia is a culture of shared governance that values
intellectual freedom.
These sectors are motivated by different concerns and have varied desired outcomes.
Law Enforcement agencies are case driven and individual problem focused and has a
desired outcome of crime solved. They also have public policy concerns, e.g., weighing
civil rights vs. public protection. The private sector is primarily profit driven and focuses on
developing specific technologies for applications. Their desired outcome in combating
electronic crime is the protection of their assets. Academia is theory driven and motivated
by the pursuit and publication of scientific breakthroughs.
This group will look to see if there is there enough overlap in motivation to make these
partnerships work effectively and what those overlaps are. It will also attempt to discover if
there are incentives that can be built into the partnerships to better motivate each of the
parties to be more interested in the outcomes desired by the others?
Inter-Agency/ Sector Technical Assistance - Task Forces and Computer Crime Units
Building on the partnerships discussed above, the working group will look at how inter-
agency/ sector task forces can aid computer crime units or serve as de facto computer
crime units for agencies that don’t have one. The group will look at interagency
cooperation from a historical perspective, including past experiences with task force. This
will help them determine who needs their own Computer Crime Unit and how limited
resources can be most effectively leveraged among agencies.
The group will also review lessons learned from previous attempts to integrate law
enforcement with the private sector and/or academia. Issues that have arisen in those
instances include access to law enforcement data by civilians; access to proprietary
information by other companies, government, and academia; and freedom of information
(right to publish, etc.), and technology transfer issues (rights to theories/inventions).
Delivering Technical Assistance
The first step in delivering technical assistance to State and local agencies has to be a
coordinated effort to assess their needs, target those needs, and then help secure
funding and other resources to meet those needs. Meeting those needs will involve both
technology deployment and transfer, areas that this working will explore.
Technology deployment is the basic movement of new knowledge/ tool from developers to
the end-users, in this instance law enforcement agencies. The partnerships
discussed above should help in this transfer from developers such as universities,
government agencies, and quasi-governmental agencies. This working group will look
into intellectual property issues - dissemination, publication, ownership, and
protectability - and commercial applications - evaluation of commercial viability and
strategies for commercialization - of newly developed tools.
Technology transfer involves moving new tools to the private sector from academia and
government developers. Through commercial agreements with manufacturers in the
private sector, the technologies can be made available in sufficient quantity and at a
price agencies can afford.
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