One day, while Jane, a 13-year-old girl in Hong Kong, was surfing on the Internet, she heard a cuckoo call from her computer - a stranger who said he was a 16-year-old boy nicknamed Tom was inviting her to chat over the ICQ.
Unbeknownst to Jane, Tom was, in fact, a middle-aged man. Soon Jane and Tom became ICQ friends and they chatted quite regularly over the Internet. One day Tom asked Jane out and they met. Unfortunately Jane was raped.
Rape, however horrible it may be, is not an unusual crime, according the police here, but the story about Jane illustrates how criminals use the internet, and in this case, the ICQ, to perpetrate age-old traditional crimes and the newer high-tech ones.
To deal with this kind of situation, the Commercial Crime Bureau of the Hong Kong Police Force already set up the Technology Crime Division (TCD) in June last year. But it was not until early this month that the force's Computer Forensics Laboratory was opened.
In his opening speech, Director of Public Prosecutions of the Hong Kong Police Force Chau Foo Cheong said, "Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that computers and other digital equipment have become an important part of our life. In business, for example, e-commerce and m-commerce are becoming common and in our daily life, e-shopping, e-finance and e-learning are becoming ever more popular.
"Consequently, computer forensics now plays an important role in police investigative work. Such investigations may entail digital evidence search, internet traces and log analysis," Chau said.
The investigations may also include identification of suspects involving digital images, and reconstruction of a crime scene requiring software analysis, reverse engineering, decryption and presentation of digital data, he added.
The TCD is currently headed by a senior superintendent with a team of 60 officers. The Division is divided into three sections, namely Operations, Forensic Investigations, and Intelligence and Support.
With the police's advanced computer forensics knowledge, officers of TCD examined Jane's computer, traced Tom's address and arrested him. Though Tom denied even knowing the victim Jane, forensic examination of his computer revealed the contents of his conversations with the Jane.
With solid evidence against him, a strong prosecution case was presented in court. Tom finally had little choice but to admit his guilt.
In July 2001, in a similar case, a middle-aged man was charged with the offense of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl and was sentenced to 14 months' imprisonment. The victim was a girl aged 13 he met over the Internet through ICQ. The digital evidence seized by computer forensics examination played an important role during investigations and prosecution in court.
In the year 2000, the TCD conducted computer forensic examinations for 91 crime cases, according to the latest issue of Offbeat - the staff newsletter of the Hong Kong Police Force.
In 2001, the number of examinations increased 75 percent to 159 cases. The amount of computer data examined grew from 1,100 gigabytes in 2000 to 4,800 gigabytes last year.
In the first eight months of 2002, 128 cases and 3,400 gigabytes of data have been examined already.
To meet the challenges ahead, TCD has expanded its computer forensics capability in stand-alone computers and networks.
With the help of the newly established Computer Forensics Laboratory located in the Commercial Crime Bureau at the Police Headquarters in Central on Hong Kong Island, each of the computer forensics examiners is now capable of handling, at any one time, three to four cases involving 'stand-alone' computers, or 600 gigabytes of data on any networked computer.
The Computer Forensics Laboratory was taken from concept to reality in just 12 months.
"Our laboratory, though small, is considered to fully meet international standards. Over the past year, we have carried out examinations for foreign police forces, including those of the United Kingdom and Canada, and our results were used as evidence in court in successful prosecutions," Chau said.
(Xinhua News Agency October 9, 2002)
