 This meeting was held in exciting Las Vegas, Nevada from July 9th through the 11th, 1999. This is video tape number seven. I don't know. Can you, those of you in the back, can you hear us? Okay. Okay. We're going to get started now. My name's Gail Thackeray. For those of you who don't know, it doesn't count. If you're trying to spot a Fed, it doesn't count if you spot us because we're both wearing law enforcement insignia. You don't get a T-shirt for recognizing us. He wore his undercover outfit today. I'm Gail Thackeray. I'm with the Arizona Attorney General's Office. This is Kevin Higgins who is with the Nevada Attorney General's Office. Kevin is going to lead off by giving you some very useful information since you're attending this conference. Nevada has some very interesting laws that you should know about. He's going to give you some survival skills for getting through the weekend unbusted. Kevin Higgins. Thank you. I'm not sure the Attorney General knows that's the reason I'm here today. This is by way of background. I've been in the AG's office 14 years now. I've been doing the high-tech stuff for a couple of years. Before that, I was in charge of death penalty prosecutions. I used to get people executed. Now I do other things. It's a little change of pace. You have to understand here in Nevada, you're in the Old West. Most things weren't against the law. A lot of things aren't against the law. Things become against the law because somebody gets angry or mad or you do the wrong thing. We'll talk about that briefly. I should also give a disclaimer. Any views I represent today are not necessarily the views of the Nevada Attorney General and Nevada Department of Justice or anybody else besides myself. For a long time, about the only things that were really, you got in trouble for Nevada, cheating and gambling is a bad thing. It's still a bad thing, so I wouldn't recommend that this weekend. Stealing cows is a really bad thing. Up in Northern Nevada, there aren't a lot of repeat offenders. They find their horses in their trucks, but not much else. Scaring the tourist is also discouraged, so we try and avoid that. I'm talking as loud as I can. I'll try and talk louder. There's no big volume knob up here to turn it up. I'm sorry. If there was a big knob, I would do that. Nevada Attorney General's office kind of got thrusted. The high-tech issue, when we discovered an employee of an unnamed state agency, was using his technical expertise to gasp, cheat at gaming. It's a bad thing. He had gone and he was an employee of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Any Nevada Gaming Control Board employees here today? Alright, you could out them if they were here. He figured out how to reprogram the eProms in slot machines. Not that you heard it here, but if you go into a casino and you look at all those slot machines, you're looking at a really big network. They know which machines are paying off, which machines are busted. Nobody plays nifty nickels anymore, so we're getting rid of it. To make sure that all those machines, back in the old days, there were actual mechanical wheels, and the wheels spinning determined little mechanical random number generator. The pins would go into the wheels, bing, bing, bing, if you wanted to lost. Even the ones that look like they have wheels today really don't have wheels. There's a random number generator built in, a little eProm chip, and one thing that I'm probably telling people way too much. One thing a Gaming Control Board does is they check, they check, here he already knows about it over there, they check to make sure that that's an authorized random number generator program. Well, Mr. Harris figured out a way, there's a little slack on the eProm, he figured out a way to put his own little program in there. He had a coin drop sequence, and if he dropped the coins in the right sequence, two, three, two, three, one, two, three, it maxed out the jackpot. And so he was maxing out jackpots, and his friends were maxing out jackpots all over Nevada. The reason he got caught is he got greedy. And from a law enforcement point of view, that's how most people get caught. They get greedy, they brag, they tell people they think they aren't their friends, and they get caught. He went to Atlantic City, he knew there was a way to scam a Kino game in Atlantic City. He found out it really wasn't a random number generator, that it was a predictable cycle on the Kino machine. So he sat in the hotel room, had his laptop running, saw the sequence come up, went down, made his bet, $100,000. And Mr. Harris got caught because he wanted it in cash. Casinos don't pay out cash for $100,000. So if any of you have got the Kino machine rigged, they don't pay out cash, you get a check, they get ID, they get your picture. He was so insistent, hotel security eventually goes into his hotel room, and to their surprise, the Kino numbers are coming up on his laptop before they're coming up on the Kino system. So Mr. Harris got caught and got arrested. The gaming control board was somewhat chagranted and embarrassed. He was the head of technical services that was supposed to stop this sort of thing. We did a search warrant, we got his computer, and that's where our problems started. Local Metro, the first thing they found was this disk that said, cheating program on it. Hey! So they whip it into their computer and it just burns the hell out of it. I mean, it fries the hard drive. Number one, if you're in law enforcement, do not run the program that says cheating program. The second thing they found, they got his hard drive. We couldn't get into his hard drive. Anybody from the FBI here? We sent it to Quantico. They couldn't get into the hard drive. One of our guys had gone to a law enforcement training thing. We got into the hard drive, found out his whole scam, convicted him. He snitched off all his friends, and they've been prosecuted too. And so we kind of got into the high-tech prosecution thing through the back door. I think Mr. Harris, for the most part, is going to be an exception to the norm. Where local law enforcement is going to run into computers and computer crime, and we do it all the time here, we find guys that are making meth, that got their accounts receivable and accounts payable on their laptop. They're running a spreadsheet. Joe sold 10 grams. He owes me this much. Joe sold 5 grams. He hasn't paid me. I owe this much money. And we find this, it used to be kept in little slips of paper. They'd lose them. It was hard to do your year-end report. So we get these guys, they've got the recipes, they've downloaded off the internet either to make good meth or bad meth if they know what they're doing. You know they want to make good meth and bad meth. Thank you. That's good to know. And they catch it all the time, and it's much more efficient for us because they have the list of all their customers there. Most of the meth guys aren't smart enough to use code names. You know, Stinky owes me. It's, you know, Kevin Higgins owes me. So the other place we run into it is people killing their relatives. They oftentimes will have a little diary somewhere that says, my wife really needs to be killed. I got to kill my wife. They think they have it hidden in the slack somewhere. There are two or three law enforcement types in Nevada that are smart enough to look at the slack on the hard drive and find that stuff out. We had a dead apartment manager in Reno, one right between the eyes, over his desk. They go in, the screensaver's on. They get through the password on the screensaver and lo and behold, guess whose account is up there? You know, Joe Smith's account, three months in the red. They go and find Joe, and of course he's the guy that off the apartment manager. So, you know, it's kind of low tech. And the way we look at it, there's a lot of people that are doing old crimes using computers. They're, you know, keeping their meth records. They're writing, you know, buy new, get poison. They have their shopping lists on the computer. You find them. They've got their financial records. You find some new kind of crimes going on. We've had a couple of the short bus guys that have, you know, lower teenage girls to Nevada with vague promises. I'm sure nobody has made vague promises in chat rooms here to meet somebody of the opposite sex, right? I'm glad to know that. And like I said, you know, things are pretty open in Nevada until, frankly, you piss somebody off, okay? And last bill, we just passed a new bill in the legislature on high-tech crime. And I can tell you where about half the stuff came from. There's now a crime in Nevada to strip the header information off your email. We catch you doing it. It's a misdemeanor. Yay! That's got to be a fed back there. And the reason is that an African-American state legislator was getting racist hate mail that the header was stripped off of. Nobody knows who sent it to him. So, he had this as a bill and there's now a crime to strip the header information. So, somebody made him mad. Forfeiture. We can now, if we arrest you for any computer-related crime, we can forfeit any piece of equipment you've got and keep it. And the reason that happened is they caught a guy in a Reno that was hacking cable boxes. He had like 300 cable boxes he'd hacked. So it got, you know, the Playboy Channel and all that stuff. And they convicted him of his misdemeanor crime. And as he walks out the door, he says, I want my boxes back and the prosecutor kind of starts sputtering and realizes that these forfeiture statute doesn't include cable boxes or electronic components. So the guy got his misdemeanor, he got 300 boxes back, though. So TCI wasn't happy and they got their little bit put in the bill. Theft of computer services is illegal. Encryption in order to commit a crime is illegal. So if we catch you committing a crime and you've been doing kiddie porn stuff and you've encrypted it and we're eventually able to get through it, you've actually committed a separate crime by encrypting it. Most of these guys are not the Kevin Polsons of the world that we catch. You know, their password is on a sticky note on there, on there, you know, right on the monitor or it's, you know, fluffy or whatever. And it's like I was talking to Gail about. One of the things I do is I teach kind of intro to prison 101 at the Juvenile Center up in Reno. And, you know, this is what life is like to be in prison guys and maybe straighten up your life. And this kid in the back goes, hey man, you never catch the smart ones. And, well, you know, Junior, you're right here in custody. So we probably don't catch the really, really smart ones in state law enforcement, but we catch the dumb ones and the short bus guys we catch all the time. So I'll let Gail do her bit. I'm happy to answer questions. And you can ask the prosecutor a question and I reserve the right to decline to answer it. So thank you for your time. It's been interesting here. And I think I'm the only one with a tie on today. So, yeah. We are not feds. We are state agency, but we are government and we are here to help you. True. Now look, you just found out something you didn't know about Nevada law. I'm going to tell you just a few minutes' worth of things. I have read some of the most astoundingly bad legal advice I have ever seen in my life off the net. Get a real lawyer, will you? Let me explain a little bit about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act because I'll bet that a lot of you, I see a lot of confusion in the discussion forums out there, a lot of you do not realize that this is a very unusual statute. You've heard about the fourth and fifth amendments and how if police do things wrong, maybe stuff will get suppressed and it can't be used against you. Well, the Wildtap Statutes, starting with the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, are unique. There is a suppression rule that applies not just to the police, but to private citizens and it has very sharp pointy teeth that you need to know about just to get through life with a computer video camera, for example, and we'll go to that in a minute. Now I'm going to do a little question of my own here. How many of you from either reading or just, you know, what you see in the press or just your natural instincts, how many of you think that it's really shocking that Kevin Mitnick has been held this long without a trial? Until it's good to play, of course. Okay? Now, of those who put their hands up, how many of you have asked Kevin Mitnick how many times he consented to delay his trial? See, there's something that none of the pro Mitnick folks are mentioning out there in all these hacked web pages and free Kevin stuff. What they're forgetting to mention is that when a person is arrested in state court, in federal court, they're facing charges and they have a right to a speedy trial. Now the number of days may be different in each state, but Kevin could not have been held this long if he had not asked for those delays. The rule is if the defendant wants a speedy trial, the prosecution and the courts have got to work together to give it to him. And there are some exceptions to that. You know, somebody getting sick, like the defense attorney or star witness might delay part of the trial. There are lots of reasons why there might be a delay. But the point is the defendant, by and large, controls when he goes to trial. So ask Kevin how many times he's shown up in court or his attorney on his behalf and can send it to the delay. Secondly, Kevin was held without bond. How many people think that was unfair? Come on. You guys have been saying different stuff out there than that. A lot of people are complaining that it's outrageous that Kevin met Nick was not allowed release before his trial. Well, you know what? He was on release when he skipped. Nothing that happens to you in your trial is going to be as bad as skipping and then getting caught and coming back to face new charges and the old charges. Judges don't look kindly on people who skip bond, so don't do it if you don't want to get held without bond. Now, one of my personal favorites besides the fractured legal advice I get off the net is hacker handlers or whatever you call those memes you all give yourselves. We all give ourselves. I have one too. I know I won't tell you what it is. But when you are arrested, what effect do you think it has on the jury if the testimony from your friends, relations, your own records, maybe your own webpage is what your name is, the Angel of Destruction? Good. How about something thief? This is good. People use the most amazing handles and they probably think they're very powerful at the time, but we get a lot of amusement out of them when we're doing our search ones. Now, let's go on to the most important thing we can talk about today. The ACPA. Basically, the wiretap statute, and there are some variations by state. But let's talk about the federal one because you need to understand it at the Fimble Rebel that we're doing all our legal advice on today because it applies to all of us. It is the minimum threshold by the federal statute. It is the minimum threshold of protection that we are all entitled to as we go around using phones, using computers and talking to each other, communicating. The federal statute says the states can give more protection, but they can't give less. So here are the basic protections. We're having an oral conversation if we're talking in this room face to face. We're having a wire conversation if the human voice is being transmitted over a wire microwave. We don't care what the form is. Now, this is a kind of technically inaccurate convention, but what you need to know about these two is wire communications and oral communications are protected at the very highest level. As government, we cannot intercept those without something that is much harder to get than a search warrant. We call it a search warrant on steroids. You have to have everything you need for a search warrant plus a lot of other stuff. Now, the reason this should interest you is, first of all, you use communications every day and you want to be protected. The privacy you want protected. The second thing you need to know is when you're doing some of the things that people take naturally, like filming each other with video cameras, you may unwittingly step into wiretap territory. The statute says that you shall not use a device, which may be a video camera with the sound on, to intercept communications without the consent of a party. That's the federal. Some states require all parties. And unless you have the consent of a party or are they in a place where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy? Where's that phrase again which you heard in the first talk? Reasonable expectation of privacy would not be out there where anybody can overhear you. It would be on a telephone. It would be on an internet phone. Internet phone, even though it's going out electronically, which is the third kind of communication, is protected at that high level because a human voice is talking. Now, the last thing I want to tell you because we really don't have time to do the whole statute and I want to give everybody time for questions, is that if you violate someone else's wire or oral communication privacy and it's been 10 years that we started routinely writing wiretap tools into search points and hacker cases because we find those routinely. Not only can you be prosecuted for the wiretap violation and sued in your thoughtful congress has given statutory damages against even a civilian wiretapper, just as against the governing, but you cannot use that evidence. The classic case where this comes up is the annoyed boyfriend-girlfriend spouse decides to wiretap the family phone or some other phone to find out what their beloved object is up to. They cannot use that in court even if there's no state action. If a thief steals a document, he can deliver it to the police and say, you know, I know I'm going to get in trouble for this, but I was doing a burglary last night and I saw this plot to kill someone and my conscience will not allow me to let this go, so I'm giving it to you. Well, we can use that and investigate. There's no state action. The police have done nothing wrong in those states. Under the federal wiretap statute, it's no good to you to wiretap someone else because if you get caught, not only can you get prosecuted and sued, but you can use it. Accept to prosecute you for violating that statute. That's how high the privacy level is. And, yes. Employers have certain exceptions within the wiretap statute. The wiretap statute's one of these things that says, thou shalt not, but then you look at the exceptions and employers and employees is a different situation because there are exceptions that cover regular business use of certain communications facilities. The phone company has the right to listen, too, because there's another exception that covers them for protecting the network from fraud and abuse-protecting users. So the telephone company has a limited right to listen in. They don't have a right to listen in to see if you're committing a crime just randomly, but if they're investigating something, they may have that right. Now, the final thing I want to say is that there are certain exceptions that cover regular business use of certain communications because this is widely misunderstood. Electronic communications, let's just use email as the most common one. Employers, right now, the way the case law is working, employers can read your email and use it even if they promise you they wouldn't. There's a case out of Pennsylvania, the Pillsbury case, where they told the employee we don't read email, it's confidential, so do not say anything on your boss's email systems that you don't want to read in the paper or have used against you. Okay, now, I don't want to go into detail there. If any of you have questions, I cannot give legal advice as a member of a government and more than Kevin can to individual people, and I need to repeat the same disclaimer that these are, anything I say here is not the opinion of my boss or my office. It may not even be my opinion but we'll try to answer questions. Now, for Kevin, if you have any questions about Nevada Law or anything else, since we have a virtual schedule here, obviously, I think we'll hold the questions down to about 10 minutes so we don't turn to much on the weak speaker. Okay? Oh, okay, I'll let you answer some of these. Is the guy that knows the difference between bad math and good math, does he have a question? No, he doesn't have a question. Okay, how to put a situation, I have a computer that tells the action to my system, to my system, they want to act against the government's system. Without support or action to my system, it doesn't play in the original system, but the fact of that, is that we... If the FBI does it, it's obviously a foreign counterintelligence emergency. Yes? Okay, somebody who breaks the system from all different designs to steal passwords, is that a violation of the privacy of people who have those passwords and who would be prosecuted? That's a direct violation of Nevada law. Whoops, to break into anybody's system for any reason. To break into alter, to view, to steal data of any sort is a felony in Nevada, so we would prosecute. Big Doug. Thank you. It's been said a number of times, three, that if a computer system has been intruded into, that the system administrator can capture information and disclose that to law enforcement. My understanding of eCPA is that it's not at your statements that there is some liability or potential liability in the history of the park doing that is that the system that you're understanding? Okay, the question was if someone breaks into a computer system, can the system administrator capture the information, do a sniffer for example, capture their information and then turn it over to law enforcement? Is that accurate? The answer to that is the thing they teach you on your first day in law school, the statute gives the system administrator the right to do whatever they need by and large. Now remember we're talking from the law here, there are always exceptions to anything as you heard earlier today but the rough answer is the statute specifically gives system administrators, network operators who have the responsibility for keeping it running, the ability, the legal right to do whatever that takes including keystrokes. Now in the famous Legion of Doom case that was prosecuted out of Atlanta, Georgia that was actually done there were some keystroke captures going on, but at that point the law was so new that the prosecutors did not want basically that evidence because they just didn't need it, they didn't use it in a way that I think today would all be much more comfortable with. Now there are some states, remember states all have an equivalent of the ECPA there are some states that might require the system administrator to insist on a subpoena or a search warrant some states would actually require a search warrant if it's personally identifiable information. We don't have an ECPA here in Nevada because nobody's gotten PO'd yet so Next, wiretaps Nevada is an odd state for a lot of reasons but one on one conversations I'm fully free, it's one party consent so if I'm talking to you in the privacy of your home and you say, alright let's go blow up the World Trade Center man I can tape that and use it telephone communications on the other hand is a two party consent state, so except answering machines, that's another story I'll put it here in the front row Additionally, it says that a person engineering is illegal for these purposes does that mean that you're getting background assistance because there's no need to find a security flaw if it was created by someone else Do you know what that means that the system is illegal if it was created by someone else Well I helped write the Nevada law this last session and we said it's against the law to hack into a system there's no exception in the law if you're hacking your own, that's an interesting way to hack in their own system so I kind of doubt a prosecutor would do anything with that but that's an interesting point of course in Nevada it is against the law to commit suicide so we will prosecute you if you do that oh hey that guy knows all about math do you have a question the federal statute uses the word intercept and defines it quite clearly as capturing it doesn't say you have to understand it and in fact there's a portion of the statute that was added to the original wiretap statutes from the ECPA the first version of it was enacted for example if we had a legal wiretap order in Arizona a court supervised wiretap order if some gibberish comes across the line that we can't understand the statute actually allows you to grab it and intercept it and then do after the fact minimization which means that you can't use it or listen to it or display it or send it to people and disclose it if it's not relevant to what the court has ordered you to have but we can capture it and then decipher it later basically I should have mentioned earlier in the ECPA one is interception two is disclosing and three is using so if Nick Gingrich hadn't been a politician he could have gotten rich off the press people who disclosed what his statements over the cell phone were maybe more arguing about this because the statute does not have any press exception in it if a reporter hacks into your stuff or tape records you in such a way that it's a violation of the statute we're all debating this but there's nothing in the statute that says there's a first amendment press exception the statute's quite clear it's very very sharp pointy teeth and very strict definition so it'll be interesting to see if that happens but Moot obviously wasn't going to take on the press but at $10,000 per offense he could have been very very rich if he had won that issue how about the guy in the back the guy in the back yes it's very general he said it happens here Johnson says to me there's just another thing on the system is your lawyer finding out here enough if they're opening shop gates however there's a couple of reasons a person who says there's a lot of tools that there's a lot of business on that system the person here I don't know I'm going to repeat the question repeat the question we get it the presumption is we get an anonymous tip that somebody's got porno and we get a search warrant and a search machine we'll take that for the assumption we wouldn't do it we can't do it anonymous tip isn't enough for us to get a search warrant but outside of that we get a complaint from somebody that the guy in the big boost I've been on the website and he sent me something so let's say we got enough to get a search warrant and you're asking if finding back orifice on his machine is a defense basically it would be a defense to the crime it doesn't mean you didn't commit to crime it would be up to you to prove the defense somehow as soon as the existence of back orifice was a defense I'm sure every pedophile in the country would just automatically put back orifice on their machine and say obviously my enemy did this to me on purpose of course it's kind of hard if you've got CDs you've burnt and you've got your huge kiddie porn CD collection to claim that somebody did that to me when I wasn't looking do you have any CDs? no, okay, I shouldn't ask any incriminating questions I promise I'll do that way in the back over here if I can feed this child if there was a CD do you have a CD to the child CD, if there is do CD's come and pop and they play out the kids they are they talk to me they are in my opinion no and no I mean, you're on an open public forum that anybody can log into and that's the old, before I sell you the dope man, are you a cop? It doesn't have to tell you the truth. No. Do you mean do they have to tell the truth then, you're asking? Our Supreme Court here in Nevada says cops can tell you anything they want to deceive you and to tell them. So they don't have to tell you the truth. Is there a legitimate expectation of privacy in a closed IRC? You know, I don't know. I suppose it was limited to four people. You knew the four people and somebody was posing as the fourth person that really wasn't the fourth person. Might be a question, but I don't know how you prove that you had that legitimate expectation of privacy. So you can't ID that person by looking at the computer screen. You don't know who it is. I move in their handle, right? Sure. I mean, we'll ask them questions, I guess, but that's an open forum pretty much. Who's kind of shifty looking? I'll ask them a question. Way over there. Okay, I'm sure most of you didn't hear that. It was a kind of statement that roughly did the effect that Kevin Mitnick and his attorney certainly did at some point contribute to the delays in their trial, but the prosecution had made it difficult for them to have access to the evidence. Well, in Arizona, as in many states, but don't take this for gospel because you always need to check the jurisdiction we're in, and the feds play by completely different rules. We have a discovery process that goes on before trial. Basically, they get to see everything that we have. We are theoretically able to see what they have over what doesn't happen as often. The defense can always ask if they want to for a delay because the prosecution hasn't provided evidence, and the courts will not deny that. Sometimes it's inescapable. For example, in our homicide where somebody is arrested right away, there may be DNA evidence required, and as we all know from the OJ trial, that may take a while. So you're not going to have the DNA results the day after the arrest. You're not going to always have your computer forensics available right at the point where the rules say you should give discovery. But in Arizona, for example, if the prosecution hasn't provided everything, then we have an ongoing duty, according to the rules of court, to continue to provide it as we get it. And the defense has the same obligation in our state because Arizona is not a trial by ambush state. The court rules discourage that, and in fact, they're broadening the discovery rules all the time. Basically, I don't know what the prosecution did in the midnight case, but in any criminal trial, there's a great deal of investigating that goes on by both sides after the arrest, and that's sometimes what occasions the delay, whoever has requested the delay. The point is, the defense can always force the prosecution to honor the speedy trial rules, and there are, as I said, some exceptions, but the courts make the decision. The prosecution does not. Okay, we have another speech coming up. Is there anyone who's running this? No, okay. I don't like to schedule for five, so. Okay. We'll just keep going. Pick one. Somebody want to comment how nice my tie is? No? Okay. Are you in the front row? Well, release is an interesting thing, and you can't consent necessarily to something that's, like, if you get on a ride, like an amusement park ride, and they know it's broken, and they say sign a consent, and if you get killed, that that consent is not legally effective. Now, by analogy, if they know that link's bad and they're just trying to get you to go somewhere and they think that's going to cover them, it depends on how full the disclaimer is, but for the most part, I think you can still get sued. I don't think it protects you too much. Well, you have one on your website? No? The linking and click-through and disclaimer waiver stuff is all completely up in the air right now because the civil lawyers are having a fine time battling that out, and I think we all have to wait and just watch the cases as they come through and see how people sort that out. I haven't asked anybody over here. Brown shirt. Well, again, all of these situations are very fact-specific, kind of like Fourth Amendment situations, but if the statute, if they're acting in a way that the statute says they may do to protect their system, and the statute also says they can't just do random monitoring because they feel like it. The phone company can't start listening to telephone calls to see if anybody's ripping them off as a practice, but when an incident is occurring that's a legitimate investigation, they can capture. Now, the question, the real question, both for criminal and civil liability, would be what if they improperly use information that they have captured that's not relevant to the investigation. So system administrators dealing with an incident, whether you're a government agency administrator or corporate, the first thing you should do at the sign of an incident where you're going to tackle any of this is run for the lawyers. Prosecutors, if you're a cop, run for the civil people, the corporate counsel, if you're a system administrator in a corporation. There's a lot of very touchy liability stuff that just isn't settled yet. In all fairness, is there a woman here that would like to ask a question? Here's one. All right, here we go. The question was when do people, do people or when do they have to notify you that they're going to be listening to conversations? There are some states that have either by statute or by case law that have all party consent, meaning if there are five people in the conversation, phone company, okay. If there are five people in the conversation, all five have to know and agree. Now, if you're in a state like that, then the question would be do they have this supervisor phone company system administrator exception? When we use phone by the way now, I no longer care whether it's a phone company or any of the other media because with all these media converging an internet phone, just, you know, we use phone as a generic term for people talking with their voices. So that would be a question that would be completely dependent on the individual state and both the exception and what legislation they may have that governs system administrators in an all party consent state. Just by way of information, here in Nevada it's much easier for me to get a trap and trace to get a full phone tap to listen to what you have. So I can figure out who's calling you and who you're calling with hardly any effort at all to convince somebody to issue me a warrant. I may or shouldn't tell you this, it's extremely difficult here in Nevada. Yes? I know that there has been a lot of research where it's escalated in investigations on the point when you have found out or that other patients might be next to you. And when I think of the number of researchers, the number of professors is odd. It's super few. But there are new insights about the potential of research in the field. So, of course, I'm happy to be in touch with you. Good. The question was... Well, let me see if I can state this right. It related to the number of searches that are done in relation to the number of arrests that arise out of those search ones. Would that be accurate? Okay, yeah. Part of the... We've heard already from able counsel on the other side what a search warrant requires. Basically, they have to go to the judge and they have to have something called probable cause. Probable cause to believe the crime is being committed and probable cause to believe evidence of the crime will be found in the place where the crime, where the evidence is stored. Now, one of the misconceptions that I see every time there's a hacker bus from 1980-something on out to today is, well, they did a search warrant and nobody's arrested. That's why they call it a search warrant. They're still looking. In that situation, perhaps there are five search warrants done in a case and one person may be arrested out of that and that person may not have been in any of the five locations searched. But a judge makes that initial determination is there enough to justify going to this place to look? There's no punishment for guessing wrong or not finding the stuff. For example, the bad guys knew you were coming and they took off with the meth lab and now you find an empty house. So a lot of search warrants either are part of a larger case and you can't really tie the location to who eventually gets arrested. Conversely, there are cases where we do one search warrant and out of the evidence we find there, 20 people get arrested. An example of that would be a wiretap. It's not uncommon in a drug wiretap for us to wind up with, say, 60 people being indicted out of one that's essentially a search warrant. Yeah, you had a follow-up? Yes. Okay, the question was, are the number of searches in hacking computer-related cases comparable to other types of complex cases such as drug cases? I really couldn't answer that because one of the things you find is that the press, this isn't an insult, but the press is very hot on the bust, you know? The press almost never falls up on what happened in that case. So you may have great publicity on some search and then without going to the courthouse, you couldn't find out that everybody involved in the case pled guilty quietly with no publicity. The other thing I want to say is that the federal wiretap statutes which some people are looking at on this, are there more searches than there are indictments? They report the results of those annually. The numbers, this is why you have to remember that statistics lie. The numbers are wildly inaccurate. When you read the press saying that they did, I forget what the number is, but they did 10,000 more wiretaps in the last decade than the one before. Well, you know what happened in the last decade? Pages. We have to get a full-blown wiretap order to get the numbers off the pager. And you know what? There's lots more pagers than there used to be, but does that mean there are gazillions of people being listened to? If you take the pager statistics out, then you see the true number of wiretaps. And the same problem with the computer search ones. One of our frustrations in law enforcement is the FBI has never, when we've asked them somehow because nobody could define it as part of the problem, they don't track. We don't have a reporting mechanism for who gets arrested for computer crime. We don't have a reporting mechanism the way we do for wiretap from how many search ones are executed. There's no way to look this stuff up. Not to harp on the FBI, but if you don't know, state law enforcement always harps on the FBI and other feds. It's what's called the uniform crime reporting form. So everybody that gets murdered or stabbed or sexually assaulted here in Nevada, it gets reported and the FBI, of course, says statistics are down 7%. Nobody gets reported for computer crime, break-ins, white-collar crime, your average insurance fraud. There's no box to check on the form. So violent crimes down, nobody's... That's a nice way, by the way. Nobody is reporting and keeping track of where the white-collar fraud is. And on our level, I think that some of those people that used to do the stop-and-robs that are marginally trainable, maybe the medium-sized bus, it's not that hard to get on the Internet and find out these scams and commit a white-collar scam. Something that happens here in Nevada, I can tell you it's happening in a casino right this very second. Somebody has broken into a mailbox in Las Vegas somewhere, stolen somebody's check they've made out to the power company, scanned it, reprinted it, changed the name on it and is passing bad paper every casino in town. That doesn't take a lot of hacker expertise to do, but it's safer than robbing the 7-11. You don't get shot and you're probably not going to go into prison and you're not going to get a gun enhancement. So those statistics are just so misleading, I don't know how to keep track of it. We've got a nice wave that Ari and you are over here. In Nevada, as of June 8th, an Internet service provider cannot give you information out to anybody else without committing a misdemeanor. Now, does that mean they're not doing it? No, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to get a list of every ISP in Nevada. They're not like in the phone books. So it is technically now against the law for them to send out confidential information or even your web address without your consent. But lots of things get made into laws that don't have big enforcement problems. We got like two minutes, so there has to be a really great question. The guy in the black thinks he's got a really great question. We have the ISP. Well, I'll let Gail answer. I don't know what the FBI's rules are. Nevada, we don't have those rules. But the problem is, 20 years ago, cops got into forfeiting stuff, right? We all got up with warehouses full of Ugos that we couldn't do anything with. It's the same way with computer equipment. You take every system you get, pretty soon you get a warehouse full of computer boxes that nobody has the time to look at anyway. So we, for the most part, have quit taking it. If it's a child porno guy, we take his equipment. But we think it's a medical billing company that's ripping off Medicare. We just go in and keep copy of the hard drive and there's no way for us to, the haul that equipment away. Well, we threaten to do it, but no, we don't do it. I can't tell you what the FBI's doing. We don't do it here. The question, the argument here, has been going back and forth a little bit. Now, this really is the last question, folks. It has been going back and forth a little bit on why we see some computers and not others, for example. That whole area of forensics is evolving and hopefully with the help of the people who are writing better forensics tours and people who are writing better law, including some of the now beginning to be computer literate judges, we will have this worked out so it's a basis of equality for both sides. Don't forget that defense also has access to the evidence, even if it's in the prosecution's hands. We don't even have very good procedures worked out for how we share looking at that evidence without causing each other's cases problems. This is definitely an evolving field, computer forensics, and there's no, a couple groups that teach it, won't even certify it, but there's no consensus yet on what is the right thing to do in each circumstance and that's partly because every system, every situation is unique. That's the only answer I can give you. Now we can't take more questions because it wouldn't be fair to the next speaker who I want to hear, but I will be here. I will be around until Sunday afternoon. Kevin has to leave, but we can't, as we said, we can't give legal advice. We're just kind of doing the best we can to answer questions and I'll be around and feel free to come up and ask later, but we do have to give the next speaker time, so thanks. Oh, and after all the speeches are over and before the evening events, there will be a reunion of the people in 6.02 and 5.02 area codes who are on probation and are not supposed to be here. I'll see you in the bar.