The Electronic Crime Technology Center of Excellence
The National Institute of Justice established the Electronic Crime Technology Center of Excellence in 2009 to build the capacity of state and local law enforcement in the areas of electronic crime prevention and digital evidence collection and analysis.
The center's team of scientists, engineers and other digital forensics experts has experience in establishing, staffing and supervising electronic crime investigation units and task forces as well as digital evidence examination labs for state and local law enforcement, among other areas.
The center will support NIJ and state and local law enforcement in the following areas, among others:
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Building the capacity of electronic crime units and crime labs: The staff will provide advice and support to assist criminal justice agencies with the use of new technologies or the adoption of existing technologies. Through a digital forensics unit performance evaluation program, the center will also support agencies and digital forensic units in prioritizing pending digital evidence examinations, determining the most efficient commitment of resources on a case-by-case basis, and providing the capacity to reduce pending examination backlogs. (The backlogs are a result of the ever-increasing digital crime rate and the increase in personnel training in digital evidence collection at electronic crime scenes.) The performance evaluation program will be scalable to state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States, regardless of their size or resources.
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Identifying technology and operational requirements: The center hosts and supports an electronic crime technology working group composed of 20 electronic crime, digital evidence and criminal justice practitioners. The group helps NIJ identify technology gaps, review ongoing digital forensics technology projects and vet potential new projects.
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Developing electronic crime and digital evidence training standards: The ever-increasing choices of electronic crime and digital evidence training courses available to law enforcement can make the training course selection decision process more difficult and time-consuming than necessary. Standards developed by the center are expected to help streamline this process.
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Testing, evaluating and demonstrating technologies: The center is developing the capacity to conduct tool and technology testing in a controlled laboratory or field environment, and operational evaluation and demonstration of technology with practitioner agencies. Findings will be disseminated through reports, conferences, standards and technology assistance activities. The center's primary focus will be on evaluating new technologies in field environments. Specific areas of interest include very large-scale data warehouse solutions for digital evidence; counter forensics (attempts to hide digital evidence from forensics programs); random access memory acquisition; and global positioning system (GPS), mobile phone and personal digital assistant forensic tools.
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Assessing the compliance of laboratories with quality assurance standards: The center's team will help NIJ identify and develop quality assurance standards for digital evidence examination and electronic crime laboratories, as well as protocols to assess compliance of laboratories with those standards. The goal is to help these labs build their capacity, maximize their performance and improve their productivity.
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Developing and publishing comprehensive NIJ guides: The center, the Electronic Crime Technical Working Group and other partners collectively wrote one of NIJ's most highly requested publications, Electronic Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for First Responders, Second Edition. In conjunction with that guide, the center also developed a course of training for law enforcement personnel; see Digital Evidence Collection Training.
