I-Team: Inside An FBI Probe

Reported by: Hagit Limor Email: hlimor@wcpo.com Last Update: 3/10 12:05 am Source: WCPO.com Photo: Paul Brown Stadium

The email came in the dead of winter and was chilling indeed. A man calling himself Abdul Yohanish said he was about to bomb the major local bridges connecting Ohio to Kentucky, the local international airport, and Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals.

Just who was Abdul Yohanish? And was the threat real?

FBI agents used all their traditional resources in their race against time to find the answers. But they also used a new tool, a forensic lab of sorts, but for computers. It's the latest entry in a rapidly developing and ever-changing field of police work called digital forensics.

The newly-opened Miami Valley Regional Computer Forensic Lab is one of just 14 such labs in the country. FBI agents inside extract information from much more than desktops, work stations and laptops. Cell phones, PDAs, iPods, even gaming systems store information electronically, and for this new breed of special agent, anything with a hard drive is fair game.

In the case of the terrorism threat from the man calling himself "Yohanish", a check of the original email showed the sender had some fairly sophisticated computer skills. As FBI agent Michael Brooks said at the time, "So many steps were taken to hide the source of the threat. False addresses used. That sort of thing."

But it wasn't enough to fool agents at the Computer Forensic Lab. They tracked the email to a man police say really sent the threat, Frederick Purvis, whom they arrested. Agents seized the computer in his home in Hamilton, Ohio and are using evidence on its hard drive in the case against Purvis, who is awaiting trial.

The lab sits inside a nondescript building in Dayton, Ohio, in a place that looks more like a typical, but very well-equipped office, than a high-tech lab. The evidence room holds the latest computer gadgets and software. Agents work not only for the FBI but also investigate for local police agencies who may not have the manpower or expertise to handle tough, high-tech cases.

The lab's director, David Barnes, says he and other agents can find just about anything someone has accessed on an electronic device. He says computer hard drives store so much information these days that very little old information truly gets erased, and that includes data people think they wiped clean.

"It's amazing," Barnes says. "I mean with the tools we have what we can find out about people on a computer."

Barnes and his cohorts have cracked cases as wide-ranging as murders, white collar crimes, identity thefts and other internet frauds, and what you've heard the most, child enticing and pornography.

He remembers the case of a young girl who ran off with someone she met on the internet, someone her parents didn't know existed. He says, "From the time we got the email address, it was within like 24 hours they were able to find the girl."

Barnes says the lab's volume of cases is exploding, up 78 percent just this past year. He expects that pace to continue as modern-day criminals -- like all of us -- increasingly use technology in our everyday lives. He says the lab constantly evolves new ways to track anything that stores data. "We haven't gotten a hard drive from a car yet, but I can see that being just down the road."

[WCPO.com web site ]