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>>ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA D. HARRIS: We are here to announce the creation and the launch
of the eCrime Unit of the California Department of Justice. And we have decided to make the
announcement here in the great County of Santa Clara with the great District Attorney of
Santa Clara, Jeff Rosen, and the Assemblywoman, Nora Campos, because it is here that there
has been a great deal of leadership around what we can do to appreciate the technology
that was created in our backyard and do it in a way that encourages its continuation
of development, and we don't know where it's going to end up, but it's very exciting to
see the process of its growth, but we also know, as elected leaders and as law enforcement,
that we want to make sure that in this new place -- the Internet -- we also make sure
that vulnerable populations are safe, that consumers are safe, and that we allow good
behavior to occur. But where there are predators and predatory practices, we also want to ensure
that we have the skills and the technology to go after them and make sure that there
will be accountability and consequence. So, I'm very excited to announce the creation of,
what we call in the Department of Justice, the eCU, lowercase "e". I want to recognize
Robert Morgester who has been with the Department of Justice for a long time and has been,
as an individual, doing this work and he I've appointed as the Senior Deputy Attorney General
who will be over and supervising this Unit and the creation and its development of this Unit.
So, Robert, I want to recognize you. And then we have Larry Wallace who's here,
who's the Director of the Division of Law Enforcement for the California Department
of Justice, and Travis LeBlanc from my Office who is the Special Assistant Attorney General
that we stole from the United States Department of Justice to be over the work that we are
doing that is policy work around technology. So, what is the eCrime Unit and what will it do?
Well, it will investigate and it will prosecute identity theft crimes, cyber crimes
and other crimes using technology. The Unit has been assigned 20 attorneys and investigators,
and we expect that that number will grow as we expand the work that we are doing across
the State. It's been operational since August, and so far I can tell you that what we have
addressed are crimes that perhaps would have gone without consequence because frankly the
jurisdiction just wasn't clear. Maybe it was because the incident occurred in a cloud,
and who has jurisdiction over that cloud? Or sometimes there was ambiguity about who
would take it on because the victims were in many different jurisdictions, and so it
was a question of which law enforcement agency would have jurisdiction over the activity.
So, what we have and what we have dedicated with this Unit is a broad mandate that appreciates
and takes advantage of our unique role as a State Department of Justice to work across
jurisdictional lines and to use our power and our resources to make sure that we are
providing a voice for victims who are very vulnerable and often will go without support,
because the jurisdiction around the incident that harmed them is unclear. I think we all
should be proud of the fact that being in California and Californians that two of our
most productive and important industries, which are technology and entertainment, are
directly impacted by the technology that is occurring now and is growing, but also impacted
by the inappropriate uses of the technology. So, for example, piracy is a big issue that
impacts both the entertainment industry and the technology industry. You can look at the
theft of intellectual property as a specific example of where those two important California
industries have a vested interest in making sure that we as law enforcement will be there
to protect their interests and to protect the consumers of their product. In particular,
we can look at piracy again as the issue there, that is, the theft of intellectual property
of software companies, for example, to the theft of intellectual property as it relates
to the entertainment industry and that can be from our movie industry to the music industry.
It is an issue that therefore equally impacts Northern and Southern California, and so we're
proud of the work that we can do across the State in that regard. And some may ask, well,
why are we doing this work and why now? Well, because the time has come for us as public
institutions to adopt this technology and take advantage of its uses. As a career prosecutor,
I can tell you that many years ago, we in law enforcement were a bit ambivalent about
embracing that science called DNA. And then we learned, through the creation of crime labs
up and down the State and institutionalizing a skillset around science, that it was one
of our best crime-fighting tools. It allowed us to fight crime in a way that allowed us
to also be efficient and effective and certain. So, part of the initiative with the eCrime Unit
in the California Department of Justice includes the creation in Fresno as our launch
of a pilot, which is basically a technology center where we are doing the work, that is
the forensic work, around allowing law enforcement to know how they can get evidence from a smartphone.
I'm told there are about 600 types of smartphones on the market right now, and most of them
have a camera, and most of them when we look at it from a forensic perspective will allow us
to draw down on a photograph and figure out where that photograph was taken, and through
GPS technology when that photograph was taken. So, it is very exciting in terms of knowing that
with these labs and with these centers, like the REACT Center here in Santa Clara,
we can do the work of assisting local law enforcement to find the evidence they need
to catch a perpetrator of crime. We are also proud of some very specific case examples
that highlight the work that needs to happen through this Unit, and they involve everything
from what we want to do around going after identity theft, which is a crime that impacts
a lot of people in our State and we believe it impacts as many as 8.1 million people in
the United States and last year, we believe, over 1 million were Californians, and the
total cost of identity theft in 2010 was $37 billion. Well, a specific example of that
kind of work is the work that we do around looking for scam artists who engage in e-mail
phishing, people who troll the Internet. So, identity theft is one area of focus for this Unit.
Another is fraud, and what we know is that we've had, for example, many scams that
have caught consumers where people are inappropriately auctioning items on Internet auction sites,
and it has impacted individuals and it has impacted whole communities of people.
Another area of focus for us has been the theft of computer components or services and, in particular,
we've seen networks of gangs who have done that work, and there are great examples of
what REACT most recently has been doing out of Santa Clara County to come down *** them.
And then, of course, there's the issue of child exploitation. What we know is that
child *** for awhile was starting to wane, and law enforcement in its traditional
work was able to deal with it and go after it, but with the advent of the Internet it
has grown exponentially. And so, this is an area of focus for us as well, which is to
do what we can to go after those who are creating that kind of *** and distributing it
in a way that makes sure that they face serious and swift consequence. Specific cases!
We have one involving the sale of counterfeit jewelry. So, you'll see here, and essentially
what happened is that this was a sale that took place on eBay and no local jurisdiction
would investigate it, because it was unclear who had jurisdiction. So, the call came into
our office and, through very diligent work that involved search warrants and interviews,
we discovered 300 boxes of counterfeit jewelry that had been shipped into the United States
and California from China. The retail value of this seized property is $1.5 million, and
we know that this is but one type of what we call copyright theft -- counterfeit -- and
a result of this type of activity is that last year alone we believe $58 billion was
lost in the economy due to piracy. So, this is a very big issue. On December 8th, we filed
five felony charges against the defendant, and we'll be using this case as an example
of what will happen when you inappropriately use these Internet sales devices, and eBay
in particular. Another case that we have been prosecuting is a social networking stalker.
It's an identity theft case and also it is an example of child exploitation on the Internet.
This is the case of George Bronk of Sacramento who was recently sentenced to four years 8 months
in prison. You'll remember that he had hacked into the e-mail Facebook accounts
of his victims and blackmailed them with photographs and threatened to replicate and then distribute
nude photographs of these victims if they did not produce even more nude photographs
for his pleasure. One victim described it as virtual ***. That case involved victims
from at least 17 States and as far away as England. So that's a case that has been prosecuted
with serious consequence and it is an example of the kind of cases that we will be looking at
in this Unit. Another example of the work we are doing is the work of dealing with identity
theft, in particular, as it relates to ATMs. We recently had a case where defendants were
running an identity theft scam at ATMs in seven counties. They used credit card readers
and cameras to access the information. So, essentially, you know what happens when you
go to your ATM, the one that's not on the street but you have to actually go through
a door to get inside and access the ATM. Well, you have to swipe your card across the door
in order to get into the ATM. They had rigged the outside reader so that they put their
own technology there, and it was then reading the consumer's credit card, and then simultaneously
photographing it so that they could then replicate it in real time, and then draw down from these
victims' ATM accounts. And the fact about that that's most insidious is that, unlike
a classic credit card, that money is immediately taken from the debit card and it's very difficult
to recover. So, that case involved seven counties and the loss was estimated at $2 million.
Local officials previously would have only charged it in one county, but through the
eCU we charged the entirety of the scheme across seven counties, and that case is in
the process of being prosecuted, and you'll hear more about that next year. So, it's very
exciting, and we are proud again at the California Department of Justice to be creating a model
of what States can do and what law enforcement can do to embrace technology in a way that
helps us keep our communities safe and allows consumers to actually get what they pay for.