The Digital Trail of the Maltese Falcon: Private Investigations in the Information Age

What's the impact of IT on private investigations? Richard Power grills Ed Stroz about the field and what it means for CSOs, government and business.

By Richard Power

January 05, 2010 — CSO —

These first two decades of Information Age, i.e., the 1990s and the 2000s, have transformed almost all aspects of human endeavor from bookselling to physics, from astrology to economics, and from pornography to politics; and the many ways in which the field of investigation has been impacted by information technology (IT) is of particular interest for me.

For example, in 1998, in my role as Editorial Director of Computer Security Institute (CSI), I interviewed the legendary private investigator, Terry Lenzer. He had solved the murder of three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi, served as Assistant Chief Counsel on the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee and as President Bill Clinton's personal sleuth). In the piece, we explored some of the evolving problems in the realm of on-line stock trading, etc. "The volume of only-line trades and the velocity at which they can be consummated has opened the door to all kinds of scams and frauds," Lenzner remarked, "including misappropriation by employees on trading desks who exceed their trading limits, the transmittal of information on the Internet in investor chat rooms being used anonymously by broker dealers to promote stocks or for shorting stocks. They are spreading false information about stocks going down." (World-Class Private Eyes Sharpen the Focus on Cyberspace, Computer Security Alert, 11/98).

Of course every human endeavor operates partly in light and partly in shadow; and, especially, in those fields that delve deeply into shadow, some succumb to temptation.

Also see Digital and Physical Investigations: Merge Ahead

In my first book on cyber security, Tangled Web: Tales of Digital Crime from the Shadows of Cyberspace (Que), I included a case study of the Phonemasters investigation (among several others). The Phonemasters were an early and sophisticated cyber crime gang. They had a menu of services, e.g., you could purchase somebody's DMV records or a celebrity's private phone number. Their customers included Mafioso, and yes, some unscrupulous private investigators. Fast forward several years, and in Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost: Preventing Intellectual Property Theft and Economic Espionage in the 21st Century, my second book on cyber security, co-author Christopher Burgess and I included a case study of the Haephrati affair, in which private investigators were not merely resorting to purchasing purloined information from criminal hackers, but instead were actually integrating the use of Trojan horses into their operations.

Secrets Stolen/Fortunes Lost also included a "Virtual Roundtable" featuring several thought leaders in thwarting intellectual property theft and economic espionage, including Ed Stroz of Stroz Friedberg.

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