In
addition to the Bowitz case, the New York office has seen landmark high tech cases. Suspects have intercepted police pages and
eavesdropped on information sent to police cruisers.
Robert Weaver, of the US Secret Service explains how pager intercepts can be found online. When linked with the appropriate
software and cabling device, they can allow anyone with a scanner to see pages.
"Connect the scanner to the computer, and set it to pager frequencies," says Weaver. "In this particular case, a
news agency, Breaking News Network, intercepted the New York City police and fire departments' [messages]."
In fact, Fort Lee, New Jersey-based Breaking News Network pled guilty to intercepting the alpha-numeric text messages in New
York City in 1997. The case was "the first time, in history, that a news agency pled guilty to eavesdropping on [law
enforcement]."
And while police frequencies are in the public domain, the pager traffic and text messages are not.
Then there is the 1998 mobile data terminal (MDT) intercept case back.
"When [an MDT] is connected to a scanner," explains Weaver, "it receives and understands and translates the
frequency, which are the police frequencies and fire and emergency service frequencies. It'll print out on the screen the user ID
and the terminal ID of all the computer terminal transmissions of the police and fire departments."
Assistant US Attorney Eric Friedberg continues, "a defendant was capturing from the air a digital stream of information
transmitted from police department headquarters to something called 'mobile data terminals,' which are the computers that are in
police cruisers, and this was highly sensitive information. Then the scanner was essentially hooked up with a peripheral device to
a laptop and the laptop software, or the software that was running on the laptop, and decoded the stream of digital
information."
What sort of digital information?
"It's your social security number, your date of birth, maybe a criminal history record," Weaver says. "Certainly
it's not to be displayed on public domain. In this case, it was sold illegally on the Internet.... We bought it in an undercover
capacity."
"The MDT case was very serious." Friedberg concludes. "I mean that was a case in which you're taking highly
sensitive information [and] sometimes people's lives depend on that information; you're stealing it and possibly using it to your
own advantage."
This article is based on original reporting by "CyberCrime" co-host and senior producer Alex Wellen.
