Grant to Fund Fight Against Digital Crime

The U.S. Justice Department wants to develop a national standard for investigating and preventing electronic and digital crime, and has awarded a $500,000 grant to Waynesburg College to take a leading role in this effort. Waynesburg will be called on to review current training practices, which are uneven and sometimes nonexistent at military agencies and police departments across the country, develop national standards, and create training modules that work with computers, the Internet, PDAs, and other forms of digital media.

The training program would focus on collecting and preserving digital evidence, and provide techniques for managing digital equipment and data sources. Waynesburg will also use the money to buy equipment and software for a computer forensics lab, and with data collection from government databases likely to begin in January, officials hope to complete the project in a year and a half.

“We’re going to teach [investigators] how to handle evidence and investigations in digital form,” says Richard Leipold, a professor of computer science who chairs the mathematics and computer science department. In a statement, U.S. Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), added, “these same techniques can be helpful in detecting and tracking terrorist activity.”
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (09/17/06); Crompton, Janice.