Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2014 - (Page 38)

exploring career options Digital Forensic Analyst Andy Crouse Senior Digital Forensic Analyst U.S. Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection When he began his career as a police oﬃcer some 20 years ago, Andy Crouse couldn't have imagined the coming technological revolution and the ways in which it would change the nature of law enforcement. Today, as a digital forensic analyst for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Crouse uses his understanding of the ever-evolving technology to help make the country a safer place for all of us. How did you become interested in digital forensics? In college, I majored in criminal justice with an emphasis on political science and law. I started off as a police officer, and over the next few years-this was in the late 1990s-computer crimes began to surface. As computer use increased, computer crime increased. I was directed to start a computer forensics lab for the department. With that came a lot of training and a lot of material that I had to learn. It didn't just involve learning about computer forensics; I had to learn how computers work. I had to study the operating systems and file systems on different computers. What else do you have to know to be a digital forensic analyst? Digital forensics represents the marrying of two disciplines, computer science and law. You have to know how the technology works, and you need some basic programming skills so you can look at code to understand what's making a certain program do a certain thing on the computer. But we have to do it in a way that is forensically sound, that can be reproduced in court. There's really no other discipline that combines computer science and law. It's unique and challenging. How did you come to work for the Department of Homeland Security? I applied for a Digital Forensic Analyst position with 38 imagine Interview by Amy Entwisle the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) Laboratories and Scientific Services Directorate. I saw the position as an exciting and challenging opportunity to work with some of the best minds in computer forensics. My co-workers have been involved in writing standards for the industry and conducting leading research on new devices and technologies. How do you use digital forensic analysis in your job? At U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), our mission is securing the nation's borders. Within CBP, we have the Office of Field Operations and the U.S. Border Patrol. These officers are spread out among all the ports of entry in the country. We also have our air and marine division, the people who fly the really neat planes and drive the really fast boats. We support all these people directly. The crimes that we investigate include terrorism, human smuggling, narcotics smuggling, and weapons smuggling. Any of these crimes can have a digital trail that provides evidence of the crime. Maybe it's a cell phone that has text messages showing what a suspect knew about the crime at the time. We need to extract those messages and reproduce them in court. There might be a GPS device that contains a track or route or maybe some waypoints that the suspect put in when they were driving or flying from Point A to Point B. We have to obtain this information in a forensically sound manner and provide it to the investigating agent as quickly as possible. We take our job very seriously. What we find and report on can mean that someone goes to prison for a very long time, or that someone walks free. We want to make sure we're providing correct information so that the investigating agent and the courts are able to make the right decision. What's a typical day like for you? In our office, we are working on cases. If we have a cell phone, hard drive, or GPS device, we obtain data and analyze it. If it's a financial crime case, we'll be looking to see what financial data may be on a computer and how the suspect might have used that data to commit a crime. We put the pieces of the puzzle together to get the bigger picture of what happened and how that Jan/Feb 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2014

Big Picture
In My Own Words
Legal Discovery
Order in the Court
Think, Debate, Change the World
Voice of the Students
What Young Inventors Need to Know about Patents
A Practice and a Passion
The Science of Crime Detection
The Medical Examiner Is In
Selected Opportunities and Resources
Wild in the City
Off the Shelf
Word Wise
Exploring Career Options
One Step Ahead
Planning Ahead for College
Students Review
Creative Minds Imagine
Mark Your Calendar
Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - January/February 2014