Busted.com

The guy thought he could get away with it, buying software or downloading it from the Internet and then selling it to other people as if he owned it himself. This guy sold about a million dollars worth of pirated software online. Then, he sold some to undercover police officers. Oops. The police caught the criminal, then Susheel “Sush” Gupta and the Canadian Department of Justice came on the scene.
It reads like a Nancy Drew novel: crime spanning international borders, government police working together around the world and using technology to track criminals down to their desks.
This is the career of Gupta, who is a federal prosecutor specializing in computer-based crimes for the Canadian Department of Justice. Previously, criminals of computer-based crimes were fined for their activities. But Gupta, 28, and a colleague helped to raise the bar on sentencing for computer crimes. That software pirate who sold to undercover cops got jail time instead of just a fine.
With the relative newness of the Internet, the Net’s legal issues are still being discovered and explored. Because there are few techie-trained prosecutors, Gupta spends much of his time training other prosecutors, police and private-sector people in the ways of cyber criminals.
Gupta’s investigation history includes hunting for hackers, securing search warrants for electronic equipment, digging for electronic evidence and stopping cyber stalkers. He is also helping Canada and other countries develop new laws, and adapt existing ones, to cyberspace. Laws such as whose rules apply to crimes committed online. Consider this:
You spot a stylin’ shirt from an online store based in Miami Beach, Fla., while surfing from your home in Blackstock. You enter your credit card number and begin dreaming of where you’ll wear your new red suede number. Three weeks later and still no shirt, you call the company and learn that it was all a scam. The site had no shirts to be sold, just credit card numbers to pilfer. Whose laws apply in this crime? Will the Canadian police get involved, or will officials in the States be on the case? What about the laws of the city in which the crime was committed? Internet crime pays no attention to international boundaries. That’s where Gupta’s team enters. They decide how to prosecute crimes committed online, which jurisdiction’s laws should be used and how to gather electronic evidence. “In the cyber world, it’s much easier to commit a crime in multiple jurisdictions at the same time,” Gupta says. “I send an e-mail to you that’s threatening, it travels from one province to another and one state to the next before it gets to you.” That can make collecting evidence difficult. “We don’t have the right to go to a different country to collect evidence,” he explains. “We have to ask them to find it and give it to us.” Within a year, Gupta hopes new legal provisions concerning online crime will be put in place. Even in the high-tech crime world, basic investigation skills are still a hot commodity. “A fraud is still a fraud, whether it’s done in person or over the phone or at a used-car dealership or over the Internet,” he says. “But the impact it could have is new.” Some people, Gupta says, believe officers constantly police the Internet, watching from afar the activity of the Web. Not true, Gupta says. His job begins only after police bring charges against someone. A crime has to be committed and brought to the Justice Department before Gupta can get to work. When a case does come his way, Gupta helps officers trace criminal activity from the Web site to the very desk from which the crime was committed. “Every time we get on the Internet, we can leave digital footprints where we’ve been,” Gupta says. “Traditionally when officers are doing interviews with people, they’re gathering hard evidence. Now they can look for those digital footprints.” Many criminals don’t understand that these footprints exist, Gupta says. But that’s how the Internet is built—with logs here and there to keep track of who has been where and when. But like all electronic technology, you hit the “delete” key and the information can be lost forever. Most of the Internet-based crime Gupta sees is fraud—60 to 70 percent of cases, he says. That includes auction sites where people pay for an item they never receive, or situations such as that suede-shirt scam.
Before tracking electronic evidence, Gupta studied history at the University of Waterloo. He earned a law degree from the University of Ottawa and developed his cybercrime expertise while interning at the Justice Department. He is now based at the Department of Justice in Ottawa.
A day at the Department involves answering calls from police officers looking for advice, “attending a lot of boring meetings” and helping to develop laws and materials to educate police and lawyers about the cyber world’s legal issues. Currently, he is also collaborating with the FBI’s white-collar crime centre to develop training materials. Gupta’s job will not be finished anytime soon. Cars have computers in them, palm pilots do and cell phones do, too. “It’s really exciting,” Gupta says. “A lot of this stuff is new, and there’s not a lot of people who have ever dealt with these situations.” The stats:
Hours: averages 10-hour days, five days a week
Education: undergraduate degree, 3-year law degree Special considerations: Be prepared to travel!
Salary: average $50,000 (junior lawyers???)

How does that work? When we’re on the Internet, our computers leave behind digital footprints—calling cards of the places we’ve been. Software tools and hardware allow federal prosecutors to access e-mails after they’ve been deleted, Web sites and chat rooms after they’ve been visited. “Delete doesn’t always mean delete,” Gupta says. That’s because when you delete an e-mail or file, you’re not really deleting anything. Instead, your telling the computer that it’s OK to store something else in the other file’s place. How long that deleted file stays in the computer’s memory depends on how often the server gets erased.
Digital footprints can help law enforcers gather evidence. “Anything they may have done may be, if they get to it quick enough, retrievable,” Gupta says in the case of computer-using criminals. “When you visit a Web site, your computer has an IP address,” he explains. “It tracks the computer addresses of all who looked at the Web sites. You can track visitors, where they’re looking from, etc. We’re able to do the same thing in law enforcement.”

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