Website yobs - throwing a virtual brick

USING a social networking site to incite crime or disorder – the offence a Warrington man got four years for – is like throwing a brick through a shop window when a police officer is standing next to you.
That’s the view of Det Sgt Andy Dodd, who leads the Cheshire Police eForensics Department, which includes the Hi-Tech Crime Unit.
He said: “In both cases there will be repercussions. In the case of the message you are simply using a virtual brick!”
Monitoring social network sites is a rapidly growing area of his unit’s work.
Insp Dodd said: “The social networks have become part of everyday life. It would be ridiculous for police officers to ignore that fact. When there are messages and pictures which provide evidence for criminal investigations we have equipment and specially-trained officers to recover them.”
Detective Constables Peter Lee and Dan Parry were involved in recent successful investigations into cases of people using the social networks to incite rioting.
DC Lee said: “In this type of inquiry our first stage is the ‘live capture’ of any messages. In most cases we have usually had a call from a member of the public to say that something has appeared and they are concerned about it.
“Then we have to move quickly. We need to get an image of the message or picture before it disappears from the server. We can search an area of the social network using key words and see what is there.”
The next stage is the seizure of the computer which originated the message. Then the unit can begin what it terms the “dead box” investigation. This can take days, weeks or months.
The computer’s hard drive is put in a machine which produces a forensic-quality copy. All future work is done on the copy, with the original data kept exactly as it was.
DC Parry said: “A lot of the messages we are interested in have gone straight to the social network site server, but we can recover fragments, snippets, which have gone on to the hard drive of the computer. We can often build a very complete picture of what has been going on.”
Eighty per cent of the eForensic Department’s work is investigating child pornography where, again, the social network sites are becoming increasingly involved.
But people need not be worried that the police are carrying out a “Big Brother” operations. The police do not sit monitoring the web – their work is reactive.
They only go into social networking sites if a member of the public reports concern or if they are brought into a broader investigation already under way.
The recent conviction and sentencing of two men – one from Warrington – resulted from a rapid investigation by the Hi-tech Crime Unit.
Pictured: DC Peter Lee in the Hi-tech crime unit workshop and (right) DC Dan Parry with colleague Chris Hughes and the storage server which carries copies of material from seized computers.