Crossroads Blog | CYBER SECURITY LAW AND POLICY

Cyber Exploitation, law enforcement

Justice Department trains prosecutors to combat cyber espionage: WashPo

This is now a few months old, but it’s worth repeating.  On July 25th, 2012, Sari Horwitz reported for The Washington Post on a new DOJ program to combat cyber espionage:

Under the reorganization, teams of specialized lawyers within NSD in Washington will work with other agencies, the military and companies facing cyber intrusions. They will develop protocols for the intelligence community and federal agents in how to deal with private companies that are victims of cyber attacks. The issues revolve around how to build possible prosecutions within guidelines covering information sharing, privacy and civil liberties.

Horwitz reported that this new program will be accompanied by “the ability to monitor computer screens in real-time as data is being stolen by foreign countries . . ..”

This sounds like a really interesting program, and one that has potential to stem our intellectual property losses.  However, I wonder how effective these prosecutions would actually be.  Most of that cyber-espionage comes from foreign nations.  We know the Chinese are behind most of this cyber-espionage, but that doesn’t change the fact that Chinese authorities would have to give up the evidence logs and be willing to prosecute their own hackers.

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