Successful Use of Online Social Networking for Criminal Investigations

Advanced Course

Law Enforcement Training Solutions

There are over 300 known social networking sites on the Internet.  Myspace.com has over 185 million users and Facebook.com adds 20,000 new users each day.  Too often, investigators overlook or underutilize this valuable resource.  Social networking sites are virtual communities.  As in any large community criminal organizations, fraud, violent crime, and victimization exist.  Investigators need to understand these communities along with the tools, tricks, and techniques to prevent, track, and solve crimes.

This two day (16 hour) course is designed for police officers, detectives, and criminal analysts.  Students with any level of familiarity with the Internet and computers, from beginning to advanced, will find this course beneficial.

The program gives students more in depth information and practical experience than is provided in the BASIC Course.  Students will work with the instructor to identify social networking users living near the users’ area of responsibility.  On the second day, students will also have the opportunity to bring real cases to the course.  There will be time for hands-on practice preparing relevant legal process documents.  Students will practice tracking offenders and doing link analysis. 

By the end of the course, students will:

· Develop all of the skill sets from the BASIC course

· Explore how criminals, from child pornographers to extremist groups, use Internet Relay Chat, Usenet, and fserve to interact and exchange information.

· Learn how to obtain free open-source information on suspects and intelligence targets using the internet.

· Learn how to interpret e-mails headers, identify ownership of Web sites, and locate Internet Service Providers.

· Be able to present to parents and civic groups on protecting children from the dangers associated with online social networking.

· Understand the unique challenges and opportunities associated with specialty networking sites, such as those dedicated to photo sharing and dating.

· Learn about the implications of Viral Videos on law enforcement agencies.

· Be able to develop and maintain their own undercover social network identities.

· Have an understanding of emerging technologies, such as VIDoIP (Video over Internet Protocol), bluesnarfing and podslurping.

· Explore the “dark side” of the Internet and learn of countermeasures used by criminals to obstruct cyber investigations.

Students receive all of the course material from the one-day course, including legal process contact information, preservation letters, boilerplate compliance documents, and resource guides.  They will also receive additional resource material relevant to the expanded topic areas.  The course material is presented in a bound booklet and accompanied by a CD containing searchable electronic resources files.

NOTICE: Course contains graphic content including profanity, and sexual and violent images.

*Attendance in the BASIC Course is not a Prerequisite to attend the ADVANCED Course.

Instructor: Lieutenant Chuck Cohen