California may be home to countless high-tech giants but it’s also a hotbed for cybercrime. In fact, the Golden State received the highest total number of cybercrime complaints in 2011 – a whopping 34,169, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
With illegal activities ranging from identity theft to phishing scams, cracking down is no easy task. But California’s Attorney General Kamala D. Harris is starting to make a dent with some innovative approaches that include teaming up with industry behemoths and forming a brain trust of cybercrime gumshoes.
The eCrime Unit marks one of Attorney General Harris’ first cybercrime-fighting initiatives since being elected in 2010. Staffed with 20 attorneys and investigators, the group is responsible for identifying and prosecuting crimes including identity theft, online fraud, child exploitation and intellectual property charges. Because many of these crimes are multi-jurisdictional, the eCrime Unit can prosecute on a statewide level and across jurisdictions – a boon for California prosecutors who, up until this point, faced the enormous challenge of prosecuting multi-jurisdictional cybercrimes at a local level.
Attorney General Kamala Harris Photo courtesy of California Attorney General’s Office
"The Attorney General recognized that high-tech crime is no longer an emerging threat; it is a serious threat to the state, to consumers across California and that it required a dedicated unit of investigators who were trained in the technology, could keep up with the technology and actually investigate and prosecute these multi-jurisdictional crimes," says Travis LeBlanc, special assistant Attorney General for Technology for California.
Another one of Attorney General Harris’ crime-fighting feats: getting tech giants to agree on something. In February, industry behemoths Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research In Motion agreed to a California law that requires mobile apps sold in their digital app stores and running on their mobile operating platforms to have clear privacy policies. Rather than reach out to hundreds of thousands of app developers across the globe, LeBlanc says the Attorney General spent six months convening with "certain gatekeepers who had a fundamental role in the app economy." More than simply a step towards greater privacy protection, LeBlanc says the agreement heralds "a shift in the way that government works with industry where they are collaborating more than they ever have before."
Also protecting the privacy of consumers is the Attorney General’s newly formed Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit in the Department of Justice. The group’s mandate is broad and includes regulating the collection, disclosure and destruction of private or sensitive information including health and financial records. Joanne McNabb, formerly of the California Office of Privacy Protection, serves as the Director of Privacy Education and Policy, and oversees the Privacy Unit’s education and outreach efforts. Previously a part-time, two-person job, LeBlanc says Californians can now expect a "team of six prosecutors to work pretty much full time on investigating and prosecuting civil violations of federal and state privacy laws."
This article originally appeared in Techwire Magazine mailed to subscribers in September.
