CBI Weaves an IT Web

The CBI, the country's nodal investigative agency, is these days busy
working on the nitty-gritty of the stamp paper scam, which seems to have taken
the entire headquarters over by storm. Be it the voice spectrogram division or
the cyber crime unit, the document forgery department or the computer forensics
division, everyone at the institution seems to be working on some dimension of
this fraud, which is a Chinese-box of sorts, with one single case having lead to
the unearthing of newer, related leads.

When you want to be on top, being tech-savvy helps. The CBI's
computerization drive, initiated in 1997 and undergoing constant upgradation,
has furthered its commitment to the use of cutting-edge technology to help the
task-force in everything from cracking codes, to assessing the authenticity of
crime scene evidence, to fingerprint and voice identification, to understanding
the chemical compositions of suspect material.

In the Watch Tower

The command center, up on the sixth floor, is a sort of eyrie, and a very
state-of the-art one at that. The rest of the CBI building is like any other
government office, unobtrusively dingy; the command center, on the other hand,
is a swank, high-tech enclave, with the motto of "Fighting hi-tech crimes
with modern policing". Currently working on the various system modules and
coordinating with the Network Monitoring Center and the cyber-forensic unit, the
command center also stays close contact with the Cyber Crime Investigation cell
(CCIC), started in 2000, which is recognized as the international contact point
for tackling cyber-crimes in India.

Dr SR Singh, director, central Forensic Scientific Laboratory, says that the
cyber forensic unit, with its trained manpower, is ideally placed to deliver
expert opinion in the courts of law. IT is today being extensively used not only
by the cyber forensic department, but also most of the other forensic
departments, from ballistics to the photography division.

In these days of newer and newer genres of technology-aided crime, from fake
currency to stamp paper frauds, from the theft of personal information over the
internet, to illegal telephone exchanges and e-commerce frauds, smart criminals
have a match in the CBI. Any number ever dialed on a cell, anything ever typed
on the computer and any password given can be retrieved. That's technology for
you, and the CBI has it...

Witnesses May Lie, Computers Don't

In March 2004, a spurious-drugs manufacturer was held, and a PC was seized
from his premises. In the first round of search upon the PC, no evidence of much
purport was found. In came investigating officers from the computer/cyber
forensics division, itself part of the Central Forensics Science Laboratory and
housed in the Command Center, whose raison-de-etre as it were, is the analysis
of digital evidence of precisely this kind. And sure enough, they found an
encrypted folder containing images of medicine wrappers, which had been scanned
and used for printing forged ones.

In another recent case, the head of the examinations department, AIIMS,
received an e-mail, apparently from the CBI. According to this communication,
the CBI was privy to information that some corrupt officials at AIIMS had leaked
the question papers for the post-graduate entrance examination. Further, it
requested the official to send a copy of the original question paper for
purposes of comparison. The official however, duly cross-checked with the CBI,
and as it turned out, the email was a fake, and had not originated from the CBI's
e-mail server. The CBI registered a case, and subsequently traced the physical
location of the computer from which the mail originated-a cyber café in a
small north Indian town. The computer, when seized and forensically analyzed,
was found to have been formatted. But the CBI sleuths retrieved an image of the
e-mail, with its time and date of creation upon that machine. Unfortunately, the
accused could not be traced since the cyber café didn't have any log of users
who had been visiting it. The investigation is still on.

In the investigation of these cases and a number of others, like the Purulia
arms dropping case, Haren Pandya murder case, and a host of other cases
involving organized criminals, extensive use of computer forensics was necessary
in order to break passwords, retrieve deleted files, trace e-mails and retrieve
crucial e-mails from the swap files, all of which yield valuable digital
evidence.

The Tools of the Trade

The CBI computerisation project aims to bring investigation, prosecution and
administration under the ambit of eGovernance. Its objectives are the provision
of accurate and timely information, prompt reconciliation, elimination of
redundant activities, sharing of data across the branches, ease in report
generation, prevention of unauthorized data access, and better monitoring of the
investigation and prosecution process. The project consists of three
applications:

• CRIMES (Crime Registration Investigation Monitoring Enquiry System) which
  takes care of cases at every stage viz. registration, investigation, and
  prosecution
• ADMINS (Administrations) which contains the following subsystems: PIS
  (Personnel Information  System), payroll, provident fund and advances,
  budget monitoring system, vehicle, equipment and dead stock system and the
  CBI benevolent fund.
• CIST (Crime Investigation Support Tools) which was developed for the
  purpose of optimizing time spent on and enhancing the quality of
  investigations undertaken.

While You were Blinking Your Eyes

As far as IT expansion and upgradation are concerned, in the coming years,
CBI will try to create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with high security to
enable faster and secure communication. It is in the process of establishing a
Strategic Communication Center connecting different departments/organizations,
and with links to different police headquarters, and also expand its existing
WAN.

Security is a feature which just can't be emphasized enough, especially
when it comes to the security of the CBI's premises. Identification cards with
biometrics are also on the anvil, which will control access by analyzing thumb
impressions, face and cornea impressions, body temperature, aiming at
secure-proofing not only the buildings in the various branches, but also the
various departments on different floors. All this does sound like something out
of a Hollywood movie, but when it comes to implementation, the primary criteria
will always be the cost and allocation of government funding.

With the CBI fighting technology with technology, Telgi and his ilk are
surely going to have a tough time staying out of this dragnet.

Jasmine Kaur in New
Delhi (For the full story, log on to www.dqinida.com)

Big Brothers, Bigger Brother-FBI

After the 9/11 attacks the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself initiated a
program to have all international agencies work in tandem, and in this regard,
an Indian team led by DIG Behera visited the FBI command center, Florida, in
June 2004. But the network intrusion detection mechanism already put in place by
the FBI in the USA is yet to be installed in India.

The other yawning lacuna is the absence of effective communication and
cooperation between the various communities. The FBI for instance has envisioned
a sort of consortium of associate corporates, the student community, professors
(the Carnegie University and Department of Defense) and other stake holders to
help it-rather like our very own Bhagidari system on a different plane. CBI is
getting into the cooperation game through an initiative, along with Nasscom, for
associating with members of the IT fraternity.