Customs debuts cybersmuggling center

The U.S. Customs Service on Monday opened a brand new facility to fight crime on the Internet.

The U.S. Customs CyberSmuggling Center is an outgrowth of Customs' child pornography investigations, said Customs spokeswoman Layne Lathram. During the investigations, Customs agents began to see evidence of other kinds of crimes committed on the Internet, such as money laundering, intellectual property theft and the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.

"People advertise Anthrax for sale on the Internet," Lathram said. "We even found nuclear trigger hammers."

Although the center is new, Customs has been investigating computer crimes for over a decade. The agency began investigating child pornography after the Child Protection Act of 1984 was passed.

In 1988, a measure was added that outlawed using computers to manufacture, transmit, distribute or store child pornography. In 1989, Customs opened its first computer-based crime investigation. Three years later, Customs launched its first investigation of child pornography on the Internet with Operation Long Arm, which ultimately targeted a child pornography bulletin board maintained in Denmark.

"The Internet de facto crosses a border," Lathram said. "The Internet effectively transmits across the border and Customs investigates…anything that has a border nexus-inbound and outbound."

The CyberSmuggling Center, located in Fairfax, Va., currently employs 38 people and is expected to soon grow to 50 employees. The center is divided into three groups. One focuses on child pornography investigations, another searches for cybersmuggling-type activities and the third focuses on computer forensics. Many computer criminals booby-trap their computers, Lathram said, and the computer forensics team's job is to preserve any original evidence while obtaining data from original hard drives.