Talinz and Crime 2: Support (Part 2)

Specialist Cybercrime Attachments

Within more well equipped countries, Specialist Cybercrime Attachments (SCAs) are the norm. These are individuals that generally reside within national hubs of police departments and are then assigned out to work as attachments to investigations with extensive technological elements. Within the national departments, individuals might have their own specialisations. Though all are experts in computer science; that alone is such a wide and varied field that one operative is incapable of being suited to all tasks. An SCA worker might be a specialist in cryptography, Talinz programming, electronic warfare, or another related discipline.

The addition of an SCA operative to an investigation is often a source of friction to a working police department. The new operative is often unacquainted with the particular department’s work culture, and frequently these individuals are stereotyped as being unwilling to learn, especially owing to their very temporary residence in each department. In addition, high-profile cybercrime cases have a tendency of granting media overexposure to the specialist operative, leading to ire from some investigators who may do much of the case’s actual legwork.

Nevertheless, these individuals are often invaluable assets to the case at hand. While some cases may merely require the aid of an SCA operative agent remotely from the assigned department, often in longer term or white collar cases, all SCA operatives are given extensive training in order to be capable of being dropped into the field with a firearm response team if the deactivation and extraction of data from Talinz units, rapid data recovery, or entering a protected computer network locally is required. Despite this, it should be noted that in countries which restrict firearms to specialist firearms squads, SCA operatives are not likely to be equipped with any weaponry.

Before an insertion, most SCA operatives are likely to prepare software for the raid. Much of this is bespoke, written using what is known about the target system, exploiting backdoors that are likely to be specific to it. Whilst minor modifications may have to be made in the moment, the actual act of hacking together a useful security program can take hours or even days, and so is almost never done on the spot. When trying to break through a system’s security protocols, these operatives often have their hands full. The squads assigned to work with them sometimes consider these individuals to be ‘dead-weights’, as although they extract necessary data and perform a valuable service, they also do little to support the team in a live-fire situation, with the exception of putting others in danger.

The Mad Hatter Program

Recently, a number of governments have joined an international initiative known as the Mad Hatter Program. Countries without enough Specialist Cybercrime Attachments are loaned individuals convicted of cybercrime offenses, services they provide in exchange for a decrease in their custodial sentence. Typically, this is a decrease of six months for every ten the individual was sentenced, per assignment they perform for the program.

Whilst taking part, individuals are under constant supervision, and are forced to wear a collar that prevents unauthorised interaction with electrical items within a small radius of the wearer. Such a device records the GPS coordinates of the individual, allowing the police to quickly locate and detain a potential escapee. Escapes are rare, though a member of the program having their collar deactivated by an accomplice, and using this as an opportunity to disappear, is not unknown. Well performing members of the program are often offered jobs with their home country’s SCA after they serve their sentence, and when compared to the heavily extended sentences levied against those that escape the program if they are caught, cooperation is heavily incentivised.

Members of the program are generally treated with suspicion and disdain by members of the police force they are pushed towards interacting with, though most members of the program are minor offenders who are likely to be released after the completion of only a few operations. Members of the program tend to be assigned to less dangerous missions than members of the SCA, as this decreases the chances of a betrayal and escape ending badly for the supporting firearms squad. This, if anything, increases the disdain these individuals receive from enforcement authorities, as they are frequently seen as taking the ‘easy’ tasks – when really they are just taking the less lethal. Some countries choose to invert this methodology, instead arguing that such individuals are more ‘expendable’ than their highly trained operatives. This practise is considered distasteful by many of the participant countries in the Mad Hatter program.