Cyber Crime A Distant #3 Priority for FBI

An anonymous reader writes "A reading of the Justice Department's 2008 budget justification to Congress for the FBI indicates the agency is dedicating about 5.5 percent of its field agents to combating cyber crime, the FBI's stated Number Three priority, The Washington Post reports. Take away the agents dedicated to catching child predators online — a program that accounts for the vast majority of the department's prosecutorial victories — and about 3.6 percent of the FBI's agents are dedicated to cyber crime, the report notes. From the story: 'If the FBI's third most-important priority claims just over 3.5 percent of its active agents, how many agents and FBI resources are dedicated to the remaining Top Ten priorities?'"

Comments

It's not important yet...

[hobo sapiens]

It's not important yet...kind of like airport security before 911.

After China pwns all of the DoD's sensitive data, you can bet they'll pump all kinds of money at it.

Re:It's not important yet...

[SnoopJeDi]

You realize this is only talking about the FBI, right?

And that this doesn't take into consideration the cybercrime divisions of several other government agencies?

Right?

Re:It's not important yet...

[vishbar]

Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong angle? Perhaps they view cybercrime as a division that you don't necessarily just throw agents at. They may only have a specific number of agents with the specific training necessary to prosecute cybercrime cases.

I'm just saying that perhaps looking at simple agent ratios wouldn't necessarily be an accurate reflection of the amount of attention that cybercrime receives. The other jobs may be more man-power intensive, even though they may be lower down on the priority list.

Lobbyists

[Bonker]

Everyone knows that the FBI's most important priority, and the largest percentage of their manpower is devoted to lobbying congress for more power.

Espionage?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Only on its own citizens.

Only on Slashdot

[the_skywise]

Will you see support of websites like thepiratesbay.org and disdain for the RIAA and MPAA and complaints that the government is trying to monitor internet traffic and watch what we're doing and then turn around and complain that the FBI isn't taking cybercrime seriously...

No prizes for guessing what the top priority is

[clarkkent09]

I'm sure #1 is taking up about 90% of the agents or thereabouts (no it doesn't say so in the document, far too long and too pdf for me to read or even search through the whole thing). Because terrorist attacks are soooooo much more scary than the other 9. I think we should bump it up to 100% and just forget about every other problem except for those darn terrorists.

Priority 1 - Protect the United States from terrorist attack
Priority 2 - Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and
espionage
Priority 3 - Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and hightechnology
crimes
Priority 4 - Combat public corruption at all levels
Priority 5 - Protect civil rights;
Priority 6 - Combat transnational and national criminal organizations and enterprises
Priority 7 - Combat major white-collar crime
Priority 8 - Combat significant violent crime
Priority 9 - Support federal, state, local and international partners
Priority 10 - Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission

Re:No prizes for guessing what the top priority is

[shanen]

Is that list a bad joke? Maybe it's somehow a second-hand Gonzo joke? The American legal system is really that twisted up after a few years of neo-GOP misrule?

Actually, I suspect that it's distorted by misclassifications, which seems to be the norm of all government statistics these days. Most obviously, a lot of the computer-related crime probably gets refiled under higher priority categories. If a stock pump-and-dump scam is being run by Pakistani-based scammers, and there is any reason to suspect that they might be routing some of the ill-gotten gains into funding terrorists, then that investigation and any associated agents are presumably refiled under priority #1.

With regards to the comments about pushing problems onto ISPs, that hasn't worked yet, and no reason to expect it to. They are making money the way things are. As long as they can pass their spam-related costs back to their customers, they don't really care. The backbone people are actually in an even better position to do something--and they care even less about who pays for the packets. The more packets the better, as long as they get paid, and they probably include spam in their business plans these days.

My own belief is we need to move the costs downstream, as close to the spammers as possible, and thereby reduce the overall costs on the entire system. If an ISP doesn't do it, the backbone should cut them off and all the other ISPs should get together and go after that ISP's customers. If a webhost helps the spammers and refuses to nuke their spamvertised websites, the DNS people should cut them off, or even better, route their DNS requests for illegal services to police websites. That will give the wannabe customers something to think about. It just seems incredible to me that so much highly visible and clearly illegal activity continues to flourish.

Nice try

[Nursie]

But there's more to cybercrime than copyright infringement.

Cracking/theft of secure data
DDoS attacks
Spam and the associated botnets
Viruses

All of which come far higher on the evil list than copying music and movies. IMHO.

And the RIAA/MPAA hate is well documented on many sites and not unreasonable. So far the pirate bay has proven to be within the law in the place it is based and so is not related to crime at all.

Re:Whaaaa?

[The One and Only]

Everyone who's studied this research seriously knows that the proper protocol is to randomize the order.

Re:the logical answer

[Anonymous Coward]

... except that there are priorities other then the top 10. What about numbers 11-100? Perhaps the FBI is spreading out its resources to cover, I don't know... all the crime?

No, the only conclusion you can draw is that the top two uses of manpower for the FBI (anti-terrorism and counter-intelligence, according to TFA) each use at least 3.6% of resources. And I kinda hope it isn't more then 10-20 or so for each.

Yup

[planetheidi]

From what I've seen on the front lines, the Bureau has definitely been cutting back significantly on anything except intelligence gathering. Of course, fighting cybercrime was always challenging for them - I mean, go figure, most cybercrooks are International or very well proxied. Most of the time, the FBI just weeded out the terminally stupid. So honestly, it's not going to make too big of a deal in the short run.

is it just me...

[christopherjrider]

or is this just plain silly.

Assuming for the moment that the top 10 are fairly evenly staffed, that's about 55%, give or take. That leaves about 45% for everything else.

Seems roughly right to me. There are far more than 10 "big problems" in our good ol' US of A.

And how is this a problem???

[rwyoder]

With the level of incompetence of law enforcement agencies with respect to anything technical, why on earth would you want cybercrime at a high priority??? The less time they spend on it, the less damage they can do.