Law Enforcement Challenges

Law Enforcement Challenges
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Law enforcement officers face several hurdles when investigating exploitation, cyber stalking, and obscenity but Chief among these hurdles is identification, collection, transportation and preservation of digital evidence. Cybercrime is conducted using the internet and other gadgets that can access the internet and most of the data that can be used as evidence are digital. A computer might be located, but there is no way it may physically appear to suggest being employed in the commission of a crime, digital evidence in the computer must be accessed.
Digital evidence might be stored in the cloud or the hard drives of a computer, smartphones or any other device that can store data. The government does not have the discretion to spy on each and every one; they may have the resources, but a search warrant has to be obtained to enter the house of a suspect or to allow for installation of tracking software and gadgets in the house of the suspect. However, the law is very strict on the issuance of search warrants; the investigating officer must prove that the suspect is engaged in the commission of cybercrimes (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014). If the investigating officer is successful to go past the justice department to get a search warrant, the suspect may choose to destroy evidence or encrypt the evidence. Damaged data may be recovered or not, it all depends on the level of destruction done by the suspect (Girard, 2013).

At times, criminals encrypt data hence investigating officers cannot access data contained in such devices not unless they have decrypting key (Girard, 2013). When investigating officers are faced with deleted data and encrypted data, the investigation may have come to a dead end if data deleted cannot be recovered and that encrypted cannot be decrypted.
Many cyber criminals are good at erasing their tracks as most of the crimes are commissioned on the dark web and not the normal internet that can be accessed by regular computer browsers (Siegel & Worrall, 2014). The Tor network that is used to access the deep web was developed by the FBI to communicate sensitive information across agencies, but it leaked to the public and criminals are proving untouchable (Girard, 2013). Dark web activities are complex to track and this has proven to be a nightmare for enforcement agents tasked with cybercrime (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014). Investigating officers may have access to the deep web and even get in contact with the criminals but fail to capture the criminal due to the impossibility of obtaining linking evidence.
Crimes committed on the internet prove difficult to assign to an individual jurisdiction. Traditional crimes involve the physical presence of the offender on the ground hence prosecution becomes easy. A crime can be committed in the west coast of the USA from the East Coast via the internet (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014). In such circumstances, it becomes cumbersome in determining the law that should apply to the crime if it should be the law where the offender or where the crime has been occasioned. At times what is legal in one state may be illegal in the other state.
Apart from geographical jurisdiction, there is the another issue of who among the various law enforcement agencies should handle a cyber crime. Traditionally there are federal crimes and state crimes (Siegel & Worrall, 2014). Cybercrime leaves the agencies guessing on whom should swing to action when a crime is reported since state agencies have at times ignored prosecuting offenders citing that they belong to the federal agencies. There are federal laws that outline what comprises cybercrime, but at times such laws may be part of state laws hence clash of jurisdiction. When the crime is committed within states in the USA, such actions are subject to state and federal laws, but when it engages another county, it would demand to invoke of private international law (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014).
Dealing with the hurdles hindering successful prosecution of cyber crimes calls for the working together of software providers and law enforcement agencies (Girard, 2013). In the case where criminals encrypt data and avoid giving the decrypting key, the company that developed the software should be in a position to help with decoding the data (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014). On matters of jurisdiction, one law should be legislated to govern the whole of the USA. For predictability, the USA should signup to international conventions that govern cybercrimes. An existence of cybercrime prevention conventions would allow for uniform prosecution of crimes across countries and the states of the USA.
Cybercrime has no defined boundaries within which a crime is committed (Girard, 2013). Law enforcement agencies should be allowed to work together within states if the offense is commissioned along states. The complications that already exist make the prosecution of crimes difficult as states tend to maintain their independence (Girard, 2013). Wars between government agencies and states in the USA leave the many crimes unprosecuted; working together of agencies and states would help bring many offenders to book (Siegel & Worrall, 2014).
Fight against cyber crime is a war that is only beginning to pick shape. The collection of digital evidence to aid in the prosecution of criminals is ever becoming challenging given the advanced levels of technology at the disposal of criminals. The deep web, deletion of data, encryption of data, and clash of jurisdiction among other issues have proved to be a nightmare in the quest of a cybercrime prevention officer.

References
Girard, J. E. (2013). Criminalistics: Forensic science, crime, and terrorism. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Siegel, L. J., & Worrall, J. L. (2014). Essentials of criminal justice. Cengage Learning.
Taylor, R. W., Fritsch, E. J., & Liederbach, J. (2014). Digital crime and digital terrorism. Prentice Hall Press.