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The locals are catching on

The FBI and Secret Service are well trained in dealing with cybercrimes, particularly identity theft and child pornography, but there's clearly not enough of them to go around when one considers the caseload.

So it was good news to read this week that the Florida Attorney General's Cybercrime Unit is expanding by nearly 10 times its current size.

And on a much more local level, the town council in Cary, N.C. approved spending $225,000 to build a new cybercrime unit. According to a report by the local ABC news affiliate, the town required the state's assistance in a recent child porn case - now they won't need that anymore.

The state of Florida is one thing, but Clay, N.C.? Shows how far we've come.

But that's exactly the goal of the National Computer Forensic Institute, which was launched a couple months ago. The Hoover, Ala. training center was set up by the Alabama District Attorney's Association in conjunction with the federal Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Secret Service.

The thrust, according to the D.A. association's Executive Director Randy Hillman, is to educate the local police, judges and prosecutors who are finding themselves involved in more and more of these cases every day.

Quite frankly, many of them are clueless. Murder investigation, no problem...computer hack, huh?

But it appears the local jurisdictions are catching on to the need to train their personnel, if for no other reason than they're tired of waiting a year for a computer forensics exam to be completed by the state or feds.

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