Pentagon's Real Life 24

"If there is a real-life version of the kind of technical wizardry that appears in... CSI and 24," DANGER ROOM pal Siobhan Gorman writes, "it's probably found in a squat, 1980s-era office park halfway between Washington and
Baltimore, [where] 200 digital detectives [from the Defense Department's Cyber Crime Center] are scouring the hard drives, MP3 players and compact discs seized from terrorist hide-outs in search of links and clues to their next plans of attack."

Wired profiled the Center (otherwise known as "DC3") a few months back -- looking at its relationship with the hacker scene. Siobhan's story gets more into the guts of the DC3's counterterror work.

The Pentagon launched the Cyber Crime Center in 1998 to lend a high-tech hand to its criminal and counterespionage investigations, but the center has come into its own only in recent years...

The center's workload -- the volume of data it processes -- has doubled in the past year and is more than 10 times larger than it was in 2001, as the digital information explosion meets the government's post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism push.

In 2006, it processed 159 terabytes of information -- one terabyte would fill more than 8,000 file cabinets -- and it expects 40 percent more this year. At any one time, the center is evaluating 2,500 pieces of digital media...

**

Letters from Osama bin Laden, transcripts of chat sessions with a Sept. 11 hijacker, biographical information and photographs of the hijackers, and records of pilot license fees for lead Sept. 11 operative Mohamed Atta were among the pieces of evidence... [used] at a recent status review hearing in Guantanamo Bay for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks...

A February 2005 military raid in Iraq yielded the laptop of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Information on that computer reportedly helped U.S. officials track down and capture his top associates.

When Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike a year later, soldiers uncovered additional computers, memory sticks and MP3 players that military officials heralded as an intelligence coup. Four hundred and fifty raids followed shortly thereafter.

Looks like this won't be the last we hear of DC3, either. The Center is about to launch a new challenge to the digital forensics community "to pioneer new investigative tools, techniques and methodologies." Stuff like:

* BitLocker Breaker

* TPM Trickery

* Damaged Media Recovery

* Real vs. Fake Image Analysis

* SAM Attack

* Sizzling Thumb Drive

* Steganography Tracks

* Password Cracking

* Hack That

* and more...

Bring it on.