Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Announces New eCrime Unit Targeting Technology Crime - Part 2

>>ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA D. HARRIS: I want to now introduce Assemblywoman Nora Campos. She hails from this great District, and she's also the Chair of the Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media. Nora! >>ASSEMBLYMEMBER NORA CAMPOS: Well, first of all, I am pleased to welcome our State Attorney General Kamala Harris to the City of San Jose, which is the center of technology and innovation for our great State of California. Thank you so much for selecting our County to launch your new eCrime Unit. Every year, California loses millions of dollars because the intellectual capital of our State is being hijacked by criminal elements. The addition of the eCrime Unit to California will fight against technology crimes, send a clear message that we are not going to accept illegal activity in the State of California. This is the perception that technology crimes are victimless crimes. The reality is technology crimes affect all of us, from corporations to small businesses to consumers. Many have faced identity theft, e-mail fraud, as the Attorney General said, and many other violations of our privacy and security. She mentioned that this is affecting the entertainment industry as well as the high-tech industry. As Chair, I've had the opportunity to travel across the State of California and listen to vice presidents and CEO's regarding this issue: the millions of dollars that they are losing which trickle down to make sure that we are addressing this issue. Last year, I authorized AB 746, a bill that was signed into law by the Governor in July, that addresses a technology crime that we know affects our youth every day, and that is cyber bullying. My bill will ensure that if you post on a social network site that the Education Code will cover anti-bullying provisions and allow school officials to suspend students for violating the anti-bully, cyber bullying bill. No one would have thought that a post on a web site, written with bad intentions, could have such a powerful impact and could destroy lives. For this reason, the eCrime Unit around technology which is usually not regulated will be addressed in order to ensure that technology benefits will outweigh the negative impacts. These issues of technology crime are very important, and I am grateful to the Attorney General for making sure that this is a priority under her leadership. The State of California needs to address this because we are the capital of technology. That is why I stand and am pleased to be joining Attorney General Kamala Harris today in taking a strong stand and saying to the rest of California and the U.S. and the world that California will not accept this type of illegal activity here. Thank you, Attorney General, for including the City of San Jose as well as California, and putting us on the map as a model that will be addressing this. At this time, I'd like to introduce our District Attorney for Santa Clara County, Jeff Rosen. >>SANTA CLARA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY JEFF ROSEN: So, you should turn your cell phones off, because if one rings we're going to take it and download the information instantly and share it with everyone, and then upload it. [laughter] I'm very pleased to welcome California's Attorney General, Kamala Harris, to our county, the heart of Silicon Valley to announce the formation of the Attorney General's eCrime Unit. In fact, I cannot think of a more ideal place than right here, Silicon Valley, for the Attorney General to roll out her innovative, wide-reaching and important initiative to combat criminals who use sophisticated technology to steal identities, take intellectual property, hack into computer networks, commit Internet fraud, and sexually exploit children. As the importance of the Internet to our economy has grown, criminals have moved online to steal valuable information and goods from individuals and businesses. In the 21st century, law enforcement will increasingly combat online criminal activity. Attorney General Harris's eCrime Unit will provide much needed resources and expertise to thwart and prosecute online criminals who cause billions of dollars in damage to our economy each year. Over the years, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office has worked closely with the Attorney General's Office to investigate and prosecute high-technology and financial crimes. Under my administration and Attorney General Harris's administration, our cooperation has flourished. For instance, the REACT task force is a Bay Area high-technology and identity-theft investigation and prosecution task force, which is directed by my Office. Earlier this year, REACT solved a $37 million computer-chip takeover robbery, one of the largest of its kind. The robbery occurred at Unigen in Fremont. The computer chips had been manufactured by Intel in Santa Clara. They were being re-configured by Unigen in Fremont for the end-user Google, back in Mountain View. Over 98% of the stolen chips were ultimately recovered by REACT and eleven of the alleged robbers have been apprehended to date. Because of the multi-county, jurisdictional aspect of this investigation, that you have chips being made in one county, they're being re-configured in another county, and that some of these chips eventually left the country, a Deputy Attorney General on Attorney General Harris's staff -- and he's right here, Ralph Sivilla -- is prosecuting this case. It's currently being prosecuted in Alameda County, which is where Fremont is, with the support of REACT and the Santa Clara County D.A.'s Office. This is one example of many cases where our D.A.'s Office and the Attorney General's Office have worked together to bring dangerous, high-tech criminals to justice and safeguard intellectual property which is the economic engine of this region. As we all know, the Silicon Valley is on the cutting edge of technology, and as Silicon Valley prosecutors, I strongly believe that we must also be on the cutting edge of investigating and prosecuting technology-related and financial crimes to effectively serve our community and protect its economic well-being. To this end, I have dedicated 15 prosecutors in my Economics Crime Unit -- which includes high-tech, major fraud, real estate fraud, mortgage fraud, elder financial abuse, and insurance fraud -- to proactively pursue economic and high-tech criminals who prey upon our residents, businesses, and human capital. The Attorney General's announcement today promises more support in fighting electronic and economic crimes, and that is welcome news to all of us in Santa Clara County. I look forward to even better cooperation with the Attorney General and her new eCrime Unit. Together, we will continue to stay on the cutting edge of pursuing and punishing white collar criminals and protecting our community. Let us continue to go forward from strength to strength. It's my pleasure now to introduce Stuart McClure who is going to speak for a few moments. Stuart is the Worldwide Chief Technology Officer at McAfee. Prior to working at McAfee, he held positions as Executive Director of Security Services for Kaiser Permanente and served as the Senior Vice President of Global Threats and Research at McAfee Labs where he led an elite global security threats team, and was Founder and President and Chief Technology Officer of Foundstone. Mr. McClure is widely recognized for his extensive and in-depth knowledge of security and is one of the industry's leading authorities in information security. In fact, his first book, "Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets and Solutions," has been translated into more than 30 languages and is the definitive, best-selling computer security book. Maybe it will be featured as one of Oprah's books next year and will really pump up the sales. A well-publicized and acclaimed security visonary, Mr. McClure has more than 22 years of technology and executive leadership with profound technical, operational and financial expertise, and it's my pleasure to introduce him and have him speak to you for a few moments. >>STUART McCLURE: Alright! Welcome, everybody! Thank you for coming and thanks for the opportunity. I truly appreciate it. So, you know, today's announcement really is unique in many, many ways. I mean, I've been traveling this globe for a long time trying to espouse the limitations that we have on technology and the openings and the opportunities that hackers have. And it's been, quite frankly, it's been a challenge! A lot of people don't think it's ever going to affect them, and then when they do of course, the light bulb goes off and everybody wants to make change. Unfortunately, the big challenge that we've had in this industry has been, not so much tracking the bad guys -- tracking the bad guys is actually kind of the easy part -- it's actually bringing them to justice. It's going through countless, endless number of anonymized nodes to track who's really at the keyboard. And it's that kind of challenge, and also a jurisdictional challenge, that has limited our ability to really rein in the criminals. At any given point in time, we are tracking well over a million individual bad actors, bad web sites, that we quite frankly can't even keep a hold of. So, with what we're trying to do here with the eCU, I find it really inspirational and I'm hoping that the world is taking notice. A big part of what we see in the landscape for the next eight to nine years, by the end of this decade, we predict there should be about 50 billion individual devices out there connected, and so we're really connecting everybody to everything at this point in time, which really creates an opportunity for the bad guys that we have yet to see. That, combined with the fact that the anonymity of the Internet and the ability to obscure your source, it creates an opportunity here that is quite frankly daunting. And we've worked with global law enforcement for many, many years and have found it very painful, simply because it has required so many different people in so many different places to communicate and bring together one effort. So, for me, this is a first step in hopefully many more around the globe that will allow us to do this together. And with that said, the challenges that we've talked about many times in this space and in my books and in McAfee etc., you know we go a long way to try and protect individuals, but at the end of the day it's user behavior, and that we cannot control.