Policing pollution

As wind and rain pummel the water, a valve opens, sending oil through a line that is normally attached to a tanker. But there is no tanker present, so the oil belches into the water. The oil company at fault blames the weather. The Environmental Protection Agency investigates and concludes that the incident is an environmental crime.

"Our analysis showed that somebody was operating the computer [which controls the oil delivery process] and deliberately manipulated the system to open the valve, which caused the oil spill," says Earl Devaney, director of the EPA's Office of Criminal Enforcement, Forensics and Training (OCEFT) in Washington, D.C.

Because it's an open case, Devaney can't discuss details. But he does say that by following a trail of activity through the oil company's network, agents proved that a disgruntled employee - not the storm - caused the $3 million spill.

"The company could not imagine it had such an employee working for them," Devaney says. "In this case, our involvement cleared the company of criminal wrongdoing, but the company still had to pay the cleanup costs."

Environmental crime is the crime of the future, according to Gary Winston, assistant state attorney and head of the environmental crimes division of the Florida State Attorney's Office in Miami. And increasingly, environmental violations are being conducted over networks.

"Because valves and devices are controlled by computers, electronic forms of terrorism can now be directed at the environment," Devaney explains.

Oil spills are bad enough, but just about any hazardous material or toxin could potentially be leaked into the environment if the control device is linked to the network.

Along with the OCEFT's efforts, state police and prosecutors like Winston are getting tough on environmental crime. Last year, Winston's office processed more than 200 environmental crime cases - wetlands destruction, unlawful dredging of protected bays, illegal transport and dumping of hazardous materials, to name a few.

In many of those cases, networks were used to commit the crimes. In other cases, networks stored records used as evidence in criminal trials.

The federal government regulates hazardous waste primarily through the use of manifests, which log where hazardous waste is transported. Because most manifest records are kept in computers, the data makes for great evidence in criminal investigations, Winston says.

Devaney, who launched the computer crime training unit for the Secret Service's Office of Investigation in the 1980s, foresaw the coming of digitized crime against the environment. Now he's tackling the problem by developing the technical skills of the OCEFT's 200 armed enforcement agents.

"In today's world, people put most everything on computers. We need the forensics capability to go in and retrieve that information off the company's networks," Devaney says. His group shares its expertise with other law enforcement agencies that need help cracking complex environmental crime cases.

Last year, for example, Winston suspected an industrial facility of concealing the true amount of hazardous waste it produced. He couldn't find the evidence in electronic manifests, so he called in a forensics specialist from the OCEFT.

Instead of searching for outflow records, the agent told Winston to look for purchase orders and inventory logs - anything that would give him an idea of how many chemicals were being processed. Because each chemical results in a known amount of toxic waste, it wasn't hard to determine that the company was, indeed, falsifying its hazardous waste reports, Winston explains.

The OCEFT's training and forensics support lab is located in the EPA's Denver-based National Enforcement Investigations Center (NEIC), the technical and scientific expertise support laboratory for all of the EPA's civil and criminal investigations. The NEIC gained computer crime support capabilities in 1995 when Diana Love transferred from the technical unit of the EPA's air pollution prosecution district to manage the new functions.

According to Love, environmental regulations have been moving toward electronic monitoring and reporting - something she worries will open a new can of worms in terms of environmental reporting fraud.

When the opportunity to launch computer analysis support arose, she jumped at it. "I had been thinking about building a computer forensics team like this - high-level experts that could legally break into LANs and mainframes, retrieve deleted information and even reverse engineer the systems," she says. Her team also has high-level environmental knowledge.

Love's computer forensics team is analyzing software and hardware for 40 open environmental crime cases. True to her predictions, electronic filing of air pollution compliance is revealing new cases of fraud. Under the federally mandated automated reporting system, companies can electronically file their pollution emission reports to their designated EPA field offices.

According to Devaney, a handful of less-than-honest individuals are turning to black-market stealth programs that capture the readings from emission monitoring devices and doctor those readings to fit within compliance levels without the knowledge of network administrators. Then the rogue programs send the falsified reports to local or federal EPA regulatory offices.

Finding these programs is onerous work that often involves replicating the suspect network down to the minute detail. This means analyzing and rebuilding entire network segments. It can take four to six months just to produce a data set to analyze, Love says.

However, the EPA's efforts are paying off. Since 1991, the OCEFT has quadrupled its number of criminal investigators from 50 to 200. Fines against companies that commit environmental crimes rose to an average fine of $1.9 million in 1998. And some executives are doing jail time; the average sentence in 1998 was a little more than 15 months.

Winston attributes the rise in convictions and fines to Devaney's vision. "This should be a wake up call," Winston says. "There's an increasing trend to use criminal prosecution as another tool of enforcement."

Radcliff is a freelance writer in Northern California who specializes in reporting on high-tech crimes. She can be reached at DeRad@aol.com.