Signed into law on April 1, 2021, Public Law 16 of Indiana’s 122nd General Assembly established the High-Tech Crime Unit (HTCU) fund with a directive that the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council (IPAC) create up to ten units “to assist prosecuting attorneys in investigating, collecting evidence, and prosecuting high tech crimes.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines digital forensics, which is the focus of high-tech crime work, as “the field of forensic science that is concerned with retrieving, storing and analyzing electronic data that can be useful in criminal investigations” to include “information from computers, hard drives, mobile phones[,] and other data storage devices.”
The hardware and software tools used in digital forensics are quite expensive, placing them out of reach of many local law enforcement agencies; similarly, the training for personnel conducting such investigations is time-consuming and requires a particularized set of skills. The model here creates geographically balanced and accessible units throughout the state. Further, the HTCU model supplements the Indiana State Police’s Digital Forensics Unit in the Laboratory Division; the two will grow together and ensure their mutually beneficial success.
After considering the proposals submitted by seventeen prosecuting attorneys, IPAC announced on November 8, 2021 the selection of ten hub offices covering the north, south, east, west, and central geographic areas of Indiana. Those ten offices then finalized their budgets and operational plans. Each unit is established within the prosecuting attorney’s office and uses the distributed moneys for personnel costs, training, technical assistance, and technical support. The fund was appropriated three million dollars for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, and the legislation allowed for IPAC to allocate no more than five percent of that amount to reimburse expenses incurred in administering the fund. Notably, each of the units formed relationships with their local university as a source of future personnel and active internship programs. The units formed up at various times in 2022. Some counties had pre-existing teams that simply needed to reorganize under the HTCU model; whereas, others started from scratch.
Over the course of 2022 and 2023, the State’s HTCUs handled 4,583 cases. Given the slow process involved in creating some units from scratch, the quarterly data reveal growth toward an average of 672 cases per quarter in 2023. However, because cases might involve a single device or many devices, a truer representation of the impact of the HTCUs is a study of the devices examined by the units. In total, the units examined 7,580 devices. These devices come in several forms: cell phones / smartphones; video (typically surveillance or closed-circuit) systems; search warrant responses from cloud service providers; traditional desktop or laptop computers; external storage devices, such as SD cards, USB drives, or external hard drives; other mobile devices, such as tab-lets and e-readers; extractions from online/cloud accounts; and vehicle infotainment systems. Most devices come to the units based upon the service of a search warrant, but over fifteen percent are turned over with consent to search. Further, during those two calendar years, the HTCUs sought preservation letters from digital service providers over 200 times, and HTCU personnel testified forty-nine times in court proceedings.
The two largest expense categories are unsurprising to anyone familiar with the field of digital forensics: analysis tools and personnel. The forensic analysis tools include those developed and offered by industry leaders such as Cellebrite, Magnet, GrayShift, CellHawk, Monolith, and Berla. The specialized software and equipment are necessary to extract data from the latest devices on the market and to prepare the data into for-mats readable by investigators, prosecutors, and defense counsel.
After accounting for jurisdictions that have long-standing digital-evidence units of their own (notably Marion and Vanderburgh), the ten units divide the state into roughly equivalent populations. The units are based in Lake, St. Joseph, Allen, Tippecanoe, Madison, Delaware, Vigo, Monroe, Dearborn/Ohio, and Knox Counties.