• A keyboard is the computer criminal's weapon of choiceschwarze tastatur image by Peer Frings from Fotolia.com
  
  When it comes to computer crime, it seems that, so far, law enforcement is constantly behind the eight ball in prosecuting these crimes. With the development of technology and information systems surging forward year after year, congressional legislation to handle new and unusual methods of cyber-attack have lagged hopelessly behind, leaving few laws with real teeth for law enforcement to work with when tasked with reducing computer crimes.
  
  

Victim Cooperation or Ignorance

• A major problem with fighting computer crime is that only a small percentage of cases are ever reported to law enforcement. If there is no knowledge a crime took place, obviously, prosecution can't go forward, and the criminal is emboldened. Consider this: if the victim is a bank and a hacker has penetrated its security and accessed private customer financial information, reluctance to broadcast that breach to anyone is understandable. Alternatively, in many cases, especially dealing with large corporations, the crime might go undetected at all. Or maybe it only comes to light years later, when all evidence is gone and prosecution would be pointless.
  
  

Training

• Even as law enforcement agencies at all levels are beginning to realize the scope of computer crime, departments find themselves woefully understaffed when it comes to competent technicians who can follow and analyze the digital traces of a computer criminal. When budgets are limited and real blood is flowing in the streets, management might be disinclined to spend money on a "phantom" crime.
  
  

Jurisdiction

• Even if law enforcement had qualified cyber-detectives on every staff, the age old problem of jurisdiction rears it's ugly head. Often a computer crime crosses state and even international boundaries. Agencies are famously reluctant to barge into another agency's area of control, thus leaving the high-tech criminal with more freedom to operate than a traditional criminal.
  
  

Evolution of Law

• On the federal level, the debate continues about how the central government should regulate and punish computer crime, or even if it should. By focusing on the specific theft of money or information and the prerequisite mindset behind a willful act, states have made more progress when it comes to creating specific laws and punishment for breaking them. By creating the real world analogy that theft is theft no matter the form it takes, a baseline for prosecuting computer crime has been established, though many of the other issues remain.