The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction

FY 2011. The primary forensics responsibilities of an RCFL are to conduct a comprehensiveexamination of digital evidence, provide a complete and timely report to the contributor, providetestimony as needed, and to generally act as a regional focal point for digital evidence issues.RCFL Examiners can extract information from a computer system and/or digital media, and canrecover deleted, encrypted, or damaged files. Any or all of this information may be useful duringdiscovery, depositions, or litigation. Over 130 different state and local agencies participate inand have personnel assigned to a RCFL.The RCFL Program has supported a substantial number of investigations over the last severalyears. For example, from FY 2007 to FY 2009 the RCFL Program achieved a 60% increase inthe total number of examinations completed for investigations relating to crimes against children– increasing from 1,386 to 2,194. The RCFL Program is also far reaching in that it hasconducted examinations for over 650 separate state and local law enforcement agencies.Resources from the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund (AFF) have enabled theRCFL Program to fight the backlog of forensic service requests at the RCFLs by providingovertime reimbursement to sworn law enforcement staff detailed to RCFLs. In the NationalAcademy of Sciences (NAS) report, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: APath Forward” (page 1-4), backlog statistics from the 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)census report are cited. Specifically, the NAS report states that:“… in a typical publicly funded crime laboratory ended the year with a backlog of about401 requests for services, received another 4,328 such requests, and completed 3,980 ofthem. The average backlog has risen since the 2002 census, with nearly 20 percent of allrequests backlogged by year end.”In comparison to the trend at general (i.e., non-computer-forensic) crime laboratories, the RCFLProgram has steadily reduced the overall backlog in digital forensic exams at RCFLs over thelast 3 years. As a result, RCFL statistics show a drop of 36% from FY 2007 – FY 2009. In FY2009 the total number of service requests for FY 2009 was 5,616. The total number ofbacklogged cases at the end of that year was 506 - resulting in a backlog of just 9% of all casesreceived.Despite the sustained efforts from both the CART and RCFL Programs, FBI studies indicate thatthere have not been enough trained, certified, annually proficiency tested, peer-reviewed,monitored digital evidence forensic examiners or laboratories to meet the growing demand forforensic analysis. With more than five thousand independent state/ local law enforcementagencies in the United States, 16 RCFLs and dozens of ICAC task forces with non-laboratory“forensic capacity” to help address the growing volume of data and requests associated withchild exploitation investigations, there is still a need for additional resources to handle theforensic processing and analysis of digital evidence. To this end, the FBI has been exploring andutilizing a number of strategies to increase the number of trained, digital evidence forensicexaminers both for its own investigations and for the RCFLs.The FBI believes that providing training to the law enforcement community both builds thedigital forensics capacity and also reduces the burden on CART/RCFL examiners. ImageScan is132