A new crime fighting tool came online at the Conway Police Department this week. It was donated to CPD by the United States Secret Service, and it's called Fred.
FRED is an acronym for computer forensics hardware/software business Digital Intelligence's Forensic Recovery Evidence Device. Simply put, it is a powerful computer featuring a pair of 500 gigabyte, 7,200 revolution-per -minute Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard drives, each capable of processing three gigabytes of information per second. The 70-pound, liquid-cooled computer boasts a full terabyte (1024 gigabytes) of redundant array of independent disks (RAID) memory, which means that FRED stores data on an array of hard disks "read" by the computer as one massive disk.
For all this, FRED has a single mission, Detective Brian Williams said to recover digital evidence from whatever electronic devices may have been used in the planning or commission of a crime.
Williams is the only CPD officer trained in the use of FRED. He recently graduated from the Secret Service's newly built Hoover, Ala. National Computer Forensics Institute's Computer Evidence Recovery Course along with 24 other law enforcement personnel chosen from a nationwide pool of candidates. Williams was a member of the institute's first graduating class, spending 200 hours in a classroom learning every aspect of digital evidence recovery and utilizing FRED's dizzying array of hardware and software to solve crimes.
Hardware and software associated with the FRED system, valued at about $26,000, as well as Williams' instruction, comes to CPD free of charge, with the understanding that Williams will use the system to assist in Secret Service investigations as required.
Chief of Police A.J. Gary said CPD has made use of similar technology before, but doing so has meant sending electronic devices to other agencies, which often means CPD must wait weeks for evidence to be recovered.
"Now, if we run into a case where it's a kidnapping or somebody's life is in jeopardy," Gary said, "we can recover this evidence and process it very quickly."
Gary added that CPD was considering the purchase of such a device before Williams was selected for National Computer Forensics Institute training. Interestingly, Digital Intelligence's line of computers includes FREDDIE and FRED SR. models.
A concise list of the types of hard drives FRED can extract information from looks like an explosion at the alphabet soup cannery:
IDE, EIDE, ATA, SATA, ATAPI SCSI I, SCSI II and SCSI III hard drives can be read, as can other data storage devices including "floppy" discs, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, Compact Flash, Micro Drives, Smart Media, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, xD Cards and secure digital media and multimedia cards.
This means that devices ranging from cell phones to iPods to servers to supercomputers can be "interrogated" by FRED, Williams said, adding that, no matter how many times or how hard you click on "empty trash," little ever really gets deleted in today's digital world.
(Staff writer Joe Lamb can be reached at 505-1238 or by E-mail at joe.lamb@thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit.)
