The superhighway robbers

FORGET gold bricks - burglars these days know silicon is where the real money's to be made when planning a profitable heist.

Take a 1995 case in Irvine, California. A record $12 million in chips and memory boards was stolen from Centon Electronics by 10 armed robbers, dressed for the occasion in suits and ties.

Sartorial elegance aside, component theft of this sort is only one piece of a larger high technology crime jigsaw that has law enforcement and the technology industry frustrated. Proprietary data and trade secret theft also cost hitech firms millions.

The digital villages which span Silicon Valley are painfully aware of this. Its three regional police departments each have specialised hitech crime units. The Santa Clara County district attorney's office in San Jose also has a hitech crime section, with two prosecutors and an investigator working solely on such cases.

The three are affiliated with the High Tech Crime Investigators Association (HT CIA), a not quite 10 year old institution which allies law enforcement, the courts and industry. Members include security firms, police, customs officials, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, lawyers, private investigators just about anyone who is trying to combat crime within the hi tech arena, or learn exactly how computers can be used as evidence in other trials.

"Because of the very nature of Silicon Valley everyone has computers," says John C. Smith, an investigator with the computer crime and hitech unit in the district attorney's office. "I'm working on my second murder case and I've had a couple of attempted murders.

Smith's narrow rectangle of an office in the bustling county offices of San Jose is made even narrower by a grey wall of filing cabinets, labelled with names of his cases. "Cadence" reads one: this is perhaps the hottest trial in the Valley at the moment, a trade secrets case in which seven executives of a firm called Avant were charged last April with stealing source code from a software manufacturer called Cadence.

Smith, a tall former police chief with a polished, shaved bead, shifts and recrosses his legs, then stretches backwards in his chair. He's a relaxed, amiable man, quick to laugh. His desk is an unruly swirl of papers and file folders, and stacked on shelves are dozens of computer hand books on security, guides to networking and programming.

"They had this guy who'd just tried to kill his wife; the guy was a computer programmer," he says. The police wanted to search his PC; Smith figured they should also go after his network accounts at work. "In one of the network directories were letters to a girlfriend nobody knew he had. We've got a murder case going right now where we have a guy in custody accused of killing a woman. They were sending a lot of email back and forth, plus I have two computers from the suspect to go look at to see what we can find in there." Murder cases and other types of "computer forensics" form a curious sideshow for Smith, who more typically investigates trade secret and proprietary data theft, and network intrusion.

With no background in science or mathematics, he spent hours in the library reading physics and electrical engineering texts to prepare for his first cases. He now has years of experience, a few courses behind him, and a natural aptitude for the subject. He has spent hours listening to willing engineers, absorbing their expertise. When he retires this year, that knowledge will be sorely missed; he'll be replaced by his new partner, who's frantically learning the ropes.

Smith grins. "Yeah, my partner's in there sweating.

The work is not merely a case of searching files on a PC. When Silicon Valley companies are involved, he may take a search warrant to examine servers, entire networks, or Internet accounts. They may just go in and take a computer away, or it might be a full fledged raid.

"We'll move all the employees into a conference room, physically away from the computers," he says. "We'll also go in and pull the lines, incoming modem lines, T1 highspeed Internet lines or whatever to make sure no one can log in from outside." Potential trade secret cases can sometimes be easy to spot: a former employee sets up a company and within weeks has a product remarkably similar to that of the former employer. In this kind of case, Smith sets up two computers side by side and searches the source code of the two companies' programs, line by line, for giveaway duplications. "Programmers put a lot of little comments in the middle of their code," he says. "You go back and look for comments and mispellings and so on. In one case I spotted 600 lines of identical code." The pace of work is heavy - Smith is working on 10 trade secret cases at the moment, where five years ago he might have had three in a year. The man who takes Smith's evidence and hammers it into a case, deputy district attorney Frank Dudley Berry Jr, agrees: "The volume is beginning to be overwhelming." The bulk of time is committed by employees; the open, casual nature of hi tech firms - an important part of Valley work culture - also makes companies vulnerable, he says.

Such was the situation in his favourite case, where an employee was found to have been stealing and selling Hewlett Packard laserjet printers, which were loaded in a truck in San Jose then driven to Los Angeles. "These two Chinese guys were paying $800,000 cash for printers from a Ryder truck from a guy named Eddie," he says. They got their lead when a local dealer complained because HP would only give him a few printers at a time. "In the meantime, here's Eddie with 1,200 of em out on a lot!" Sun Microsystems has a particular problem with component theft. "Right now the hotbed for us is the UK. We're getting hit over there with burglaries on a weekly basis," says Joe Chiaramonte, a retired FBI agent who is now Sun's security head, as well as president of the HTCIA. The components aren't serialised so they can easily be sold on the "grey market", a legitimate but sometimes murky market for extra components. "They're lightweight, can't be detected, and are safer than dope," he says. "I can drive around with a chip in my car, whereas I couldn't with a bag of cocaine." Chiaramonte says countries on this side of the Atlantic seem to run about four years behind the type of tech crime that hits the US. He predicts that as security tightens here, burglars will make the same move as they have in the US: to armed robbery, and hijacking lorries full of components.

At first, "maybe two years ago", burglars would break in, open computers, and steal the memory modules. But they're grabbing the whole central processing unit (CPU), the brains of a machine. "Now, they just break a window they don't even care if there's employees inside - grab a couple of these CPUs, and run for it.

"And they've gotten so bold," he sighs. "Once in Bagshot, these guys broke in and stole 15 computers. We boarded up the windows, put up a cyclone fence, and they came back that same night and stole even more.