USD Magazine Spring 2010

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Virtual sleuths combat online criminals with the click of a mouse by Nathan Dinsdale

A computer hacker in Seattle deftly pilfers credit card numbers from an online retailer based in Texas. An identity thief at an Internet café in Moscow steals social security numbers from a temp agency in Tucson. A child pornographer in Anaheim e-mails illicit images to Beijing. An extremist in Peshawar uses his laptop to try to sabotage the electrical grid in Washington, D.C. Each potentially has at least one thing in common: They’ll have Toreros to reckon with. The modus operandi for the next generation of nefarious minds has expanded far beyond the brutish methods of traditional crime into the murky ether of the virtual world. After all, there’s no need to rob a bank at gunpoint or launch a terrorist attack on, say, the New York Stock Exchange if you can effectively do both from your home computer. It’s a grave new world for those entrusted with protecting a vulnera- ble populace in a hyper-tech society. Nevertheless, that’s the heady task that USD graduates have seized as FBI agents hunting online criminals and shaping national cyber-security policies. They’ve taken different routes to the FBI, but the paths of four alums in particular have converged at the trailhead of a precarious battle between cutting-edge criminality and avant-garde policing, a place where each shares a common purpose, driven by relentless faith in their mission to protect and serve. A ndrew Leithead ’92 (J.D. ’95) wasn’t the first — or the last — USD graduate to enter the ranks of the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. But he may very well have been the youngest when he first aspired to his future career.

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