As someone who will theoretically graduate in May with a Master's in digital forensics, this thread depresses me.
Keep an eye on the job market. If you are interested in the law enforcement end, but prefer being a civilian position in computer forensics then look for the following
FBI CART positions.
RISS network positions.
State, County, Local Forensic Lab positions.
Digital Forensic Examiner positions.
DHS and other Govt agencies remember there are plenty out there.
Other government contractors.
Keep an eye on opportunities with this list, get involved in local association chapters i.e. HTCIA.
Check out forensicmag.com, USAJobs.gov, HTCIA.org, and other websites you will find as a result of searching.
You may not have to start on the road. I understand you and others want to get right to removing hard drives and that may be possible (probably pays better as well) instead of running radar or handling domestics.
Maybe you would consider working as an instructor for a private company that instructs military and law enforcement in computer forensics. So keep an eye on the job market maybe you will find something that will put you into forensics right away. Any chance for an internship with a local, county, or state agency in your area?
Regards,
Chris
As someone who will theoretically graduate in May with a Master's in digital forensics, this thread depresses me.
It shouldn't depress you, but rather give you a realistic understanding of what the job market is like right now and how digital forensics works on the law enforcement side.
Judging by the resume that you have posted on your website, you've developed some very strong fundamentals at Purdue and I'd be shocked if you couldn't land a position in the field and have a long and successful career. I think you've approached the problem statement of "How do I break into digital forensics?" quite well with how you have prepared yourself.
npld120 brings out some good suggestions for those who are more interested in doing digital forensics on the law enforcement side rather than being a police officer and going through that traditional developmental track. There are civilian positions that you can obtain in law enforcement and there are also contract positions (You work for private company A which places you at Government Agency XYZ under a contract) where you can do some very cool digital forensics work chasing bad guys.
As a former law enforcement officer and someone who has also worked in the private sector in a variety of positions I have to agree with a lot of the comments here.
Law enforcement was a great experience for me. But to even get to the position where you may be able to do computer forensics takes time. Even then you may not be doing computer cases all the time……….. and it is about being part of something larger and crucial to society. I also think a lot of the skills translate really well to the private sector if handled properly.
The private sector work has an amazing breadth of diversity. E-Discovery, incident response, intellectual property, government support, PCI and PII investigations are just some of the topics I have seen or touched upon during my career. But I will say it has taken a lot of effort to get where I am and my experience has been crucial every step of the way. So I guess I am saying be realistic………….starting off in a tough job market which has a mixed bag of experienced candidates already looking for positions can be daunting.
Keep looking and be flexible and go forth to get what you can. Start building and look for the right opportunities to learn and apply your knowledge and training. Write. Create. Share. Get your foot in the door anywhere you can and start the journey
If I were you 7lowe, I would stick with your current situation. Developing IT experience, and getting a security clearance will set you up well in a few years if a LEO or gov/contract position is what you're after.
Everything in government takes time, and if you lack the patience at this point to wait for a security clearance, you're going to be mighty disappointed later on waiting for a good position that suits you to become available.
Reading this thread reminds me of when I was in high school, and I wanted to be a pilot flying helos in the army. To do that, you had to go to RMC (office school) and then you had to rate high enough to get your first choice to get a flying gig. So you could spend a year and a half at RMC, not score high enough, and owe the army a 4 year RoS as a grunt or whatever. Hence I decided not to do that, and listened to my primary school principal who told me I should study law, and by combining my law (and IT) studies with my IT job experience, got into a CF job as a civvy at a LEO and loved it.
Keep in mind that there are a large number of federal, state, and local agencies that do forensics Customs, Revenue/Taxation, Competition Bureau, etc.
Also you may have a much shorter wait to get into a pure forensics job if you start out in an IT support position in one of those agencies, figure out who's in charge of security & forensics, and do some networking with them.
Tech support is one of the easiest ways in (and good experience), and once you are in, a lot of doors can open up. It took me a grand total of 2 months to go from network support to doing forensics at my first forensics job - although I did have a several years of years doing LAN support under my belt by then.
Sweet.. I got mentioned on Forensic 4cast!
I think there's a lot of great advice dispensed on this thread and on the podcast, but I don't think I phrased my original question in quite the way I wanted it to be interpreted. I certainly didn't mean to somehow dismiss the street patrol experience put in by the members here or in any police CF crime lab.
This past fall I had a class taught by forensic investigator that works for a state police agency. Although he was a private citizen, we did have guest lecturers that worked in labs that simply didn't consider civilians. The sole CF investigator for a particular large-ish city told us he was on the police force for (to the best of my recollection) 15 years. When that position in his city opened up, he didn't even know what computer forensics was. He put in a year of training before he was a full-fledged CF investigator.
I fully expect there to be a probationary period where new hires are expected to do grunt work and mundane task from day to day for a while. I'm going to assume this is true for a law firm that does e-discovery or any police agency. And I'm definitely willing to scrub hard drives or just sit and image devices for days on end if that's what the lab needs done.
But what I'm seeing is that people working in various CF positions got there with diverse backgrounds. It's true that right now police tend to hire within their ranks; but this isn't necessarily going to be true forever. There were a few positions locally (from one agency) that citizens were eligible to apply for. Recently on HTCIA there was a post for what looked like an entry-level, on-the-job-trained positions, in Texas I think, that were also open to civilians. I hope I'm not coming off abrasively, but I hope the typical track to a LE CF job doesn't continue to include walking the beat and responding to domestics.
On a somewhat unrelated note Eric, I think it was you that mentioned including a sample report of a practice image on a resume. I'm so glad you mentioned that because I recently wrote a "legal memo" for an e-discovery assignment I was especially proud of that I'll definitely hang on to.
I'm glad we haven't completely soured you on digital forensics. D
That wasn't me who made that suggestion, but it strikes me as a good idea.
If you do want to be a police officer and catch bad guys using your newly acquired digital forensics kung fu, you might want to look at federal law enforcement. As you know, state and local can be a long hard slog before you ever get your chance to land in a digital forensic position.
I do think that you will see more positions being created in both the sworn and unsworn ranks of state and local law enforcement, but you've got a career to launch and you can't wait around forever, I suspect.
What I would recommend is talking to federal agencies like
FBI- They have an extensive digital forensic function and one of the critical hiring skills they are looking for is
US Postal Inspectors- They have a lot of digital forensic people and want to recruit people with
Secret Service- They're heavily involved in technology crime and have their own digital forensics capability. Speaking of grunt work, you can guess what you'll spend a portion of your career doing. How well do you look in sunglasses?
I would also encourage you to look into the inspector general community. I don't think most people know about the various
DCIS- The
TIGTA OIG Office of Investigations- The
HHS OIG Office of Investigations- The Health and Human Service's OIG's Office of Investigations does a lot of work fighting fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare. As you can
You also have military law enforcement options available to you such as the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. They both have digital forensics capabilities and the AFOSI in particular has a strong reputation in the digital forensics community.
I think all of these agencies are likely to require a certain amount of "grunt time" before you could land in a digital forensic slot, but I think there is a good value in learning how to be a cop before going into that technical role you desire. The best course of action would be to just start calling these agencies and seeing what a potential career path would be like for someone who wants to be a police officer who uses digital forensics to catch bad guys.
LE needs to get beyond the arcane belief that one has to be an LE to do computer forensics. Civilians as digital evidence analysts are no different than civilians as other types of evidence analysts. Does LE make all of their DNA analysts, forensic pathologists, forensic entomologists, and drug chemists be experienced law enforcement officers? If digital forensics is to continue to evolve, this thinking must change. As Marcus Rogers has indicated, we can either move this to a true science, or be relegated to the realm of pseudoscience.
So were you a sworn law enforcement officer? I see lots of your posts say you are former LEO.
Reading this thread reminds me of when I was in high school, and I wanted to be a pilot flying helos in the army. To do that, you had to go to RMC (office school) and then you had to rate high enough to get your first choice to get a flying gig. So you could spend a year and a half at RMC, not score high enough, and owe the army a 4 year RoS as a grunt or whatever. Hence I decided not to do that, and listened to my primary school principal who told me I should study law, and by combining my law (and IT) studies with my IT job experience, got into a CF job as a civvy at a LEO and loved it.