In cramped, dingy offices near New York’s East River, a couple dozen detectives and analysts hunch over computers, plowing their way through hundreds of criminal cases. This is the home of the New York Police Department Computer Crime Squad. The heart of this or any other computer crimes unit is computer forensics, the conservation, deconstruction and analysis of electronic evidence contained on personal computers, networks and, increasingly, handheld devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants…
