rits of Uzis. Long a favorite of the Secret Service,
it seems Uzis went out of fashion with the advent of the Persian Gulf
War, our Arab allies taking some offense at Americans toting Israeli
weapons. Besides, I was informed by another expert, Uzis jam. The
equivalent weapon of choice today is the Heckler & Koch, manufactured
in Germany.

The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer. He also did a
lot of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases. He used
to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix. He was now a private
investigator and, with his wife, ran a photography salon specializing
in weddings and portrait photos. At--one must repeat--a considerable
rise in income.

He was still FCIC. If you were FCIC, and you needed to talk to an
expert about forensic photography, well, there he was, willing and
able. If he hadn't shown up, people would have missed him.

Our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of a
computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken. It's vital
to understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there are,
what kind of operating system they use, how many people use them, where
the actual data itself is stored. To simply barge into an office
demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift disaster.

This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. In fact, what it
entails is basically undercover work. An intelligence operation.
SPYING, not to put too fine a point on it.

In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee whether "trashing"
might work.

I received a swift briefing on the theory and practice of "trash
covers." Police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps,
require the agreement of a judge. This obtained, the "trashing" work
of cops is just like that of hackers, only more so and much better
organized. So much so, I was informed, that mobsters in Phoenix make
extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a specialty
high-security trash company.

In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a local residence
for four months. Every week they showed up on the municipal garbage
truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the contents of the suspect
cans off to a shade tree, where they combed through the garbage--a
messy task, especially considering that one of the occupants was
undergoing kidney dialysis. All useful documents were cleaned, dried
and examined. A discarded typewrite