{"id":2276,"date":"2013-04-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/2013\/04\/21\/cybercrime-dominates-federal-caseload-hickton-says\/"},"modified":"2021-12-30T11:40:59","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T11:40:59","slug":"cybercrime-dominates-federal-caseload-hickton-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/2013\/04\/21\/cybercrime-dominates-federal-caseload-hickton-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybercrime dominates federal caseload, Hickton says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Attorney David Hickton was installed as the top law enforcement official for western Pennsylvania, his reorganization of the criminal division included a new national security cyber group in addition to the traditional offices that prosecute white collar crime, violent crime and civil rights offenses. Robert Erdely, a retired state police trooper now serving as a detective in the Indiana County Court House, has an international reputation as a computer crime investigations expert, and often brings cases that end up in federal courts, Hickton said. \u201cWhat takes a case federal is if our extra jurisdictional reach is helpful, or the tools we have on the federal side might be helpful, but frequently we have sentences that are more severe,\u201d Hickton said.<\/span> \u201cSo in violent crime, we have the armed career criminal sentences and some of the mandatory minimums for someone who, for a similar act (prosecuted under state laws), might get a low sentence or get probation\u201d in a state or county court.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And Hickton said cybercrime investigators last year solved a string of bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh and its related hospitals, a case that many thought would go unsolved, but culminated with the arrest of a suspect in Ireland.<\/p>\n

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The drug trade in western Pennsylvania has been traced to illegal narcotics kingpins in Newark, N.J., Cleveland and Detroit, Hickton said, but his office is seeing a major, deadly new trend emerge: the abuse of prescription pills facilitated by doctors and pharmacists in the region. \u201cA lot of people sit back and say, \u2018This is not in my community,\u2019 but Washington County had more than 50 basically synthetic heroin deaths through pill abuse last year.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Attorney\u2019s office has prosecuted some well-publicized cases in Indiana County in recent years, including the guilty pleas and sentencing of three men who admitted burning a cross on the lawn of a multirace family\u2019s home in Robinson, West Wheatfield Township, and the current investigation of the embezzlement of millions of dollars from Falcon Drilling Company in Indiana.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt will be a large organization of community leaders that\u2019s working on crime prevention councils \u2026 beginning with a partnership with the United Way called Be One in a Million, a mentoring program that spins off an existing program called Be a Sixth Grade mentor,\u201d Hickton said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The components with jobs and with cyber are a part of that, it\u2019s understanding that there may be a connection to make western Pennsylvania the go-to place for cyber like it is a go-to place for Marcellus shale right now,\u201d Hickton explained.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI have my responsibilities to bring the cases and enforce the law, but in my view, to do this job correctly, you have a broader mission and that is to ensure freedom and justice, by enforcing the law and protecting the public welfare,\u201d he said. And what good do I do, really, if all I do is just hammer criminals and bring drug prosecutions if I don\u2019t recognize that maybe we need to go and find out who are the church leaders and how can they help, who are the dedicated community activists?<\/p>\n

Link: http:\/\/www.indianagazette.com\/news\/indiana-news\/cybercrime-dominates-federal-caseload-hickton-says,17070503\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4763,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions\/4763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}