lege paper. "Oh yeah, I was there," said another cop. "Glad to
hear that tear gas hit somethin'. Haw haw haw." He'd been so blind
himself, he confessed, that later that day he'd arrested a small tree.

FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and
turned into a new kind of cop. There are a lot of specialized cops in
the world--your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but the only
group that matches FCIC for sheer isolation are probably the
child-pornography people. Because they both deal with conspirators who
are desperate to exchange forbidden data and also desperate to hide;
and because nobody else in law enforcement even wants to hear about it.

FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot. They tend not to get the
equipment and training they want and need. And they tend to get sued
quite often.

As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew
darker. Nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until
there's a DISASTER. Computing disasters are awful, but there's no
denying that they greatly help the credibility of FCIC people. The
Internet Worm, for instance. "For years we'd been warning about
that--but it's nothing compared to what's coming." They expect
horrors, these people. They know that nothing will really get done
until there is a horror.

#

Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd been a
computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city council, and
now installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable rise in
pay). He talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart.

Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal
"network"--a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with a
complexity that puts stereo units to shame. FCIC people invent and
publicize methods of seizing computers and maintaining their evidence.
Simple things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for street cops, who
nowadays often stumble across a busy computer in the midst of a drug
investigation or a white-collar bust. For instance: Photograph the
system before you touch it. Label the ends of all the cables before
you detach anything. "Park" the heads on the disk drives before you
move them. Get the diskettes. Don't put the diskettes in magnetic
fields. Don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens. Get the
manuals. Get the printouts. Get the handwritten notes. Copy data
before you look at it, and then exa