ialized law enforcement units, some of
them rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal Investigation
Division, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret
Service and the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions.... If you're a
federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train at FLETC. This
includes people as apparently obscure as the agents of the Railroad
Retirement Board Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley Authority
Police, who are in fact federal police officers, and can and do arrest
criminals on the federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

And then there are the computer-crime people. All sorts, all
backgrounds. Mr. Fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized
knowledge. Cops all over, in every branch of service, may feel a need
to learn what he can teach. Backgrounds don't matter much.
Fitzpatrick himself was originally a Border Patrol veteran, then became
a Border Patrol instructor at FLETC. His Spanish is still fluent--but
he found himself strangely fascinated when the first computers showed
up at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick did have a background in
electrical engineering, and though he never considered himself a
computer hacker, he somehow found himself writing useful little
programs for this new and promising gizmo.

He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime,
reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war
stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming people of
the local computer-crime and high-technology units.... Soon he got a
reputation around FLETC as the resident "computer expert," and that
reputation alone brought him more exposure, more experience--until one
day he looked around, and sure enough he WAS a federal computer-crime
expert.

In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be THE federal computer-crime
expert. There are plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of
very good federal investigators, but the area where these worlds of
expertise overlap is very slim. And Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right
at the center of that since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a
group which owes much to his influence.

He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office, with its
Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior
Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with three-ring
binders with ominous titles such as Datapro Reports on Infor