By Ryan O'Connor
Staff Writer

Bow Police Detective David Girard has boldly gone where no officer has gone before.

Girard, according to Tim Pifer, director with the state forensic police laboratory, is the first town or city detective in the country to remotely access a state hard drive recovery system through the comfort of his own desk.

Girard, who was part of the first group of 17 detectives in New Hampshire who learned how to use the system, said Bow is the first town in the state to access it.

The purpose, said Girard, is to access files, which could pertain to financial fraud, child pornography or any other crimes involving the use of a computer hard drive.

“There has been an initiative in the state on how police will investigate computers that are seized,” said Girard. “Historically, what the problem has been is that there has only been one guy that is responsible for all the computers that are seized in the state.”

Pifer said it is normally a time-consuming process that involves creating an exact duplicate of the suspect’s hard drive and then analyzing it, which narrows down what nvestigators would primarily be looking for.

Now, rather than one or two people doing all the work in the state lab, a hard drive replica is still being made but is now placed on a secure server.

Individual police departments or detectives can then access it to do the analysis themselves.

“The detectives are intimately familiar with their case, not us, so this way we give them the resources and the tools to do this themselves,” said Pifer. “It puts a lot of the searching back in the detectives’ hands where it belongs.”

Pifer said roughly 150 departments around New Hampshire already have the capability of tapping into the state police server, which controls the remote access hard drive recovery system.

“Right now we have the luxury of having the backbone already in place, so we are simply tapping into that secured network and allowing this to be run through that,” Pifer said. “So any department that has access to that LAN line will be able to utilize this resource.”

Girard is hopeful this will save all parties a lot of time.

“Hopefully, this will alleviate a backlog and speed up the process because detectives will be able to look for exactly what they’re need, rather than just bringing a computer over (to the state lab) and having (the technician) try to figure out what we want, we can just do it ourselves,” said Girard. “Plus, it doesn’t necessarily contaminate our computers either because everything we do is on their server over there.”

The new system also has the ability to pull out selected files, such as word documents, spreadsheets or photos, depending on the case, and separate them, making it easier for detectives to search through.

It can also detect files that are masked or hidden with different file extension by red-flagging any file header information that doesn’t match up with the file extensions.

Moreover, the system can also pick up hash values, a number which helps identify a file or document to an individual’s computer that may have been investigated in past cases.

Girard compared the hash value to a vehicle identification number, as far as distinguishing a person’s documents from another.

According to Pifer, he is unaware of any other states using the technology, but has received a great deal of interest from within the law enforcement community.

“This is a pretty leading edge solution to preventing backlogs of evidence and not just in New Hampshire, but other states will be using this to work through their backlog problems as well,” he said. “Computer crimes will only grow larger as far as widespread use of computer technology is concerned, whether it be personal computers, blackberries, cellphones or any other digital devices. So, it’s nice to have this state-of-the-art technology.”