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 Information Security* and *CFCA Telecom Security '90.*
The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door to chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the latest dismal developments in the BCCI global banking scandal.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California some years back. He'd been raiding systems, typing code without a detectable break, for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just logged on -- *typing.* Investigators were baffled. Nobody could do that. Didn't he have to go to the bathroom? Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking device that could actually type code?
A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonishing squalor. The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who had flunked out of a California university. He'd gone completely underground as an illegal electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone- service to stay alive. The place was not merely messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder. Powered by some weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a chamber-pot under his chair.
Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker community.
Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the FLETC grounds. One of our first sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world. There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s.... He's willing to take me inside. I tell him I'm sure that's really interesting, but I'd rather see his computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased. I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in favor of microchips.
Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen: the three-mile long FLETC driving range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security driving for VIP limousines.... A favorite FLETC pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.
Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and again for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the grease. When they're sufficiently grease-stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock unit, where they're battered without pity. And finally then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage.
There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches. The plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to my right. "Nine- millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.
Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses." This is a street lined on both sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs. They were once officers' quarters. Now they are training grounds. The first one to our left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it has been wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners. Every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for later taped analysis. Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical mistakes -- all are gone over in detail.
Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day after day, of federal shoe-leather.
Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are practicing a murder. We drive by slowly as some very young and rather nervous- looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the raid-house lawn. Dealing with murder takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve- shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be murderers -- quite possibly both at once.
A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians: waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can learn a script. These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.
Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation, standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies inside on faked bloodstains.... While behind this weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of real death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these young agents will really investigate, many times during their careers.... Over and over.... Will those anticipated murders look like this, feel like this -- not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake people standing around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't know how to take it; my head is turned around; I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.