Virginia Sheriff’s Office Looks to Internet for Its Crimefighting Tools

Ron Horak joined the Loudoun County sheriff’s office nearly 25 years ago, as a guard in the county jail. He later patrolled the countryside when only four deputies were on duty at a time.

He figured he’d spend his entire career patrolling this still-rural Virginia county, some 35 miles west of Washington, D.C., where violent crime is rare and smashed mailboxes make the news.

Then America Online moved in.

Now Horak--still wearing his trademark cowboy boots--is on the ground floor of some of the nation’s most high-profile criminal investigations: horrific rapes, murders, bombings. From his quiet Leesburg, Va., office, he has one of the most far-reaching views into the seedy side of cyberspace.

“Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I see something else,” said Horak, 52. “My grandchildren hear the war stories. They hear the horror stories.”

Horak is Loudoun’s AOL detective. That’s all he does. Nationwide requests for information from AOL are so frequent, the sheriff’s office has had to devote all Horak’s energies to dealing with the applications.

Horak, the gatekeeper for police seeking clues in the online missives of AOL’s 23 million subscribers, has worked with police from all 50 states. His full-time job is to handle the warrants needed to peer into the online communication of bobcat8me or honeycupid or satangirl. He’s averaging more than one a day.

With more than 46.5 million households nationwide with Internet access, online conversations and images can hold a wealth of evidence for police investigating such crimes as fraud, arson and identity theft. AOL, the nation’s largest Internet service provider, moved to the county in 1996. As Loudoun’s main law enforcement agents, sheriff’s officials knew the law required that most requests for AOL account information be funneled through their office. But they never dreamed there would be so many.

At the red brick courthouse, clerks record each new warrant in a leather-bound ledger with entries dating to 1975. The first AOL search warrant was filed in Loudoun in 1996. The next year there were 33.

After that, the requests skyrocketed.

In 1998, Loudoun magistrates signed off on 152 Internet searches as police from New York to Texas peered into the accounts of users including sexylilwildcat and lonely wife69, looking for the identities of criminals or motives. Last year there were 299 AOL searches; this year, there were 245 by late August.

“We didn’t realize the magnitude of this when we started,” said Loudoun Sheriff’s Maj. John Patton. “We didn’t realize how much it would grow.”

Bill Taylor, president of the Oregon-based International Assn. of Computer Investigative Specialists, said Loudoun shouldn’t expect requests to level off soon. Groups like his are training front-line officers nationwide to consider the potential for computer evidence in every case.

“It’s becoming more and more common for street cops on the front line to think to preserve a computer, just like they do fingerprints or bloodstains,” Taylor said.

Patton said the workload already has strained his department, but officials know Horak’s job is critical to prosecutions nationwide.

New Jersey investigators called on Loudoun to help with an AOL search when they were investigating the 1997 death of Edward Werner, 11, who was strangled by neighbor and avid Internet user Sam Manzie, 15, who had himself been molested by someone he met online. Pennsylvania police recently pursued accounts associated with Richard Baumhammers, 34, charged with killing five people during an allegedly racially motivated shooting spree.

Mark Marshall, a detective with the Worthington, Ohio, police department, said Horak helped him put a child predator behind bars. In 1998 Marshall had gotten a tip that Mark W. Maxwell had tried to lure a 13-year-old girl he met online to a hotel.

Marshall called Horak, who helped prepare a search warrant and delivered it to the magistrate. Included in the records Horak sent back were pornographic images and the names of hundreds of people Maxwell communicated with online.

“It made our case,” Marshall said. “Here was an agency who didn’t know us . . . [but] he hand-delivered the warrant. He got us the information. He said, ‘If you need me, call.’ You can’t ask for better than that.”

Horak said he fell into his job by chance. He began processing the warrants in 1998 when the department’s computer expert went away for a two-week class and one or two requests filtered in. But each week there were more.

Still, the frequency hasn’t numbed Horak to the content. Children who threaten teachers. Men luring girls for sexual encounters. Someone sending e-mail using the names of the town mayor and police chief.

“The brazenness of people never ceases to amaze you,” Horak said. “They are just so bold.”

He has taught seminars in Santa Fe, N.M., Ocean City, Md., and Virginia Beach. Sometimes officers call and say they heard about him from friends in other agencies.

“Detectives will call and say, ‘I don’t have a clue where to start,’ ” Horak said. “I know I’m in trouble if they say, ‘I had to get my grandson to turn on the computer for me.’ ”

Horak faxes them a how-to letter describing the warrant procedure, and they send back an affidavit explaining why they need the information. But Horak also must know enough details of each case to justify the need for the search when he goes to the magistrate.

To obtain an AOL search, Horak must prove there is “probable cause” to look into an account--that “there’s a 51% chance that a crime was committed and that this evidence would aid the investigation,” said Loudoun County Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Owen D. Basham. “It’s the same standard as if you were searching someone’s house or car. And it doesn’t mean that [the person whose account is searched] is the one who did something wrong.”

“If they just want a ‘look-see,’ I reject it outright. Big Brother does not do that,” Horak said. But “if you have broken the law and used AOL to do it, you have reason to worry.”

AOL spokesman Rich D’Amato said the company, to protect its subscribers, requires a legal order by a judge or magistrate. “We work with law enforcement to get them the information as quickly as possible,” he said, adding that AOL also has one person devoted to processing such requests.

“I don’t think we truly envisioned years ago it would get this big this soon,” Horak said. “It’s good to be able to reach out and help people prosecute.”