Oregon Public Broadcasting

The lab – which is in Portland – is one of only fourteen accredited computer forensic labs in the country.

It’s operated by the FBI in partnership with local and state police.

Police say accreditation is the best way to make sure evidence stands up in court.

Alan Peters is the assistant agent in charge of the FBI in Portland. He says these days, computer forensics can be just as important to police as having a gun.

Alan Peters: “Just as critical to the law enforcements mission as it is to have the capability of having firepower, we need to have that cyber power as well. And that is found here within this lab.”

The lab will be used to retrieve evidence from cell phones, computers, and even video game systems.

Which is good news for local police.

That’s because the lab will speed up processing of cell phones.  Previously, it could take up to two months for the FBI to process cell phone evidence, says Kent Hughes with the FBI.

Kent Hughes: “We now can provide the investigators, the detectives from the local agencies, a room to come in, we train them, get them training. So they don’t need to submit it and they can get a turn around of sometimes an hour or less.”

Just as society has embraced cell phones, so have criminals, says Kent Stuart. He’s with the Oregon State Police and is a Macintosh specialist with the computer forensics lab.

Kent Stuart: “Iphones for example, Blackberries, all the PDA type cell phones nowdays are just like tiny computers and they can do pretty much anything a desktop or laptop computer can do. And they can store a lot of the same information.”

The director of the new computer forensics lab, Andy Schroder, agrees.

Andy Schroder: “We’re finding more and more that the best evidence is in a cell phone or it’s in a computer or a laptop or it’s on a web page or a myspace page and you go where the evidence is.”

In fact, both the FBI and local police say it’s rare these days for a major crime not to have some sort of digital evidence, though it’s not always obvious.

For example, a GPS unit in a car or cell phone can help convict criminals, says the FBI’s Thomas Gregory Motta.Gregory Motta: “With GPS enabled phones, there may be restored data that place him at a particular location when he makes the call. It may be near the crime scene.”

Motta emphasizes, though, that the goal of the computer forensics lab is not to convict or acquit suspects—it’s to find the object truth and to make sure that truth stands up in court.

The Northwest Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory is available for law enforcement agencies throughout Washington and Oregon.