COPS ON THE I-WAY

Here's the plot: short of cash but endowed with a wealth of computer skills, a clever employee is able to reach inside the boss's private data base and ``kidnap'' invaluable company secrets by locking them with a sophisticated encryption program. She then sends an anonymous electronic ransom note demanding a wire transfer of $3 million to a blind account in the Cayman Islands -- or the boss's proprietary data will be lost forever.

Extortion -- in this case hypothetical -- is only one of the many imaginative, daring and increasingly publicized crimes that have gone high tech in recent years. In addition to the predictable tax, insurance and credit-card scams, software infringements and eavesdropping, the computer is now the site of crimes that range all the way up to homicide. ``Law enforcement is becoming aware that computers can be used to facilitate just about any type of crime,'' says Jack King, legal editor of the Bureau of National Affairs Criminal Practice Manual.

One of the most emotion-raising illegal activities is the occasional use of the Internet and online services by pedophiles, who can not only transmit child-pornography images but also have been known to use the Net to make assignations with youngsters. As for homicide, while it's hard to imagine that someone could actually be killed online, police in a Pennsylvania murder- kidnapping case found critical evidence, including a ransom note, on the defendant's computer. The computer can also be a tempting conduit for anonymous threats; the Secret Service tracked down one perpetrator who sent a threat to President Clinton's well-known E-mail address.

Computer crimes are hardly new. In California prosecutors have been pursuing high-tech crime in Silicon Valley for a couple of decades. But the focus and nature of the crimes have changed dramatically. When the Department of Justice set up a computer-crimes unit in September 1991, it was intended to cope primarily with threats to computer security posed by hackers, toll-fraud artists and electronic intruders. But the new crimes, says Jim Thomas, a criminology professor at Northern Illinois University, ``aren't simply the esoteric type they were five years ago.'' They are ``computer crimes,'' he adds, ``only in the sense that a bank robbery with a getaway car is an `automobile crime.'

'' And computers are fast approaching the ubiquity of automobiles. The ever richer variety of criminal activities has had law-enforcement officials scrambling -- largely because neither the laws nor the enforcement structures were designed to deal with them effectively. A recent case that illustrated this was watched closely by just about everyone in the computer world. It was that of David LaMacchia, an M.I.T. undergraduate who was charged last April with conspiring to distribute millions of dollars' worth of illegally copied commercial software over the Internet. LaMacchia allegedly set up and ran an online bulletin board that allowed anyone who accessed it to copy for free a variety of software programs. Touted as the largest single instance of software piracy ever uncovered, LaMacchia's case was thrown out last December by Massachusetts Federal Judge Richard Stearns, who decided that the senior from Rockville, Maryland, had in fact committed no crime at all. In January U.S. Attorney Donald Stern announced that he would not appeal the decision.