This book, more than any other I’ve written up to this point in my life, was a labor of love. It allowed me to combine the knowledge and experience of two careers (over a decade in government and law enforcement, and close to another decade in the computer field, encompassing almost 20 years of working with computers as a hobbyist).When I was a working police officer, computer crime was an esoteric specialty area—investigators in small- and medium-sized agencies rarely encountered a case involving digital evidence, and the term cybercrime was unheard of in most police circles.
Today, all of that has changed. In fact, our whole way of life has changed over the past two decades, and many of those changes can be directly attributed to the Internet. I met my husband on the Net in 1994, when I was still a cop and he was practicing medicine.We’ve come a long way, baby, since then.
Today, the two of us make our livings online, as authors, consultants, and providers of online training. Ninety percent of our business is conducted via the Internet. Many of our friendships began in the virtual world, and we use e-mail to keep in touch with family members in remote locations, with whom we probably would rarely have contact otherwise.There are plenty of others out there like us, whose “real world” lives are inextricably intertwined with the time that we spend in the netherworld of cyberspace. It is inevitable, I suppose, that members of the same antisocial element of society I dealt with as a police officer would find their ways onto the Net, as well.