INTERVIEW
my language skills to bridge conversational gaps in meetings with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Similarly, my cultural understanding gained through prior lived experiences in Japan in 2008 helped drive and inform my team’ s ability to foster deeper relationships with Japanese military and police.
AT: What type of fraud schemes caught your attention while you were investigating for the military? Can you also share what skills you think are important for investigating fraud?
JS: When I first started my career, the majority of my time in investigations had been primarily counterintelligence investigations ― national security-level crimes with the FBI. So the first time I heard of all these varied fraud schemes was still at the start of my career and had to do with romance scams, such as if a young junior airman were to be approached by an attractive, beautiful or handsome individual on the social media platforms. Back then ― about a decade ago ― Snapchat was a key tool that scammers would use because it enabled, for example, a nude photograph to be sent that would disappear almost immediately. These young military members would receive the photo and then, in exchange, they would submit money to these criminal actors. At that time, I approached the problem from a counterintelligence perspective for one of these junior military members. Were they involved in a classified work environment? Did they have secret or top-secret clearance? Did they work on platforms involving significant sensitive capabilities? I meshed that all together, which made me wonder why it was that these junior members were attracting so many romance scams compared to more executive, senior leaders in the military. This led me to the realization of their vulnerability due to the lack of education regarding romance scams and the lack of a full awareness of the access they have as military members and how that might be enticing to foreign intelligence actors who are trying to gain access to our critical and classified information. That was my first eye-opening experience with romance scams.
AT: In your military experience, did you have any cases where you have dealt with either human smuggling or human trafficking?
JS: One case that I ran in partnership with U. S. Customs and Border Protection( CBP) and brought to the attention of the Assistant United States Attorney was a migrant smuggling case. Essentially there was a military member who was new to the Air Force who was incentivized by a friend he met to smuggle Mexicans through the Arizona border into the U. S. for $ 2,000. It’ s such a low monetary amount to risk his career, his livelihood and risk getting caught ― which he did. He ended up getting caught by CBP in a full-on, high-speed chase. Running that investigation enlightened me to the importance of having a neutral mentality as you’ re approaching investigations because every investigation should be afforded an objective point of view from the investigator, without adding your bias to it.
In addition, it is important to have effective interpersonal skills working with law enforcement officers from different agencies, because you don’ t know necessarily what the internal culture is for different government, local police and state agencies.
AT: How has your investigative approach evolved since you first entered the military and are you incorporating new technologies such as AI?
JS: My understanding and appreciation for the importance of hard skills or technical skills has evolved. Certainly as an investigator, you need soft skills. But nowadays hard skills are extremely important in the data sciences. For example, for investigative analysis, you need to know certain software capabilities and tools to analyze criminal data trends to help inform someone like the chief of police of what the trends are in a certain neighborhood or part of town. I have also made it my goal to study more data science, learn more about structured query language or certain mechanisms that would enhance my investigative capabilities so that I can aggregate trends quicker and more effectively to help drive the course of the investigation and to better understand overall criminal trends as they evolve and emerge.
As for AI, as I was leaving my job with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, there were talks about how to better integrate AI into our day-to-day investigative operations. Some examples of possible AI usage were leveraging AI to scan agent notes, police notes or documents to essentially save time and make work efficient, as well as using AI to transcribe voice recordings of an interview and summarize and publish investigation reports. The human element would still be necessary to review and evaluate these summaries, but it could save that person hours of sitting at the computer and typing it out themselves.
However, security is an important component related to the data we are feeding into the AI machine. Say the government sells a contract to Company A to create a security protocol to secure the back end of an AI software so that cyber actors can’ t attack it and get access to personal information, such as interviews of victims and witnesses and subjects of a crime. But company A then tries to get the contract to a different company that is not as secure and no one’ s informed that company A has done this. The next thing you know, all of this sensitive government information is leaked to the public or personally identifiable information is compromised,
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