High-tech pursuit
of the bad guys

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

When Bill Jeitner says he misses police work, his nostalgia has nothing to do with the thrill of pinching a bad guy after a daring high-speed vehicle pursuit or perhaps an exhaustive foot chase through the back streets and alleyways of the urban jungle.
In fact, stereotypical "cops and robbers" scenarios like those are the main reason why Jeitner retired from the Philadelphia Police Department in 2002 after 22 years on the force.
Instead, Jeitner’s forte and passion was always outsmarting criminals. Although he’s no longer working in the public sector, the 51-year-old Wissinoming native still uses brain power to fight crime.
His Warrington-based company, BK Forensics, is on the forefront of the mushrooming field of mobile telephone and PDA forensics. PDAs are those pocket-sized electronic devices that are part telephone, part schedule book and part personal computer.
BK Forensics offers investigative services, computer hardware and software, support and training to public and private entities around the world interested in pulling often-hidden information from digital phones and PDAs.
Jeitner and his company have assisted authorities in England and Germany in their capture of suspected terrorists and helped countless local police departments build criminal cases against the small-time crooks that plague their communities.
The Lincoln High School graduate’s journey into the high-tech industry began in the 1980s, when he and his police colleagues figured out a smarter way to get a step ahead of Philadelphia’s drug dealers.
"When I started in narcotics was when the crack boom hit," he said. "We were just trying to get our arms around it."
By the end of the decade, personal computers were also experiencing a boom with more and more systems turning up in people’s homes and businesses, including those occupied by drug dealers.
"I started to see a lot of computers and PDAs and realized there had to be some information in there," Jeitner said. "Pagers were another thing (I saw). I knew if it was digital, it had to record information."
Jeitner also knew that the information in question, such as contact lists, financial records, e-mails and Web activity, could prove invaluable to investigators. So he decided to learn as much as he could about computer forensics, which was already in practice on the federal level.
Jeitner attended training programs offered by the FBI, IRS and Secret Service. In 1990, he became the first municipal cop in Pennsylvania to earn formal certification as a forensic computer examiner.
After a transfer from narcotics to the major crimes division, Jeitner helped build the police department’s computer forensics lab.
"Back then, I was more a leverage tool during the interview," he said. "(A suspect’s) mind would start going, and they’d think about all that they did on the computer. They wouldn’t know what we actually found and didn’t find."
After leaving the department in 2002, Jeitner served as a Chester County detective and helped that agency formalize its computer forensics lab.
Meanwhile, Jeitner and a pal from the Oregon State Police, Detective Steve Payne, figured that the next logical step was to do the same thing with mobile phones that they had done with computers. They teamed to incorporate BK Forensics in 2003.
"Everything that used to be done on computers is now done on cell phones," Jeitner said.
The principles are the same with computers and phones, he explained, but phones pose a unique problem because they all use unique operating systems, whereas computers fall into two basic categories — Windows or Macintosh.
Also, phone manufacturers closely protect the operating systems that they use for proprietary reasons.
"We’re reverse engineering all of them," Jeitner said.
The company’s software is designed to record information on a phone without changing any of the data or its all-important time stamps. Even deleted data is retrievable.
"We look at everything. Once it’s deleted, a user may feel, ‘If I can’t see it, it’s gone,’" Jeitner said.
But it’s not.
The company founder considers himself a hacker and not a programmer. Yet his practical experience in law enforcement and investigation allows him to understand the specific needs of the firm’s clients.
"I look at myself as more the practitioner than the developer," he said.
And as a former cop, he maintains his strong support for the police community. His company provides free training and technical support to law enforcement agencies and refuses to work as an investigator or expert witness in criminal-defense cases.
Because of the rapid-changing nature of technology and the inevitability of crime, BK Forensics figures to have plenty to do in the foreseeable future.
"Where we’re at with cell phones now is where we were with computers in 1990," Jeitner said of forensic investigation. "It’s different technology. Techniques are different. But the concept is still digital." ••
Visit www.BKForensics.com for information.
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com