The email was from Tom Burt, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. The subject line read “Urgent DCU Issue.” DCU is Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, one of the teams Tom managed. We created it fifteen years ago, and somewhat to my surprise it has remained unique in the tech sector. It comprises more than a hundred people around the world and includes former prosecutors and government investigators, as well as top-tier forensic, data, and business analysts. The DCU was born out of our anti-counterfeiting work in the 1990s but evolved into a digital swat team to work with law enforcement when
...more
