Federal, State and local law enforcement personnel have combined to form a series of Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories (RCFLs) all over the United States. The RCFL is touted as a "one-stop shop" for computer forensics for the law enforcement (LE) community. The labs provide examination of digital evidence in support of action against crimes of terrorism, child pornography, crimes of violence, trade secret theft, theft or destruction to intellectual property, financial crime, property crime, Internet crimes and fraud.

There are currently 14 RCFLs and May 1 saw the announcement of two new labs in Albuquerque, NM and Los Angeles, CA respectively. It is expected to take about 18-24 months to outfit, staff and open them.

The existing 14 labs are in Portland OR, Menlo Park and San Diego in CA, Salt Lake City UT, Denver CO, Houston and Dallas in TX, Kansas City MO, Chicago IL, Louisville KY, Dayton OH, Philadelphia PA, Hamilton NJ, and Buffalo NY. Each lab has a staff of 15, but provides training for many in LE, and keeps interns busy as well. These regional centers help 4,750 local LE agencies with tasks ranging from advice to training and actual data collection in the field.

Some operational monies for the RCFL comes from the sale of seized assets. This helped to fund the labs as they performed 4634 digital forensics exams in 2007, processing 1.2 Petabytes of data (A petabyte is about 1,000 Terabytes, or about 1,000,000 Gigabytes) and while providing training for nearly 10,000 LE personnel.

For more information, visit the RCFL website.