The evolution of digital technology as well as its adoption over the last decade has been a remarkable event. It is hard to think of any disruptive technology that has been adopted on such a wide scale by most of the households in America. But this has also created significant challenges for the criminal justice profession because digital technology is becoming a major medium of crimes such as theft of personal identity and financial fraud. A study by McAfee suggested that cybercrime cost firms $1 trillion globally and this doesn’t include the cost to individual citizens (Mills).

Further complicating the issue is the fact that older criminal laws are ill-equipped to address many of the legal issues arising from cyber crimes. The progress in legal framework to address the issue related to cyber crime many of whom didn’t exist before, has been slow. In addition, the new wave of criminals defies the old perception of crooks. These digital criminals are sophisticated, often educated, and leave minimal trail of their activities. Thus, the challenge in the field will be to increase the technological proficiency of criminal justice professionals and give them better training to familiarize them with the ways of digital criminals. The criminal justice profession may also attract more individuals with high technological sophistication. So far the progress in training has been slow because many departments still don’t have cyber crime divisions and only the high profile tasks are pursued, mostly by FBI.