Criminal Investigation Techniques

When one is investigating terrorist groups there are four basic approaches that are used by the investigator to give them information that will be needed for different situations that they will run into. When looking at these techniques you have mail cover, investigative task force, and undercover operations.
The first of these techniques is the mail cover technique. This is used to obtain information by looking at outside correspondences that are sent through the US Post Office. This technique is normally preformed by a postal worker who never opens the mail just gets the information off the front of it. When there is suspicious mail it will be photographed and or copied then this copy or photo will be given to the investigator. When it reaches the hands of the investigator they will check for any coded messages, as well as learn the handwritings so that it will be easier to recognize. This technique is used to aide investigators in finding out information such as meeting times that could possibly be encoded on the envelopes that will give the investigators an advantage to figure out what times these organizations would be meeting.
This technique is used when two law enforcement agencies put there resources together to help fight terrorists. These agencies will collect different pieces of information and then share them with each other in a collective effort to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Shared valuable information is what is used by these agencies to help to prevent terrorist attacks. In an example, one agency may have obtained the time and location of a terrorist attack, while the other may have the date and when they share this information with each other they will have all the info they need to gain Intel on the terrorists to either bug the meeting place or infiltrate the