The Security Sentinels

Computerworld - As far back as the 1970s, three women began preparing the world for the havoc about to be unleashed by networked computing. From their humble origins in law enforcement and academia, their influence on computer security practices has spread to government and private sector alike - despite the fact that two of the women had virtually no IT or scientific backgrounds.

These security pioneers include Martha Stansell-Gamm, a former U.S. Air Force judge advocate who started an arduous fight against breast cancer as she took over leadership of the then 8-year-old Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

While developing the DOJ's forensics procedures for search and seizure of electronic evidence, Stansell-Gamm crossed paths with Raemarie Schmidt, who developed digital forensics procedures for Wisconsin's branch of the DOJ. Schmidt's work helped set the standard for computer forensics now used by law enforcement agencies around the nation.

And there's Dorothy Denning, a distinguished computer science professor at Georgetown University in Washington, whose writings have set the stage for information security practitioners for the past 27 years.

Fight of Her Life

WHO IS SHE? Martha Stansell-Gamm Position: Chief, Intellectual Property and Computer Crime, DOJ Education: Phi Beta Kappa, DePauw University, Greencastle, Ind.; law degree, Georgetown University; master's in international law, Harvard University Claims to fame: Helped shape amendments to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Group chairwoman and editor, Federal Guidelines for Searching and Seizing Computers, 1994 U.S. representative in Council of Europe's Cybercrime Treaty, 1992-2001 Coordinated the DOJ's participation in many high profile investigations, starting with the investigation that landed computer cracker Kevin Mitnick behind bars in February 1995

For eight years, Stansell-Gamm partnered with her department chief, Scott Charney, to grow the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section of the DOJ. Logically, Stansell-Gamm was the best choice to fill Charney's shoes when he left the department in 1999. But the same week she learned of her promotion, she received news of a different sort: She was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.

The department was already smarting from the loss of its founder, and Stansell-Gamm worried about what would happen to her unit during this leadership vacuum.

"All I could do is put one foot in front of the other, count on the section to do right by me and to do right by our mission," she says. "Everyone just handled it. They jumped into unfinished, high-level projects they had no experience with and took over what needed to be done."