It's an exciting job. Being federal, I only ever deal with big ticket felony crimes. Primarily I work child exploitation, sexual assault of a child, human trafficking of children, and child abuse/neglect. Homicide, larceny, general crimes, fraud, and narcotics cases are all handled by my partner but in the interest of my personal mental health I get to peruse some of those cases at will.

My job involves kicking in doors, seizing complex computer and network systems, providing technical insight on interrogations (calling bullshit mainly), processing, carving, and recovering deleted data, training Police departments on forensic processes and tools, and setting up the more technical side of warranted surveillance missions. It's not all glamorous stuff, I still have to look at every video and image which is difficult and I have to write painfully long reports in very plain legalese so as to be understood by a jury and combed through by a lawyer. But, I love the job and wouldn't trade it for anything.

As for what to do to pursue this career. How technical are you? Have you worked at the system administration level at least? You will need to track down forensic certifications like EnCE and likely set a degree focus on some type of forensic study. Law enforcement isn't the only realm where digital forensics is valuable. Companies like Target have very complex forensic programs and today have some of the best forensic labs in the world. Yes, Target.

It's a wonderful field and has a great community, it's definitely a prime watering hole right now for people with advanced tech experience.