While Congress tries to figure out where to get the money for its health care overhaul, perhaps it can take heart in the cost-cutting efforts of one bureacracy.

Nestled among the fancy computer equipment at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Cyber Crimes Center in Washington is an odd piece of hardware for a federal agency: a PlayStation 3 game console.

In fact, the center’s computer forensics department has a rack filled with a half-dozen of Sony Corp.’s PS3s . They’re not for entertainment, though; there’s not a controller or video game in sight. Instead, ICE agents have found that the consoles are masterly password hackers.

“They’re just great with simple math,” said computer forensic agent Douglas Skinner, adding that such equations are the key to cracking encryption.

Federal search and seizure laws don’t permit enforcement officers to compel suspects to give up passwords for confiscated computers. That means the Cyber Crimes Center, which focuses on transnational computer crime ranging from terrorism to the illegal pharmaceutical trade and sex tourism, needs another way to get inside encrypted machines.

They had been using $8,000 servers to generate passwords, until they discovered the $299 gaming system could slightly outperform the servers. “This is an area that we’ve really exploited to save the taxpayer money,” Skinner says.

Claude E. Davenport, senior special agent at the center’s office of investigations, said procurement officials raised their eyebrows when they saw game consoles on their acquisition requests. But, given the PS3’s ability to crunch numbers, the center has been able to justify buying 40 of the machines. Together, the units can crank out several million passwords per second, Skinner said.

There’s one catch, though. Sony has released a new version of the gaming system which is slimmer and quieter. That’s good news for people in the family room but bad news for forensic agents, since the new model doesn’t run the Linux operating system crucial to code cracking. The Cyber Crimes Center has been trying to snatch up old-model PS3s, hoping to buy 40 more.

-- Rob Margetta, Congressional Quarterly