Monday, 27 April 2009

At a time when increased border control is exercising the minds of both international governments concerned with security, and holidaymakers anticipating lengthy airport queues, Detica, the information intelligence specialist, today unveils an innovative approach to smarter border control.

In his address to the 'Policing the Borders' conference held in London today, Imam Hoque, Senior Director and Head of Detica's Technology Innovation Group, sets out the challenge. "While globalisation has caused a dramatic increase in cross-border travel and trade, it also presents a significant risk to domestic security. Trans-national organised criminal networks involved in illegal immigration, smuggling, tax evasion, drug running and terrorism are exploiting the increased movement of people, goods and money across international borders. Facilitating legitimate travel and trade, while preventing those who might cause harm by entering a country, calls for nothing less than a transformation in border management."

The issue, according to Hoque, is that the situation has become increasingly complex. "The scope of border management has extended from the border itself to areas both before and beyond the traditional physical boundary. Meanwhile, the relentless advance of the digital revolution means there is now a cyberspace border to protect as well as real-world land, sea and air frontiers. Perhaps most significantly, embracing a truly risk-based approach is proving to be a major challenge for many border management agencies. Despite implementing new screening processes, there is still scope for generating better quality intelligence for risk-based targeting of people, goods and transportation. Otherwise, time can be wasted pursuing targets that turn out to be no threat at all - the so-called 'false positives'.

The solution, according to Hoque, is for those responsible for risk-based targeting to exploit the latest innovations in intelligent high volume data analysis. This echoes remarks made a few days earlier at the World Customs Organization's 2009 conference in Marrakesh, where the Moroccan Minister for Economy and Finance, Mr. Salaheddine Mazouar, remarked in his keynote address that: "The use of IT is crucial for facilitating trade and combating cross-border crime". However, Hoque issues the following caveat: "Although border protection agencies use a range of data mining methods to identify potential threats within large volumes of border movement data, these methods are in danger of becoming obsolete as criminals evolve their methods, collude with insiders and exploit false identities in order to operate below the radar".

To meet the challenges of 21st century border control, Detica has enhanced its pioneering social network analysis solution, Detica NetReveal®, with risk-based targeting modules for the screening of people, goods and transportation at international borders. This builds on Detica's unrivalled track record in helping large government and commercial clients deploy risk-based targeting to uncover large-scale fraud, money laundering and other types of organised crime.

Since its launch three years ago, Detica NetReveal® has quickly become the market-leading social network analysis solution. Detica NetReveal® is unique in the way it can exhaustively cross-reference billions of data records from multiple sources to identify patterns of links missed by traditional data matching techniques. Using Detica NetReveal®, border protection staff can now identify, understand and evaluate networks of collaborating individuals across disparate and often unconnected sources of data and so spot the elusive 'needle in a haystack'. Because Detica NetReveal® can cope with poor quality data due to either accidental or deliberate manipulation, this means it is no longer possible for criminals to avoid detection using variations in identity.

To tackle the challenges of cross-border data analysis, Detica NetReveal® has the added ability to identify highly unusual changes in behaviour as well as matching incoming data, in real time, against existing criminal networks in order to speed-up investigations. The system can also be extended to accommodate richer and more complex forms of 'unstructured' data such as biometrics, still and moving images, and written language.

"We now have the potential to revolutionise border control in the same way that we are revolutionising other industries", concludes Hoque. "Using Detica NetReveal® we have made investigations up to five times more efficient, reduced false positives to one-tenth of what they were and, through unearthing new criminal networks, yielded ten times more crime to be detected. Through the right mix of technology, organisation and process, we can now empower and support border protection staff. Border management agencies will then be in a stronger position to implement intelligence-led policing, make better-quality interdictions and, ultimately, achieve more with less."

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