Crime is often committed locally but effective security intelligence combat is global.
Fighting crime has magnified in complexity in the 21st century with the growth of the internet and widespread usage of social media tools. Investigators are now bombarded with a myriad of sources from which intelligence can be gleaned but which often remain unutilised. This occurs because agencies have no systematic, structured or automated mechanisms to harness the information and get a single insightful view of persons of interest.
The Infinity solution for law enforcement and border security goes a long way to helping agencies overcome these barriers. There are five key things which make it unique:
Infinity fuses structured and unstructured information from data sources both inside and outside the organisation.
Achieving a composite view of a person of interest is no longer limited to breaking down the silos of information that exist within disparate law enforcement applications. Agencies must be able to harvest critical information from outsourcers, software-as-a-service providers, public data and open intelligence sources.
Infinity has been designed to do this; to gather data and fuse information from multiple sources including:
- Structured data from internal legacy applications and databases
- Unstructured data from internal sources – e.g. PowerPoints, pdf documents, excel spreadsheets and so forth
- External data from subscription services and public data sources – e.g. companies offices, share registries, credit rating analysts, merger and acquisition databases, central statistics information and others
- Open intelligence sources
Infinity’s core competency of harvesting structured and unstructured data from diverse sources is fundamental to achieving a single view of a person of interest and to the effectiveness of building a successful case and prosecution.
Infinity automatically maps data harvested from diverse sources into a common format enabling effective analysis and uncovering intelligent insights.
Information from diverse sources resides in different formats. Traditionally, assimilating and analysing data in multiple formats has been a tedious, manual and inexact process left to individual investigators.
The Infinity solution transforms this approach with the automated ability to translate the multiple formats of information into a common form. For example radio coverage can be transcribed to text, video footage can sourced for tags and audio components mapped to text. The mapping of multiple formats of data into a common denominator is of indisputable value in the intelligence gathering process. It enables links and patterns to be revealed that previously would have been all but impossible for even the most talented investigative resource to uncover.
Infinity translates and indexes data into multiple languages – breaking down regional boundaries.
In today’s global environment it is common sense that much of the data relevant to the intelligence gathering process will be in foreign languages. This presents two inter-related challenges – firstly, given the global nature of crime, it would be unrealistic to expect investigators to be fluent in the wide variety of languages spoken by the targets they are investigating. Secondly, articles and documents written in foreign languages are not as easily indexed as content in English which impacts the ability to detect the relevant data contained within them.
The multi-lingual capabilities of Infinity increase the effectiveness of intelligence gathering as language limiting boundaries are removed.
Infinity transforms information into intelligence that identifies evidence using state-of-the-art analytics – making light work of revealing links and recognising patterns.
Intrinsic to the value of the Infinity solution is its ability to uncover patterns, links and relationships across the volumes of data it mines. In short, it has been designed to find everything associated with a suspect under surveillance even, if on the surface, the link is not apparent.
The solution achieves this by applying logical but non-exact matching algorithms, contextual and taxonomy-based searching methodologies to uncover and maximise the insights gleaned. Probability based ranking and risk-based scoring ensures that results presented back to investigators are prioritised in importance.
Furthermore, significant emphasis has been placed on the visualisation and representation of search results. Investigators are presented with an easy to understand user interface which uses graphical icons in place of complex file menus to facilitate user interaction and understanding. While easy to use the solution is completely secure. Who sees what is controlled by role-based security ensuring that different levels of intelligence access are assigned in line with approved protocols.
Infinity has been designed to complement an agency’s existing technology investments.
Today, most agencies will have in place some type of technical solution to aid them in the intelligence gathering process. Infinity has been designed to complement but not necessarily replace what has already been invested in. For many the critical additional functionality that the Infinity offers is its proven expertise in traversing open sources of intelligence and applying sophisticated intelligent matching techniques to uncover insights that will complement those gleaned from more traditional sources.
As a standalone solution or as a complementary addition there can be no dispute that the Infinity solution is the critical missing link in the pursuit of an integrated, composite and complete view of any person of interest to the investigatory process of law enforcement and border security agencies.
