Today the trend is that perpetrators attempt to conceal their illegal activities within the everyday hustle and bustle of city life. Moreover the attack and crime patterns have a strong flavor of asymmetric warfare. As a result, valuable intelligence becomes scattered and remains hidden among the masses of data found in various databases like civil databases, intelligence systems, law enforcement databases, judiciary databases, open sources and stacks of related and unrelated reports.
It is well established through numerous instances across the globe that today's petty criminals have a propensity to transform into tomorrow's national threats, thereby the emergencing as much larger state and national security threats soon. An important observation that needs to be taken into consideration, is that there is a paradigm shift in the way crime, criminals, terror and terrorists (home grown or non-state actors) evolve in their modus operandi.
The biggest challenge that remains is the easy availability and subsequently, fusion of data from various civil databases like-
- Travel Record Database
- Border Crossing Database
- Financial Transaction Database
- Purchase History Database
- Hotel Stay Database
- Telecom and Internet Subscription Database
- Biographical and Social Network Database
- And Others
The fusion of these databases can be with other sources of intelligence like crime and criminal databases, intelligence databases and reports, IRs and Dossiers, HUMINT, Locational Intelligence (LOCINT), CDR and IPDR databases
With the increasing nature of perpetrators concealing their logistics for crime or terror planning and operations under the hood of day to day city life, a versatile platform which consolidates information from various data and information sources (including sensors) and analyzes them for hidden links and patterns.
In line with the requirements of today's anti-terrorism or organized crime, a crime and criminal tracking standalone database may not be efficient (though it has a critical role to play). While these databases and other similar tools play a very important and critical role in the overall fusion eco-system, the lack of an intelligence and counter-intelligence engine means that the productivity aspect of these siloed standalone systems is drastically reduced.
A major challenge area remains the inability of today's market available application stacks to automatically enrich records with information extracted from reports, IRs and Dossiers amongst other sensor data including (but not limited to) CCTV images, CDRs/IPDRs, LOCINT data, HUMINT, biometrics and subsequently analyze them collectively to investigate hidden links. Even with biometric and GIS enablement of the application stack, the fuzzy aspect of intelligence and counter intelligence are not embedded. They therefore still remain as search-query tools which are critically important but cannot drive the efficiency required for anti-crime/anti-terrorism efforts especially in today's and tomorrow's context.
It is with a deep understanding that AGC has created a framework which has been engineered after discussions with various stakeholders in the government, law-enforcement, intelligence and defense sectors. Some of the areas (non-exhaustive view) as addressed by the strategic intelligence framework are:
- Fusion based intelligence and analysis platform for Counter Terrorism, Counter Intelligence, Economic Offences and Cyber Crime
- Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
- Communication Intelligence (COMINT)
- Lawful Interception (LI)
- Locational Intelligence (LOCINT)
- Electronic Warfare
- C4iR for Urban Warfare, Disaster Management and Command Control based Emergency Response
- And others
Click the thumbnail below to view a perspective into the fusion environment of the Strategic Intelligence Framework.
Another interesting aspect of the framework remains that there need not be multiple instances to address similar areas related to Intelligence (apart from counter terrorism / organized crime). A single framework and instance can address them all. With this view, the Strategic Intelligence Framework as developed by AGC extends to multiple application areas, a few of which are mentioned below:
- Economic and Trade Intelligence
(
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to view a perspective)
- Economic Offence and Anti-Money Laundering Intelligence
- Safe City and Critical Asset protection
- Public Policy Intelligence (Public Healthcare and Social Sector, Revenue & Tax, Energy, Transportation, Food Security, National Income and Expenditure)
- Safe Forests
- Market Intelligence