OPINION / Using good technology to find bad people

By Jonathan McDonald

Many government organizations are charged with combating terrorism, identifying criminals and effectively applying immigration policies. All these activities require that persons of interests (and organizations and networks) be accurately identified. Identification is an extremely complex process that is only compounded by increasing data volumes, complex relationships, and tightly coupled application and data architectures.

“Entity resolution technology” enables security personnel in intelligence, integrated law enforcement and immigration and border control agencies to rapidly identify persons of interest and detect and defeat threats before they occur. Gartner, a highly regarded research firm and consultancy organization, has been tracking the entity-resolution market for several years and stated in a recent report:

“Entity resolution and analysis was previously an obscure technology that has come to the forefront as a result of world events and market forces where it is used to identify the use of false identities and networks of individuals who are attempting to hide their relationships to each other.”

There are a number of government organizations responsible for counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence initiatives, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense, and other law enforcement, intelligence, immigration and border control agencies. These groups share many common goals in their efforts to combat criminal activities that impact national security. These goals include:

Stopping terrorism by finding potential threats before they happen;

Reducing crime by identifying potentially harmful persons of interest when in custody, and during field investigations and analysis;

Protecting the nation from potential threats trying to enter the country and detecting other unlawful border crossings;

Meeting or exceeding citizen service expectations (credentialing, verification, renewals, etc.) in an increasingly critical and high-risk environment;