People seem to think that law enforcement agencies around the country have the same capabilities as seen on TV and in the movies. People watch CSI and 24 and other shows and think that cops can track every suspect’s move across the grid.
The reality is that law enforcement is often way behind commercial enterprises, with long and lumbering budget cycles frequently preventing speedy adoption of the latest and greatest technology.
However, advances in — and acceptance of — cloud technology and other trends within the law enforcement community are changing things. Agencies are adapting. Although still not nearly as “sexy” as what the public may see on the silver screen, some of the newest technology available to police does bear some resemblance to that fictional fare.
Clouds in the Forecast
“First and foremost, it is all about security, whether that is physical surveillance or inside networks,” said Dave Denson, who serves as the Big Data Solutions Architect for NetApp. “Let’s start with the physical. Only a few years ago, video surveillance was a difficult and costly proposition, requiring a proprietary video management system to collect and monitor the various available video cameras.”
Denson said that cloud technology has altered that landscape. Having access to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions is eliminating the need to invest in cameras and video infrastructure.
“An agency can now hang a camera virtually anywhere and run that through a cloud system. Coupled with new IP cameras, that has opened up a world of possibilities. Instead of collecting video for analysis, live feeds are a reality,” Denson said.
More importantly, agencies charged with law enforcement and homeland security responsibilities can use IP cameras to get cross-agency feeds in real time, allowing police departments, for example, to view feeds from a school in an emergency. This has ushered in a new era of multi-agency collaboration. And those cameras no longer have to be static, but can now be on the move, on cars, on aircraft and UAS systems (once those truly go into LE use), and of course, on officers themselves.
“None of this is possible without cloud technology,” Denson said.
The focus on the use of cloud technology calls into question which cloud configuration is the most appropriate. Advances in cloud structure — public, private, or hybrid— allow law enforcement agencies to move elastically from one cloud to another, allowing for shifting data and information to different cloud environments.
Denson said that in general, the cloud is opening up the law enforcement world in other ways, as well.
“Surveillance as a service eliminates the capital investments and human resources that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive,” Denson said. “Small municipalities can now purchase surveillance in ways that previously would have been unrealistic.”
Cyber Security and LE
In addition to physical security, we’re seeing significant events in cyber security — cyber-attacks are proliferating at an ever-accelerating pace — requiring law enforcement agencies to closely monitor and guard their own networks.
“Just as agencies need to know who is entering and leaving their physical locations, they also need to understand who is coming and going on their networks,” Denson explained. “That means building smart firewalls to make sure that everything is scrutinized, while at the same time allowing for information to be obtained and analyzed from many outside sources. And this surveillance has to include access to servers in a data center, for example, to discourage the insider threat.
Agencies are becoming more adept at leveraging technology for lawful intercepts for criminal and security investigations. Today, these can range far beyond the traditional phone call to text messages, tweets and a variety of other media and platforms — all of which can paint a picture of where a criminal enterprise may be operating and how to obtain evidence that can be used both to stop crimes and to prosecute the perpetrators.
“This need for security information management has led to advances in building infrastructure, paving the way for imbedding this type of security information management right into the structure itself, tying the physical into the virtual. That allows agencies to see whether someone who is in the building may also be accessing a VPN, either deliberately or inadvertently passing information beyond the firewalls. And as new buildings are being designed, a cloud infrastructure can be incorporated right into the layout,” Denson argued.
For example, in some designs, the heat recovered from the building data centers can be used to heat the hot water. With the right design, desktop computers that might be sitting idle for much of the day can be reallocated to provide computing power for data collection and analysis.
“While none of these advances can be a substitute for traditional law enforcement practices, new IP-based technology and cloud services can provide capabilities long sought after but never before practical or cost-effective,” Denson concluded.
