Some crimes are nearly impossible to predict or prevent – an anonymous drive-by to earn gang stripes, for instance, or a random mugging in an otherwise decent neighborhood.
But a lot of the biggest and most serious crimes – things like incidents of terrorism, complex murder plots, and human and child trafficking – most likely require multiple people, substantial planning and legwork. Conspirators must communicate and align on intricate courses of action. They try to anticipate problems and work out details.
As the tools wielded by law enforcement to combat crime become more effective and encompassing, these interactions can become their undoing.
“Events like terrorism don’t just happen,” said Cemal Dikmen, Ph.D., chief technology and security officer for SS8, which helps law enforcement obtain, fuse and analyze lawful intelligence to advance criminal investigations. “They require planning. So if you can get ahead of those activities, then you can capture those individuals before they carry out their attack. It’s about racing against time and collecting enough information before the crime actually happens.”
SS8’s new cloud-native Discovery platform, built on its flagship Intellego XT product, brings that capability to departments that may never have had such advanced digital investigatory tools.
Discovery helps investigators pull, combine, filter and evaluate lawfully obtained intelligence data from a wide range of key sources in real time, including 911 and call detail records, SMS and MMS data, metadata, license plate readers, surveillance video, social media and more. This can be useful as investigations develop for recognizing relationships and figuring out connections between individuals. Discovery uniquely combines this with location tracking ability, obtained by drawing data from sources like cell tower hits, GPS points, Wi-Fi connections and device interactions with other systems. This can tell investigators where subjects have been and where they are.
All this originally siloed data is brought together and consolidated into a streamlined, unified interface that law enforcement investigators helped SS8 develop. Discovery adds on-demand analytics, easy filtering and link analysis. It is scalable and affordable via a subscription offering to agencies of any size. It is fully cloud based and does not require any on-premise hardware.
“One thing our platform can do is bring in all types of data formats,” said DeAnn Baker, SS8’s vice president of marketing. “Even though the data seems disparate at the time, we’re able to identify connections and use that intelligence for instances like terrorism, allowing agencies to and preempt those plans before they happen.”
‘All that has digital fingerprints’
One common use case is kidnappings. These usually aren’t random – kidnappers want subjects with value, with colleagues or loved ones willing and able to pay for their return. Deliberations thus often accompany their selection, and then of course expand to their movements and potential moments of opportunity. Kidnappers may visit locations or follow their subjects to gather information before their attempts.
“All that has digital fingerprints,” noted Dikmen. “Especially in places like Africa, the Middle East and South America, kidnappings are a major use case for us.”
Members of trafficking networks naturally have substantial communications. Like any criminals, they may try to disguise their conversations with strategies like SIM swaps and burner phones or encrypted apps. Discovery helps investigators work around those gaps by extracting and correlating metadata, aggregating across sources, and analyzing links and patterns of life. When carriers or platforms provide content under appropriate legal authority (warrants, subpoenas, etc.), Discovery can ingest and analyze that decrypted data alongside the metadata.
“Once investigators understand the pattern,” said Dikmen, “it becomes much easier to identify and apprehend the people involved.”
Keep eyes on the edges
Another frequent use case for the capabilities offered in Discovery involves people illegally crossing borders. SS8’s location intelligence and geofencing abilities suit it to detect movements across those lines (a cost-effective alternative to deploying physical towers, the company notes). It’s been used by government clients for this purpose.
“Border security is one of the most prominent applications for this technology,” said Dikmen. “There are places where people are supposed to be crossing borders, and certain areas where you don’t expect to see people going back and forth. With our location technology, we can place geofences around border areas and determine where those people are and where they’re going. We can also recognize patterns. If you see, say, five people crossing at the same spot every Saturday night at 2 a.m., maybe next Saturday you position an agent there and wait to see who they are. Or, after they cross the border, you can see where they go. There are lots of different applications or use cases.”
With its location-intelligence module, Globe, Discovery can also help discern meetings and joint travel, a valuable way of identifying criminal networks. This is based on certain identifiers coming into proximity with a defined frequency or duration. The same approach may also identify someone following or shadowing an intended victim.
While border security has been a hot topic in the U.S. recently, it’s been a longstanding issue on a global basis. Smuggling, trafficking and conflicts have forced other nations to harden their perimeters; the mechanisms for doing so are thus mature and well-defined.
“It’s been a problem in other countries for a long time because of human and drug trafficking,” added Dikmen. “Those are often cross-border crimes and require organization. It’s not just one person. But the good news is, when you have criminal organizations, they have patterns. Once you can get ahead of that pattern, you can crack the case.”
Advanced analysis extended to all
Capabilities like Discovery’s aren’t new to the big police departments and federal law enforcement organizations that have traditionally led the way on digital forensics. But they’ve historically required significant expenditures and maintenance and thus been out of reach for smaller state and local agencies.
Discovery’s existence in the cloud helps even the playing field, eliminating the need for server rooms, pricey hardware and software refreshment cycles and dedicated IT staff. SS8 handles all maintenance and updates. Users just pay a monthly usage fee.
The same attributes that suit Discovery for cracking big cases help it resolve smaller ones as well.
“Not everybody’s going after terrorists,” noted Baker. “Sometimes it’s a midsize or smaller law enforcement agency that’s trying to solve a specific crime that impacted their community. This tool allows them the power of the data analytics larger organizations have, but only for the time they need it.”
For more information, visit SS8.
