The Justice Dennis O'Conner analysis and recommendations from the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, has caused many law enforcement and intelligence agencies to reflect on their capacity to analyze "raw" or unstructured data. The vital importance of a criminal and intelligence analyst has again been illustrated through the dangerous reliance on information vs. intelligence. As all analytical subject matter experts will state, intelligence is the final product of collection, collation, evaluation, analysis, and dissemination. Until information is evaluated, sourced, and confirmed reliable it should not be counted upon for any judicial process, reasonable grounds, or strategic and tactical planning.
Unfortunately, with this reminder, we are faced with the reality that the unstructured open source data imperative for analysts to review is too voluminous to handle. Consequently, we must look at technology alternatives that support the role of a criminal and intelligence analyst. There is always an element of risk associated to automation, but considering the alternative of not discovering valuable and relevant facts - the risk is acceptable.
Analyzing open source data is very time consuming and thus, the human resources necessary to research and analyze raw information are significant. The fundamental issue is the huge effort required to manually extract and convert unstructured data into meaningful "Entities and Facts" that can be collated and indexed.
A technology solution to this problem exists today and is within reach of the Canadian intelligence community; the Inxight suite of SmartDiscovery products!
SmartDiscoveryTM Awareness Server - Search Multiple Data Systems and Sources
SmartDiscoveryTM Automated Entity Extraction
SmartDiscoveryTM Automated Fact Extraction
SmartDiscoveryTM Automated Categorization
Exerpts form the analysis and recommendations from the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar:
"...Recommendation 3: The RCMP should ensure that those involved in national security investigations are properly trained in the particular features of such investigations...The RCMP should ensure that the specific types of information at the basis of national security investigations are analyzed with accuracy, precision and a sophisticated understanding of the context from which the information originates, with a view to developing intelligence that can lead to successful prevention and prosecution of a crime..."
"...Recommendation 8: The RCMP should ensure that, whenever it provides information to other departments and agencies, whether foreign and domestic, it does so in accordance with clearly established policies respecting screening for relevance, reliability and accuracy and with relevant laws respecting personal information and human rights..."
"...Recommendation 11: Canadian agencies other than the RCMP that share information relating to national security should review recommendations 6 to 10 above to ensure that their information-sharing policies conform, to the appropriate extent, with the approaches I am recommending for the RCMP..."
About SmartDiscovery™ Inxight SmartDiscovery is the only complete enterprise solution for information discovery. Its comprehensive set of advanced text analysis tools includes search, entity extraction, fact finding, categorization, and visualization. SmartDiscovery's comprehensive metadata creation and search capabilities, for applications ranging from information retrieval to data mining to trend analysis is powered by Inxight's industry-proven linguistic analysis capabilities.
Inxight intelligence customers include: Battelle, Commonwealth Secretariat, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), General Dynamics, Internal Revenue Service (IRS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Unified Combatant Commands, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), U.S. Navy.
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