Back to blogging after finals and attending the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) conference in Detroit. DoDIIS filled an expo center with the Qs to America's James Bond, except instead of invisible cars the exhibitors focused on ways to enhance and secure information technology for intelligence, which in today's Intelligence Community is much more valuable. As part of the technology team from Crucial Point LLC, I wrote on a few of the vendors at the event. Here are a few examples of what I saw there:
IBM's Master Data Management software can provide a complete profile of an individual by uncovering his or her obvious and non-obvious relationships. For honest people, this simplifies background checks and such, but where the system gets really interesting is when Global Name Recognition kicks in to uncover an alias. Aside from understanding alternate spellings, nicknames, titles, and typos, the software can often find who's behind a false identity by analyzing their identity package. Fraudsters usually don't make up the details of their new identity from scratch. In order to remember the specifics, they re-use or modify details from their lives like their mother's maiden name or an old girlfriend's phone number. The Master Data Management software can uncover those links to pinpoint an actual identity.
Thetus Corporations’ Savanna provides analysts with search, discovery, and visualization tools by partnering with companies such as Kapow to pull information from web sites and all-source intelligence, Janya to perform textual analysis on that information, and then use MetaCarta, who's directory of locations is 7 times the seize of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's gazateer, to perform geospatial analysis. All of this allows analysts to explore questions and test hypotheses quickly yet completely, uncovering hidden links and then putting the whole package together in a coherent, unified, and searchable format.
On the hardware side, IronKey provides highly secure USBs. Though thumb drives have been blacklisted by many agencies because they can contain malicious code or extract classified information in a WikiLeaks scenario, IronKey seeks to make USBs secure again with a variety of safety features. They contain hardware encryption, active anti-malware software combined with automatic malware scanning, and remote administration to control what devices anIronKey can be used on and even to self-destruct when lost. Seriously.
There are dozens more covered on the blog we put together, DoDIIS Tech, on "the technology of the DoDIIS enterprise."
By Alex Olesker
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