Page 41 - GCN, June/july 2017

In the wake of recent terror- developed, \\\[but\\\] in the near future, government’s broad geographic, de-
it could be possible to replay an ac- tual terror attack in a \\\[virtual reality\\\] simulation to train law enforcement how to spot the actual attacker in an event that actually happened.”
Law enforcement groups — in- cluding the Morristown, N.J., Po- lice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Navy — have used simulations to train agents for several years, so the technique isn’t new. But Bambenek said the technology has improved significant- ly in recent years.
Increasingly, he said law enforce- ment groups want to apply virtual reality to prevention so that they can move beyond table-top exercises and allow a “red team” to attempt a terrorist attack in a virtual environ- ment with defenders trying to thwart them.
The FBI and the Defense Depart- ment are already testing that ap- proach, he added.
But how are tools that can pre- dict future terrorist actions — once the stuff of the science fiction world of Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” — becoming operational? Much of the innovation is due to advances in virtual reality and ana- lytics, but the access to voluminous amounts of both broad and focused information is also playing a crucial role, experts said.
“We are seeing a revolution in the scope and size of open-source data,” said Mark Testoni, president and CEO of SAP National Security Services. “Whether you are in law enforcement or an intelligence ana- lyst or operator, you need to identify people, their relationships to others and groups, their location, where they are going, what they are doing and how their patterns of behavior change.”
Today, practically every transac- tion people make — including send- ing personal messages and photos and filing financial, medical and tax records — is digitized, and so is the
ist attacks in the U.S. and Europe, domestic and inter- national law enforcement
agencies are investigating how at- tackers were able to slip through intelligence-gathering networks and what can be done to prevent future attacks.
Big-data analytics, machine learn- ing and artificial intelligence tech- nologies offer federal, state and local law enforcement agencies the oppor- tunity to predict the probability of attacks based on many factors, said David Rubal, DLT Solutions’ chief technologist of data and analytics and a fellow at the Institute for Criti- cal Infrastructure Technology.
By mining “personal, behavioral, facial recognition, geo-location, so- cial media and financial data,” gov- ernment agencies, law enforcement groups and their technology partners can make better predictions, he said.
“Probability and risk \\\[are\\\] deter- mined based on the intersections of this data and patterns over time,” Rubal added.
New technologies are also revo- lutionizing how officers prepare for attacks.
“Agencies are...using virtual real- ity, derived from advanced user ex- periences and gaming, to simulate ‘life-like’ situations for law enforce- ment to improve predictability and situational awareness when training officers for responding to a terrorist threat,” Rubal said.
John Bambenek, threat research manager at Fidelis Cybersecurity, said sophisticated training simu- lations are invaluable in the fight against terrorism.
“It’s one thing to train border- crossing agents to spot suspicious individuals by looking for undue nervousness,” he said. “It’s one step better to have them in a full \\\[virtual training\\\] simulation and actually looking at individuals to spot them.”
Bambenek acknowledged that the technologies need “to be more fully
mographic and longitudinal data. Testoni said the situation “is both a challenge and an opportunity.”
“We can locate bad actors and track their digital footprints, but the morass of data is overwhelming and growing immensely,” he said. “New analytical platforms offer the power and potential to leverage this digital ocean and augment the great work being done by these professionals.”
Emerging commercial technolo- gies now allow for analysis on the fly and give users the ability to rec- ognize digital patterns in the lives of suspects, Testoni said. Those technol- ogies also make it possible to identify and connect suspects and organi- zations through their activities on social media and other areas in the public domain.
The sheer amount of potentially relevant data, rapidly improving analytics and advances in high-per- formance computing are giving rise to applications that can pair with al- gorithmic capacities and “allow for sentiment and link analysis in scores of languages, dialects and local con- ventions,” Testoni said.
And by cross-referencing all that data against traditional methods of collection and detection, there is growing potential “to more readily identify nefarious actors and their linkages to others,” he added.
In a matter of years, Testoni said, law enforcement professionals should be able to unravel and analyze terror- ists’ networks and then mitigate the damage or even apprehend them be- fore they launch an attack.
“Virtual reality is a truly power- ful technology in the evolution of games” for training law enforcement agents, said Kenneth Geers, a senior research scientist at Comodo and a former National Security Agency analyst. “Humans have short lives and simple habits. The basics of ‘The Minority Report’ are not only going to happen, they will happen sooner than we think.”•
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