Page 87 - Cyber Warnings

Taming information overload for effective border controls

By Dr. Enrique Segura, Speaker at INTERPOL World 2017, CEO & President, Securiport

1
In 2016, global outbound travel exceeded $2 trillion, for the first time ever. Despite a marked
increase in security threats, people all around the world still desired to travel and take vacations.
However, the sheer volume of people crossing through borders daily has made it very difficult
for immigration security analysts to do their jobs of investigating crime at or across borders.

In the age of big data, authorities tasked with border security have too much information to deal
with, yet are responsible for quickly finding threats before they affect their country. Trained,
experienced analysts are essential yet scarce resources. Training a new analyst is a process
that spans months and years, and that requires significant investment on the part of the border
security authority.

The answer to this has traditionally been to provide the analysts with ever more complex tools.
These analytic systems provide the equivalent of a “workshop, materials, and tools” for a
trained, seasoned, and practicing analyst who can then “build anything they want” from the
available data.

For a new analyst, however, these systems can be overwhelming, as they present huge
amounts of data and palettes of analytics to choose from, usually with little supporting training or
tutorials. Even for a trained analyst, knowing which analytics to use to answer a question is
daunting – and leads to analysis paralysis.

We need a way to provide all analysts with a guided path to their objective, while enabling
advanced analysts to operate unguided based on their developed tradecraft.

Principles of guided analytics
Systems developed with guided analytics focus on aiding border security officials with a clear
set of starting points and then steering them towards a set objective. Guided analytics is built
upon the following four principles:

Start with the objective, not the data
We interact with a system with a purpose in mind. It’s easy to lose that purpose when
confronted with data – do we start with the traveller that matches our narcotrafficking profile, or
the organization that they may belong to, or the address of the hotel they stayed at while in
country? With guided analytics, security officials must first define their end goal. The system
then suggests data that helps meet that objective saving officials from scouring through
hundreds of data points to connect.

1 http://www.itb-berlin.de/media/itb/itb_dl_all/itb_presse_all/World_Travel_Trends_Report_2016_2017.pdf
87 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2017 Edition
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