Category Archives: Data

Case Closed Software Announces TX-RAMP Certification

March 23, 2023 (Austin, TX)  We are proud to announce that Case Closed Software™ has achieved TX-RAMP Certification, a prestigious recognition that demonstrates our commitment to providing secure and reliable software solutions for our clients.

The Texas Risk Assessment and Mitigation Program (TX-RAMP) certification is awarded to companies that have met strict security standards and have implemented robust risk assessment and mitigation processes. This certification recognizes our dedication to providing our clients with the highest level of security and reliability in our software solutions.

At Case Closed Software, we understand the importance of protecting sensitive data and confidential information. That’s why we have invested heavily in developing a secure software platform that meets the rigorous security standards required by TX-RAMP certification.

We believe that this certification is a testament to our commitment to providing our clients with the best possible software solutions while maintaining the highest level of security and reliability. We are proud to have achieved this certification and look forward to continuing to provide our clients with the best possible service.

China building big data platform for pre-crime

Re-posted by Crime Tech Solutions – Your Source for Investigation Software
It’s “precrime” meets “thoughtcrime.” China is using its substantial surveillance apparatus as the basis for a “unified information environment” that will allow authorities to profile individual citizens based upon their online behaviors, financial transactions, where they go, and who they see. The authorities are watching for deviations from the norm that might indicate someone is involved in suspicious activity. And they’re doing it with a hand from technology pioneered in the US.
Tiananmen_Square_Beijing_China_1988_1-640x447As Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, the Chinese government is leveraging “predictive policing” capabilities that have been used by US law enforcement, and it has funded research into machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to identify human faces in surveillance video. The Chinese government has also used this technology to create a “Situation-Aware Public Security Evaluation (SAPE) platform” that predicts “security events” based on surveillance data, which includes anything from actual terrorist attacks to large gatherings of people.
The Chinese government has plenty of data to feed into such systems. China invested heavily in building its surveillance capabilities in major cities over the past five years, with spending on “domestic security and stability” surpassing China’s defense budget—and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology. And in December, China’s government gained a new tool in surveillance: anti-terrorism laws giving the government even more surveillance powers and requiring any technology companies doing business in China to provide assistance in that surveillance.
The law states that companies “shall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist activities”—in other words, the sort of “golden key” that FBI Director James Comey has lobbied for in the US. For obvious reasons, the Chinese government is particularly interested in the outcome of the current legal confrontation between the FBI and Apple over the iPhone used by Syed Farook.
Bloomberg reports that China is harnessing all that data in an effort to perform behavioral prediction at an individual level—tasking the state-owned defense contractor China Electronics Technology Group to develop software that can sift through the online activities, financial transactions, work data, and other behavioral data of citizens to predict which will perform “terrorist” acts. The system could watch for unexpected transfers of money, calls overseas by individuals with no relatives outside the country, and other trigger events that might indicate they were plotting an illegal action. China’s definition of “terrorism” is more expansive than that of many countries.
At a news conference in December, China Electronics Technology Group Chief Engineer Wu Manqing told reporters, “We don’t call it a big data platform, but a united information environment… It’s very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror, but what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities.”
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(NOTE: Crime Tech Solutions is an Austin, TX based provider of crime and fraud analytics software for commercial and law enforcement groups. We proudly support the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Units (LEIU) and International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA). Our offerings include sophisticated link analysis software, comprehensive crime analytics with mapping and predictive policing, and criminal intelligence database management systems.)

Asking data questions

Posted by Douglas Wood, Editor.  http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougwood.
A brief read and good perspective from my friend Chris Westphal of Raytheon. The article is by Anna Forrester of ExecutiveGov.com.
Federal managers should invest in technology that would help them extract insights from data and base their investment decision on the specific problems and information they want to learn and solve, Federal Times reported Friday.
Rutrell Yasin writes that the above managers should follow three steps as they seek to compress the high volume of data their agencies encounter in daily tasks and to derive value from them.
According to Shawn Kingsberry, chief information officer for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, federal managers should first determine the questions they need to ask of data then create a profile for the customer or target audience.
Next, they should locate the data and their sources then correspond with those sources to determine quality of data, the report said. “Managers need to know if the data is in a federal system of records that gives the agency terms of use or is it public data,” writes Yasin.
Finally, they should consider the potential impact of the data, the insights and resulting technology investments on the agency.
Yasin reports that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board uses data analytics tools from Microsoft, SAP and SAS and link analysis tools from Palantir Technologies.
According to Chris Westphal, director of analytics technology at Raytheon, organizations should invest in a platform that gathers data from separate sources into a single data repository with analytics tools.
Yasin adds that agencies should also appoint a chief data officer and data scientists or architects to assist the CIO and CISO on these areas.

Part Two: Major Investigation Analytics – Big Data and Smart Data

Posted by Douglas Wood, Editor.
As regular readers of this blog know, I spend a great deal of time writing about the use of technology in the fight against crime – financial and otherwise. In Part One of this series, I overviewed the concept of Major Investigation Analytics and Investigative Case Management.
I also overviewed the major providers of this software technology – Palantir Technologies, Case Closed Software, and Visallo. The latter two recently became strategic partners, in fact.
The major case for major case management (pun intended) was driven home at a recent crime and investigation conference in New York. Full Disclosure: I attended the conference for educational purposes as part of my role at Crime Tech Weekly. Throughout the three day conference, speaker after speaker talked about making sense of data. I think if I’d have heard the term ‘big data’ one more time I’d have gone insane.  Nevertheless, that was the topic du jour as you can imagine, and the 3 V’s of big data – volume, variety, and velocity – remain a front and center topic for the vendor community serving the investigation market.
According to one report, 96% of everything we do in life – personal or at work – generates data. That statement probably best sums up how big ‘big data’ is.  Unfortunately,  there was very little discussion about how big data can help investigate major crimes. There was a lot of talk about analytics, for sure, but there was a noticeable lack of ‘meat on the bone’ when it came to major investigation analytics.
Nobody has ever yelled out “Help, I’ve been attacked. Someone call the big data!”. That’s because big data doesn’t, in and by itself, do anything.  Once you can move ‘big data’ into ‘smart data’, however, you have an opportunity to investigate and adjudicate crime. To me, smart data (in the context of investigations) is a subset of an investigator’s ability to:

  1. Quickly triage a threat (or case) using only those bits of data that are most immediately relevant
  2. Understand the larger scope of the crime through experience and crime analytics, and
  3. Manage that case through intelligence-led analytics and investigative case management, data sharing, link exploration, text analytics, and so on.

Connecting the dots, as they say. From an investigation perspective, however, connecting dots can be daunting. In the children’s game, there is a defined starting point and a set of rules.  We simply need to follow the instructions and the puzzle is solved. Not so in the world of the investigator. The ‘dots’ are not as easy to find. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the needle is actually broken into pieces and spread across ten haystacks.
Big data brings those haystacks together, but only smart data finds the needles… and therein lies the true value of major investigation analytics.