A new ‘Oversight’ for catching terrorists

Taylor

The government is always soliciting private industry to find ways to use commercial technologies for homeland security. And Patrick Taylor, CEO of Oversight Systems, headquartered in Atlanta, GA thinks his company’s technology might offer a solution to aid in identifying terrorist suspects.

“The government is always looking for the practicable application of commercial technology for homeland security purposes. They are always looking for companies that can provide solutions to their most pressing problems,” Taylor told GSN: Government Security News when he sat down to speak with us in our New York offices. “And what our system does is find issues and helps you to fix them.”

Oversight Systems has created an unique software that automates the data analysis process for a range of companies across the private and public sectors. Oversight’s Continuous Analysis Event Processing (CAEP) system helps users find and eliminate financial waste, and Taylor’s company has already saved the Department of Defense (DoD) $1.8 billion in fraud. The company has gone on to help the Marines and the Navy too.

“We use automatic ‘Integrity Checks’ and what they have are lots of indicators in them that find mistakes. In our classic role we might be looking for a duplicate invoice… [But] the same principles can be applied to the counter terrorism world because all you’re really looking for anomalies.”

The Oversight software uses advanced forensic analysis to identify transactions that might appear unusual or unexpected in some way; small errors that might be missed by the human eye. And by customizing the Integrity Checks, Oversight can sift through a multitude of data to find the smallest of mistakes in any type of industry.

But Taylor had a revelation when reading the executive summary by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the failed attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a plane bound for Detroit.

“I was reading the Christmas day bomber stuff and going, wait a minute those sound like the kind of problems we solve all the time,” Taylor told GSN.

“If you read the report,” he added, “they had all the data, and they actually even knew the questions to ask, but they had two problems. One, people weren’t reliably asking those questions, constantly and all the time. And, two, they weren’t combining the result effectively.”

Taylor, who is currently in talks with a variety of three and four letter government agencies within the Intelligence Community (IC), imagines that his company’s software could be customized to help analysts discover more effectively who is and might be a threat to the homeland.

“There are lots of indicators that an analyst would check off when deciding if someone is or is not a terrorist,” Taylor said. “What Oversight is really good at doing is pulling together these indicators from lots of data and from lots of data sources, and then asking a lot of questions and synthesizing the answer. The results would eventually lead us to say, hey I think I found a terrorist of interest.”

Indicators that could possibly tip off authorities to an individual attempting to undertake an act of terrorism include such actions as purchasing a one way ticket to Pakistan, buying an excessive amount of firearms or ammunition, ordering a certain type of fertilizer or – in the case of attempted New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi – purchasing a large quantity of certain types of chemicals at a beauty shop. With the Oversight software, each indicator would have a numerical value. As an individual continues to take certain actions, his or her score would increase.

“Its like a credit score,” Taylor mused. “Our software pulls all the data together, and based on the customized Integrity Checks, it could tell the user that there is a 50% confidence that the suspect is a terrorist. Then the suspect could set off another indictor and it becomes 75%.

“And the software lists the indicators as criteria in an easy to read, simple format so, in essence, an analyst in the IC can look across the criteria and say 'I see why the software scored the individual as it did.'”

Oversight’s software can even pull data together from different systems, regardless of how each government agency collects and files their information.

“I’ve talked to the CIA and they would love to get a common ontology,” Taylor tells GSN. “But whoever is in charge of one program doesn’t seem to agree with how another agency runs their program.

“And what we say is, we don’t care, It doesn’t matter” Taylor noted. “Whatever common definition you want to have is what we’ll have and we’ll translate it. You have one translation here, and a different one here, and a different one here, but with Oversight you end up with everything in the same model.”

For instance, because of misspelling of Abdulmutallab’s name, certain information indicating that he was a security risk was overlooked by authorities. But Oversight’s software can piece together information across the spectrum of the IC based on similar spellings of any one name.

“If you look at the Christmas Day bomber, they have all these data sources including TIDE and SEVIS and CCD. We can standardize the data, regardless of how each system operates and who is operating it."

But Taylor knows, in the end, Oversight can only do so much.

“I can run queries and create lots of indicators but someone has to look at it eventually and decide what to do,” Taylor tells GSN. “And that’s what the White House was getting at in their report.”