Government looks for answers; GSN provides the solution

The research organization for United States intelligence agencies is looking to provide funding for projects that will lead to radical innovations in intelligence collection.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Office of Smart Collection issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to propose research that dramatically improves the value of collected data.

IARPA is looking for research “to dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources” and hopes interested parties will be able to address the following issues including: innovative ways to identifying novel sources of new information, new ways to assess collection systems for improved performance, agile architectures that distill useful information at the collection and innovative ways to ensure the veracity of data collected from multiple sources, among other requests.

GSN: Government Security News thinks we have a solution. We recommend that IARPA look back at a story published on our website June 10 about Oversight Systems of Atlanta, GA. That was when CEO Patrick Taylor visited the GSN offices in New York to discuss how his software – already deployed to help manage waste at the Department of Defense (DoD) – could be used to help the same agency catch terrorists.

“There are lots of indicators that an analyst would check off when deciding if someone is or is not a terrorist,” Taylor told GSN back in the beginning of June “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.”

“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,” the GSN story explained. “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 explained during his visit to Manhattan. “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,” Taylor continued in the June 10 piece.

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

Although Oversight Systems might not be able to solve all the government’s problems when it comes to intelligence collection, we at GSN believe, after have met Taylor and heard about his commitment to helping federal agencies be better at what they do, that it might be a good place to start.