The expanded use of encryption technology worldwide has become a focal point in the pursuit of business interests of high-tech companies. As a result of the consumer drive for privacy, companies are finding themselves investing millions of dollars in ensuring that the immense volumes of data stored on people’s devices are encrypted by different layers of security.
This trend has been a cause for growing concern amongst national security and law enforcement agencies around the world, who traditionally relied on telecom carriers to help in effectuating permitted electronic surveillance.
Encryption and modern technological hurdles
A relatively recent example of how this data encryption can affect law enforcement is the terror attacks that took place in San Bernardino in December 2015.
Following the attacks, the FBI came into possession of a mobile phone belonging to one of the suspected shooters. Due to Apple’s privacy policies, the request to unlock the device was denied and as a result, it took the FBI almost four months to access the data evidence on the phone, requiring legal action and a private third party's assistance in the matter.
While access to the potential information found on the device may not always be fruitful in instances of lone-wolf attacks, it could be crucial in identifying criminal or terrorist networks and preventing the next attack.
This encryption race extends also to the apps downloaded on people’s devices. Activity on encrypted apps such as Telegram has proven that the pursuit of data encryption, while noble, is being leveraged by criminals who wish to engage in illicit activities.
Thanks to these privacy features, criminals can operate under encrypted multi-technology “eco-systems” unseen by law enforcement and run many criminal network activities ranging from drug trafficking, pedophilia, human trafficking to terrorism, money laundering, and ransomware.
From these policies comes a necessity for renewed response in order to maintain civilian safety. Innovative cyber defense solutions have emerged as additions to open-source and geo-spatial intelligence, ensuring that a more holistic approach can be taken towards security by gathering crucial data and analyzing it to provide actionable insights to law enforcement agencies.
The Era of Data-Driven Intelligence
Acquiring this data, however, is only the first part of a comprehensive security equation. The process of transforming intelligence into insightful data has become a painful one due to the sheer volumes of data generated thanks to the expansion of information technology. Additionally, the intelligence collected is often broken, disjointed and in great need of context for it to generate precious insight that can be useful in fighting crime around the world.
Several startups in the private sector aim to address these new data collection and analysis challenges faced by law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies.
Intellexa specializes in data collection and analysis and was born out of this need to break the organizational silo of putting a complete intelligence picture together. Intellexa is led COL (ret.) Tal Dilian, a veteran in the intelligence arena. Dilian founded Intellexa with a group of friends from the industry.
Intellexa combines data gathering with human intelligence
With their combined decades of experience in the field, the team assembled by Dilian seeks to harness solutions for the problems they have witnessed firsthand by pairing decision making based on data intelligence gathered and actionable insights to develop a much more holistic approach for law enforcement and cyber defense.
Often, agencies find themselves faced with hours, days and weeks of data compilation. These processes have the potential to lead to incomplete insights and thus unsuccessful operations that are born mainly from human error.
Intellexa’s unique technological approach improves workflow and efficiency and accounts for this human error all well significantly reducing the time it takes to assemble puzzling data. This is done whilst helping to maintain the leverage of human intuition in insight, ensuring that this crucial factor in intelligence operations is not pushed aside.
What arises from this technology is a complete picture that ties insights together allowing for operational efficacy. The end goal is to provide overarching knowledge of potential or real-time events taking place in the digital or physical space that may endanger the security of civilians.
For more information: Intellexa
This article was written in cooperation with Intellexa