Technology can be used to help track and catch criminals, ranging from terrorists and organized criminals to those who commit credit card fraud. But a national platform would be a more comprehensive solution to flagging suspicious behavior and preventing crimes as well as apprehending criminals.
Similar technology is currently being used to track Internet-users behavior online—what sites they visit, what they purchase, what they search for, and sometimes even where they’re located when using the Internet. But what is the feasibility of developing a national platform to flag suspicious behavior? What would be the social implications of such a technological solution?
Moderating by Syracuse doctoral students Joe Treglia and Shuyuan Mary Ho, a panel of intelligence, fraud detection, and academic experts discussed this notion of a national behavioral anomaly detection platform.
Treglia and Ho explained that the platform would provide a “statistical firewall” by creating a system of automated analysis of data indicating incidents of malicious behavior, patterns, or activities across a wide variety of industries. The system would employ spider technologies and data mining to pull relevant information from such sources as banks, telephone companies, airlines, and Internet service providers.
Much of the discussion focused on the public perception of such a tool and the threat it posed to individual privacy. Although some retailers currently track people’s behaviors online to better target their marketing without too much resistance from the public, participant doubted the public would be as permissive with law enforcement agencies collecting similar information.
For the information to be useful to a law enforcement agency, the data has to be tracked to a specific individual. The public would have to be aware and approve of such tracking, and even then, some question the ethics of doing so.
“I told my children that I would read their text logs, so they knew I’d be checking up on them,” Treglia said. “But I think halfway through the day, they forget about that. I think the same thing could happen here.”
Similar technology is currently being used to track Internet-users behavior online—what sites they visit, what they purchase, what they search for, and sometimes even where they’re located when using the Internet. But what is the feasibility of developing a national platform to flag suspicious behavior? What would be the social implications of such a technological solution?
Moderating by Syracuse doctoral students Joe Treglia and Shuyuan Mary Ho, a panel of intelligence, fraud detection, and academic experts discussed this notion of a national behavioral anomaly detection platform.
Treglia and Ho explained that the platform would provide a “statistical firewall” by creating a system of automated analysis of data indicating incidents of malicious behavior, patterns, or activities across a wide variety of industries. The system would employ spider technologies and data mining to pull relevant information from such sources as banks, telephone companies, airlines, and Internet service providers.
Much of the discussion focused on the public perception of such a tool and the threat it posed to individual privacy. Although some retailers currently track people’s behaviors online to better target their marketing without too much resistance from the public, participant doubted the public would be as permissive with law enforcement agencies collecting similar information.
For the information to be useful to a law enforcement agency, the data has to be tracked to a specific individual. The public would have to be aware and approve of such tracking, and even then, some question the ethics of doing so.
“I told my children that I would read their text logs, so they knew I’d be checking up on them,” Treglia said. “But I think halfway through the day, they forget about that. I think the same thing could happen here.”
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