Info Is Key In Stopping Terrorist Threat

Information exploitation is the key to the future of transport security, according to former Metropolitan Police senior officer Duncan Croll, now Director of Law Enforcement with Lockheed Martin.

[ClickPress, Fri Dec 15 2006] Mr Croll told delegates at the Maritime and Supply Chain Security Conference that maximising the effective use of information about individuals was “not just nice, its essential” in the fight against terrorism.

“To improve security in the transport environment, we need to know who you are, and everything about your travel documentation,” said Mr Croll.

Citing the example of screening at airports and travel terminals, Mr Croll said: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew who you were before you get to screening? Then, by the time you get to screening, your identity has been established; as you walk through screening, your identity is verified, and hopefully you can pass straight through without any delays.”

But he also warned delegates that there were dangers associated with having information overload, which led to either a “blizzard” effect – where there was too much information to make sense of – or the “mosaic” effect, where there was a lot of information held in a variety of places and on different databases, which was never pieced together to give the whole picture.

One company which focuses on providing systems to analyse that information is the Intergraph Corporation, and the company’s Security Industry Manager Dan Proctor share the platform with Duncan Croll to outline Intergraph’s approach to applying advanced technology to transport security.

Intergraph develop systems which take in information from a variety of sources, analyse it and deliver it as knowledge necessary to make real time security decisions. Focusing on this concept of “domain awareness”, Mr Proctor said there had been a major shift in security environments in recent years: “We are moving from a reactive posture to a proactive posture, and that’s a significant change in the philosophy behind security.

“We’ve now got to be able to respond to incidents before they become events”, he added, explaining that domain awareness was based on the principle of “the right information, delivered at the right time, in the right place and the right format, to the right person.”

Intergraph were among more than 150 leading companies on display at London’s largest ever security exhibition which ran alongside the Maritime and Supply Chain Security Conference, including SecurityOracle.com, the website for the security industry. Andrew Greenfield, SecurityOracle.com MD, said: “The standard of debate in the conference was matched by the innovation and technology on display in the exhibition, and we had a fantastic response over the two days from delegates and exhibition visitors alike.”

Security Oracle is owned and operated by NSI (HQ) Ltd.
Security Oracle is the UK's security industry internet portal.
Security Oracle provides news, views, forums, jobs and recruitment information for the UK security industry.

Andrew Greenfield
Security Oracle
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