A continued challenge in investigating organized crime is to map and understand the hierarchical structure of the criminal organization. Street-level wrongdoing detected by law enforcement may be far removed from the high-level decision makers that the investigation ultimately targets. While individual acts such as smuggling drugs, people, and weapons are important to disrupt in their own right, discovering the identities of those further up the command chain is vital to impact the criminal enterprise as a whole.
Creating data-driven profiles of all parties involved is a prerequisite for analyzing the relationships between them. The connections between a crew sneaking contraband ashore at night and the heads of the criminal organization responsible are defined by money. Mapping financial relationships within the organization can reveal those connections and related hierarchies, helping guide and give form to investigations. The SS8 platform provides a repository for multidimensional profiles of criminal individuals and organizations, with the ability to map, visualize, and draw insights from the financial and other relationships between them.
Profiling People and Organizations of Interest
Assembling the most complete set of information possible about people of interest requires not only identifying and accessing that data but also putting it into a structured form that is useful to investigations. The SS8 platform addresses that requirement with its powerful iDossier module, which generates and manages profiles based on collections of details about individuals and organizations. iDossier profiles are flexible enough to incorporate highly varied information types, from photos and video to text and data entries.
The iDossier profile on a subject of interest may include both identifying data such as date of birth, address, and employment history, as well as notable activities such as attendance at an event or presence in the vicinity of a crime. It also includes interactions with others, such as meetings and communications, as well as membership or other associations with organizations of interest. Building out a profile can easily pull in massive numbers of details; the SS8 platform houses that information and enables querying against it, revealing insights about profile data points separately and in aggregate with each other. In particular, it surfaces connections among profiles that add critical context for investigations.
Lawfully intercepted sources such as call data records and location intelligence are important primary contributors to iDossier profiles. Open source intelligence (OSINT) also plays a large role, often providing the starting point from public records such as addresses and phone numbers, augmented with information scraped from the internet using widely available tools and data feeds.
Other data sources are more restricted but still freely available to law enforcement agencies without warrants or similar authorization, such as criminal records, surveillance video, and information gathered in previous investigations. It may also include information gleaned from the deep and dark web, including stolen financial data and other secrets that are invisible to conventional browsers and search engines. The SS8 platform collates all these sources together and allows them to be analyzed as a single unified whole, maximizing their value.
Using Profiles to Generate Insights
The value of iDossier profiles comes in large part from their extensibility to include virtually any data source, as well as the ability to reveal connections between profiles. For example, a motor vehicle ownership record can be correlated with data from a license plate reader, placing the car at a specific place and time. That location intelligence can provide a point of reference to associate the car owner with a specific mobile handset, with meeting detection revealing patterns of life and proximity to other subjects of interest. iDossier provides a single pane of glass to gather and navigate the complex datasets and relationships involved.
These operational patterns can make iDossier profiles a central mechanism for advancing investigations. As the basic motivator for organized crime, money provides key insights about the criminal enterprise, and financial relationships can be discovered and tracked using iDossier. For example, a subject may have multiple relatives who have luxury homes and cars, without employment or other visible means of support.
Placing a subject of interest and their suspected criminal enterprise as the intersection among those profile relationships, the assets could be investigated as potential criminal proceeds. Further investigation of the purchases and potential transfer of money associated with them could set the stage for asset seizure, a critical measure to reach those who benefit from organized crime.
The SS8 platform provides rich visualization tools such as link maps to reveal these connections automatically, based on the investigator’s data set of choice and easy exploration with a point-and-click interface. These techniques can reveal the nature and structure of a criminal enterprise, helping investigations follow the money to target senior figures in illicit operations. As the agents of that investigative intelligence, iDossier profiles can help LEAs take decisive action to disrupt organized crime.
About David Anstiss
David Anstiss is Director of Solution Engineering at SS8 Networks. He has been with SS8 since 2015 and has significant experience in critical network architecture technology and advanced data analytics. He currently works as part of the Technical CTO Group under the leadership of Dr. Cemal Dikmen and is responsible for leading engagement with both intelligence agencies and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) around the world. He has been instrumental in helping them transition to 5G, defining system requirements to meet regulatory compliance. As a member of ETSI, he represents SS8 to ensure the adoption of cloud-native infrastructure is met with industry best practices and to guarantee that compliance of lawful interception is maintained. Learn more about David here on his LinkedIn profile.
About SS8 Networks
As a leader in Lawful and Location Intelligence, SS8 helps make societies safer. Our commitment is to extract, analyze, and visualize the critical intelligence that gives law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and emergency services the real-time insights that help save lives. Our high performance, flexible, and future-proof solutions also enable mobile network operators to achieve regulatory compliance with minimum disruption, time, and cost. SS8 is trusted by the largest government agencies, communications providers, and systems integrators globally.
Intellego® XT monitoring and data analytics portfolio is optimized for Law Enforcement Agencies to capture, analyze, and visualize complex data sets for real-time investigative intelligence.
LocationWise delivers the highest audited network location accuracy worldwide, providing active and passive location intelligence for emergency services, law enforcement, and mobile network operators.
Xcipio® mediation platform meets the demands of lawful intercept in any network type and provides the ability to transcode (convert) between lawful intercept handover versions and standard families.
To learn more, contact us at info@ss8.com.
