Publications

theinquirer.net, By Wendy M Grossman, 16 September 2008

VOLUME MIGHT SAVE US after all. Or kill us, depending on your point of view.

This was the gist of a speech given by Tom Black, the chief executive of Detica Group to July's Homeland and Border Security conference. Every day three billion emails, eight billion text messages; every month six billion Internet searches. In 2007: 281 exabytes of data. By 2011: 1.8 zettabytes. What's an anti-terrorism squad to do?

To date, the government's approach has been to amass more and more data. But, as Black said and David Porter, Detica's head of security and risk, concurs, that's no help if the body of data can't be analysed. Porter tells fun stories about data mining gone wrong: the US army experimental neural network that perfectly sorted photographs with and without tanks - because it saw differences in the weather.

... In addition, says Porter, Detica is retained by banks and other organisations to spot good customers and detectcredit card fraud, money laundering, transport ticket fraud, and so on. "Anywhere that you're looking through a stream of transaction data to spot something 'interesting', where 'interesting' depends on your point of view." Terrorism is, of course, also on that list.

The nature of fraud has changed noticeably over time. "Five to ten years ago, fraud was perpetrated by one person and was monolithic in execution, whereas the sort of fraud we're seeing these days is decentralised, fragmented fraud, so they'll work as an organised, collaborative gang that exists for a time, perpetrates the fraud, and then dissolves." Each piece of the fraud is done by a different person, and each of those may slip past detection systems.

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