Thread: Technology to counter terrorism

Satellite navigators to make illegal landfall on the Indian coast; Global Positioning System (GPS) systems to pin point targeted installations; GPRS–enabled mobile phones, suspected to be Blackberries or similar handsets, to exchange emailed instructions; secure satellite telephones to make crucial exchanges virtually undetectable…the full extent of the technological muscle deployed by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week, is only now unravelling.

source: blog of Anand Parthasarathy & the Hindu

Ironically, many of these technologies are precisely the ones that have been hailed as removing the last remaining barriers to empowering the world’s citizens and making every one of them a member of the new ‘connected’ planet. Mobile phones are so ubiquitous that even with the stringent rules in place in India that establish the antecedents of every cellular SIM owner, it is virtually impossible to trace every user.

That is not to say that civilized society cannot respond, fighting technology with technology — and hopefully staying one jump ahead of the bad guys.

London is now held out as an example of a city where surveillance systems are deployed on a massive scale in public places. Exploiting the Internet Protocol — and an array of new semiconductor offerings from players like Texas Instruments and Freescale — has made it possible to come up with highly cost effective video surveillance systems, which multiplex each video channel up to four times, even while canny storage solutions and compression algorithms, reduce the massive data overhead.

Indian designers like Ittiam, eInfochips and eCon Infotech have come up with canny systems that can be usefully deployed as part of a ‘desi’ solution to the large scale surveillance that will inevitably become necessary as a fallout of the Mumbai tragedy. Having captured vast quantities of public imagery, its analysis, checking against a data base of known suspects is the next challenge — one where face recognition techniques are being tried out. As yet a work in progress, face recognition might yet be the ultimate weapon that will stop terrorists in their tracks well before they can do damage.

Security agencies worldwide are increasingly called upon to monitor the electronic environment hoping to intercept conversations that might give away plans of terrorists. In recent years, specialist players like Basis Technology Corporation and Content Analyst Company, both based in the U.S., have harnessed natural language processing technology and content analytical tools to identify linguistic and location-specific features buried in unstructured text.

Source: blog of Anand Parthasarathy & The Hindu

Source : The Hindu : Sci Tech / Information Technology : Taking on terrorism with state-of-the-art technology