Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) all over the world face intensifying personnel shortages. Most are unable to meet recruitment targets or even to compensate with new hires for ongoing retirements. Financial pressures also play an undeniable role, with one study finding that compensating for a two-year loss in officer numbers across England and Wales alone would require more than a 50% spending increase. Moreover, many new officers, analysts, and other support staff need years of training and experience to become expert in the methods and techniques to solve complex cases such as fraud and cybercrime.
The shortage of law-enforcement resources—from patrol officers to forensics analysts—costs society billions of dollars per year in excess crime losses. New and existing personnel are in a race to meet that challenge in the increasingly digital landscape of investigation and evidence. The technology to examine electronic footprints is critical to modern police work and solving crime today. It is also the resource multiplier making it possible to mount sophisticated responses to scattered digital clues.
Built through years of collaboration with law enforcement and the intelligence community, SS8 solutions for data collection, management, and analysis help level the playing field. The SS8 platform extends visibility, reach, and insight over vast expanses of potential evidence. It streamlines processes by automating away manual tasks and overcoming the shear bulk of information available to investigators, reducing unnecessary work so that every analyst and investigator can accomplish more in less time.
Helping Reduced Teams Collect and Access Data at Scale
The landscape of information that investigations draw on has changed dramatically in the past 10 years or so. Encryption of nearly all communications content has pushed LEAs to focus more on message metadata and other sources such as location intelligence. At the same time, mobile bandwidth has exploded, and new communication channels from over-the-top services such as Telegram and WhatsApp to social media have become far more significant. To assemble the digital breadcrumbs they need, analysts must access a complex landscape of sources: open source intelligence, the deep and dark web, facial recognition, and license-plate readers, to name a few.
Short-staffed investigative teams must contend with a diversity of data sources across potentially thousands of targets and hundreds of concurrent incoming streams. All the while, they must often keep track of and switch among multiple data tools, adding inefficiency and potential human error at every turn. The effort to capture, ingest, and process the information is harder because of personnel shortages, and the data fatigue that comes from the effort can erode morale and burn out analysts, making staffing challenges even worse.
The SS8 platform eases the analyst burden with a single pane of glass that makes it easier for them to pull in data from every source. APIs and ODBC data connectors make it possible to effortlessly access information, without gaps and without the need to set up every connection manually. Fast Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) lookups across legacy sources reduce the overhead for investigations to benefit from far-flung data. And the efficiency of handling all those operations from the SS8 console helps small analyst teams be more effective.
More Nimble Workflows for Leaner Investigations
Decades of work with law-enforcement and intelligence analysts informs the design of the SS8 platform, including to meet efficiency challenges. SS8 MetaHub unifies data from diverse sources that would otherwise be siloed so it can be interrogated together, without manual steps. The SS8 platform as a whole provides a tight workflow that carries through analysis to the preparation and export of an evidential playlist for use in prosecution.
Superior data-management capabilities benefit investigations of all types and sizes, notably for resource-intensive work on high-incidence, low-resolution crimes such as vandalism and petty theft. Data-driven automation of laborious tasks is critical to efficiency, and it can be instrumental in solving cases. For example, a hypothetical retail theft ring might be broken by correlating CCTV from the crime scene with TikTok video that shows the thieves showing off the stolen merchandise. Computer vision could readily find that connection, which could easily be prohibitive by manual means.
As AI becomes more deeply embedded into lawful intelligence workflows, use cases such as facial recognition in the retail theft example will increasingly help extend the resources of short-staffed agencies. It will become possible to identify subjects across multiple recordings using voice prints, while speech-to-text will make large repositories of call recordings instantly searchable, and much more.
The SS8 platform’s ability to unify, manage, analyze, and visualize full-spectrum data will act as the foundation to build those capabilities on. As LEAs evolve to support complex investigations with limited resources, advanced lawful intelligence will help safeguard the success of individual analysts and the organizations and public they serve.
About Kevin McTiernan
Kevin McTiernan is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in the security industry. His extensive expertise spans big data, cybersecurity, network security analysis, and regulatory compliance. As Vice President of Government Solutions at SS8, Kevin specializes in the implementation of advanced intelligence solutions for the U.S. Government, law enforcement, and the Five Eyes alliance. He is an accomplished public speaker and an adamant supporter and volunteer for the National Child Protection Task Force. You can learn more about Kevin on his LinkedIn profile.
About Rory Quann
Rory Quann is a Senior Solutions Engineer specializing in End-to-End Government Solutions at SS8 Networks and brings with him over 14 years of experience in the Lawful Interception and Data Analysis industry. Prior to joining SS8 in 2013, Rory worked for BAE System Applied Intelligence where he was focused on large scale Government deployments of Intelligence Solutions. Rory has held multiple positions in the Lawful Intelligence space ranging from Deployment Engineer, System Consultant, and Sales Engineer focusing on Country-wide Passive deployments. Rory is a Certified Microsoft MCSA Engineer and EMC Certified deployment Engineer. Learn more about Rory on his LinkedIn profile here.
About SS8 Networks
As a leader in Lawful and Location Intelligence, SS8 is committed to making societies safer. Our mission is to extract, analyze, and visualize critical intelligence, providing real-time insights that help save lives. With 25 years of expertise, SS8 is a trusted partner of the world’s largest government agencies and communication providers, consistently remaining at the forefront of innovation.
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.
