Mastering Data Management

Border Control agents must quickly identify persons of interest against potential watchlists and databases.

In my previous posts, we’ve defined "entity resolution" and examined two case studies, the Intelligence Community and the Integrated Law Enforcement Community. Finally, we’ll discuss entity resolution at our borders.

The Immigration and Border Control (IABC) community faces a tall order. With more than a million passengers entering the US daily through ports, airports and other border crossings, the IABC must quickly identify persons of interests.

Each person entering through a port of entry is reviewed and checked against relevant data sets to determine whether they are, or are associates of, known terrorists, or affiliated with terrorist organizations or any person of interest on a watch list. This must happen without delay.

Most individuals are legal entrants, not persons of interest, so the challenge for IABC agents is to be able to review documents rapidly to enable legal entrants to pass through quickly, while ensuring that undesirables are denied entry and are processed in the manner appropriate to their level of potential threat.

Although much of the information used by IABC is similar to IC and ILE, some is different. For example, just as the ILE tracks tattoos, IABC tracks the location that an individual is crossing the border as an additional entity to provide insight into the potential criminal groups that person may be affiliated with.

Entity resolution technology used by IABC needs to be able to rapidly and accurately identify entities of interest, prevent legal entrants from being mistakenly identified as persons of interest, and ensure that the majority of people are crossing borders quickly with minimal impediment.

The technology must be capable of processing a large number of transactions and deliver a response in less than 20 seconds or less. Access to specific details within the data may not be allowed or warranted, so there is often a need to support tactical situations where stoplight indicator (red/yellow/green) are required in response to queries by officers in the field.

Entity resolution helps IABC manage the flow of data to ensure timely border crossings while also helping ensure the bad guys don’t slip through the cracks.

Next week we’ll delve into the nitty gritty of what makes entity resolution tick.