Mastering Data Management

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The sheer volume of travelers through a border on a daily basis points to the need for real-time border security

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that US border security officials realized that a passenger with extremist ties was onboard Delta flight 253 on Christmas day after the flight had already left Amsterdam. Border security officials were preparing to question him once the plane landed in Detroit.

Officials and commentators have suggested that the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day was the result of inadequate information sharing, a deficiency in acting on available intelligence, and an inability to connect the dots. This latest revelation suggests another failing: that our security and counterterrorism efforts are sluggish rather than real-time or predictive.

Apparently, it took hours from the time that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab checked in for a one-way transatlantic flight (for which he paid cash and checked no bags), to the time that border security officials realized that he should be subject to secondary screening.

If that realization had taken minutes rather than hours, Abdulmutallab could have been more closely screened before boarding the plane. Officials could have noticed that he was acting suspiciously or detected that he was carrying an explosive device.

The LA Times story points out that “the window for identifying a passenger overseas as a potential threat is limited” and that “in-depth vetting only begins once a comprehensive list, known as a flight manifest, has been generated, just a few hours before takeoff”.

This means that the systems that support our border security and counterterrorism efforts must be capable of rapid response times. They should be able to match hundreds of passenger details against watch lists, detect non-obvious relationships and apply predictive analysis to detect suspicious activity in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, in order to alert the appropriate officials in time to act on the analysis.

And they must do this for tens of thousands of flights every day.

My colleague Jonathan McDonald has written about the characteristics that should be required of entity resolution systems that are meant to protect American citizens. Fortunately, there are systems available on the market today that are capable of carrying out this kind of detailed analysis very quickly, even on commodity hardware.

Unfortunately, as a nation we’re becoming pretty good at collecting the clues and connecting the dots after an incident has already occurred. Let’s put in place systems and processes that connect the dots in real time, before the next terrorist tries to board a plane.