Webinar Recap: How to Leverage Open Sources Online to Prevent and Investigate Crime

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Last week Wednesday we held a webinar for law enforcement and security professionals to learn more about how they can utilize and take advantage of the world’s largest publicly-available database, the Internet. Don’t worry if you missed it, we recap some of the items that you missed in this post.

OSINT AND DEEP WEB FOR LAW ENFORCEMENTArizona

The main focus of the webinar was educating on the value of collecting data from the Deep Web for analysis and use. As a quick refresher, the Deep Web can be classified as anything that can’t be found by a traditional search engine, like Google.

In short, most items that require you to issue a query directly into a web search form, such as the Arizona Department of Corrections Inmate page shown to the right, can be classified as Deep Web content and can’t be found through Google. In addition to Deep Web content, we also typically collect social media data.

CRIME ON THE DEEP WEB

Criminal activity is happening online. There have been many recent articles about gang busts occurring because police used publicly-available data to investigate gang-related crimes. Some examples include:

The Kids Arrested in the Largest Gang Bust in NYC Got Caught Because of Facebook.

Nearly 3000 Crime Reports Linked to Social Media Sites

Past customers have used OSINT from the Deep Web to monitor threats and prevent violence at events and investigate gang-related crime.

GETTING THE DATA

At BrightPlanet we specialize in harvesting data from the Deep Web. After we harvest content from the web, we tag and enrich it based on the end-user’s needs. That enrichment process varies heavily from end-user to end-user. We’ll extract items such as slang terminology, weapon names, gangs, violent terms and even locations within an end-user’s precinct to help better prepare the data for analysis.GeoTime

After data has been harvested and enriched, we then deliver the results in four different formats:

  1. Outpost Dashboard
  2. Custom Reports
  3. E-mail Alerts
  4. Access to the Raw Data

The data is customizable based on the third-party tools you want to perform the analysis of the data with. One of the third party tools we recommend is GeoTime; example visualization above and to the right. BrightPlanet customers can receive a free, one-year license to this geospatial analytics tool.

Want to learn more about our Outpost Solution? Check out our Outpost product page.




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