How Can Mobile Device Data,Tower Data,Call Data Records & Predictive Analysis Help Prevent Terror Attacks?

For most of us, our cell phones are our lifelines. Our cell phone witness and capture a lot of information about what we do, see, and share in our daily lives. We may not note or recall where all we have traveled and which route we took through the but a cell phone data can give accurate log of your activities to the second. Cell phones are recording your activities every second and sending it to telephone company, app company and Google, As I have mentioned earlier as well, a small set of data by itself seldom has any value but by data analysis and correlation with other data sets we can tell a lot about people. There are these products called Predictive Analytics tools that can this data to predict your next move. Today criminals & terrorist use this mobile phones and we can cell phones and use CDR & tower data to catch the terrorist. (Just read my blog on how Google collects cell phone data including your voice sample to know what we are dealing with today, but that's not related to today's post)

For example the terrorist who did recent kidnapping and murder of security personal in J& K can we caught using their cell phone data and future kidnapping can be prevented by using predictive analysis of this data. You might think that your cell phone is safe so long as you keep it tucked away in your pocket and do not use applications, but companies have been developing technologies to “force” our phones into giving away information without physically accessing our device. These technologies are called "Cell Site Simulators"or IMSI catchers. One of such popular products is called “Stingray.” The names may change, but all of these devices are regularly being used by USA & UK for law enforcement surveillance, These devices are designed to interfere with cell phone signals by pretending to be cell phone towers. By mimicking towers, the devices intercept signals to gather data, such as metadata and content of phone-calls, personally identifying information, and data usage, and have been especially popular as a tool for tracking the location of particular cell phones.

Technology Architecture for Mobile Surveillance

Let's assume a criminal 'A' has been involved in 10 terror incidents and another criminal 'B' was involved in 2 terror incidents they may be carrying 1 or 2 mobile phone. Predictive analysis can scan through huge bulk of location data and highlight the phone numbers that were present in the locality at the given time. We can also trace their activity for a duration of time and create a 

profile of the person and predict

1) What is his residential area

2) What are the addresses he frequents

3) What are the number of his associates and by correlation who are his associates?

4) What is a persons daily routine?

5) Does he own a personal vehicle or not

6) By further correlation with data from financial institutions we can predict the persons credit-card or banking details

7) We can tell about his family members or the people who stay with him 

As you can see this data analysis tells a lot about people that can help safely identify a persons link with crime incidents.  Security agencies can monitor their activities of shortlisted candidates and trap them to prevent crime. Apart from using the data and tools that I have mentioned Mobile Data activity surveillance requires coordination between telecom companies and government security agencies and USA/UK have been successfully able to build such mechanism and prevent crime.

Drawback - Misuse of telecom data  & prevention 

Increasingly broad use of cell site simulators by law enforcement is also controversial for many reasons. Apart from the fact that the devices themselves indiscriminately invade the privacy of everyone because they connect to and can capture data from, all cell phones within their range, the fact is these devices can also been used in controversial ways for example by deploying them disproportionately in areas made up predominantly of people of color. But this is not a serious threat and a democratic government can define protocol and monitor the use of these devices and captured data by its officials. What is important is that such monitoring devices along with "Smart Software" can monitor cell phones and at the same time secure the captured data thus protecting the privacy of non-criminal elements by way of negating cell profiles that do not have any suspicious activities over a time. Right now the priority of government is to minimize causality in areas affected by terrorism and it is critical to use Cellular Data & Data Intelligence tools to aid our security agencies.

Intelligent Sensors for Predictive Maintenance of Railways

When comparing European Rail with Indian Rail you will notice quite a lot of differences. European rails are limited companies & are definitely more professionally managed as compared to Indian Railway which has catered to fancies of Railway Ministers who had no understanding or education to manage railway. Ministers did not know How & Why railway has to run like a profitable business if it has to safely transport passengers. A loss making company cannot spend on safety of its passengers and accidents will further cripple the railways. Railway does not need to server Fancy Tea in Mud Cups to become popular - Indian's requirements are very basic, we want punctuality, cleanliness & above all safety of passengers.
                                             Being software architect and a fan of Event Driven Architecture ( An event triggers a software process that checks the type of event and accordingly performs predefined relative action, helping us build smarter software that can decide next task based on previous event). To give a simple real life example, if a "Duranto Fast Train" that is supposed to travel with max speed of 120miles per hour in a particular sector, crosses a station at speed of 130 miles per hour then an unmanned 'Speed Sensor" located at every few kilometers, will captures the speed and sends it to a Rail Database in Real Time or Immediately in layman's language. What happens next is that a Smart Software program that is watching Database for any unusual event understand that the current speed captured by sensor is more than Speed Limit for this particular ' Duranto Fast Train' and this is a EVENT that needs to be ACTED upon. The program next checks what are the recommended actions for 'THIS OVER SPEEDING EVENT' and triggers those actions.
Let's say there are 3 recommended actions in the given order of priority
1) Send SMS to driver that he is over speeding along with time, location & speed data
2) Send SMS to NEXT 5 stations to manually monitor the speed of the train
3) Send SMS to Rail Management so that over-speeding is captured in drivers report card & he is given warning and training if required
The software will perform above 3 actions and continue to watch for other events. Since it is smart software it is able to use other data to identify each train running across the country so One Software will be useful for all trains. This is very simple & limited example of how Sensor, Software & Internet can bring automation in monitoring one aspect of operation & improve safety - rail safety has many aspects as we are all aware and Sensor/Software/Events can help make rail journey safer. Railways in Europe are using Ultrasonic and Microwave sensors to detect flaws in engine parts, wheels, tracks. Ultrasonic sensors emits short ultrasonic pulses and detects the echoes that are reflected from the object - in this case the train. he echoes can be analyzed to predict potential breakdown and help prevent accidents before they can happen. Indian Railways only advantge is as a late comer they have options and technologies that have been tested so they can pick and choose and go for a custom solution. Is railway considering it? Spending money on research is great but if the research does not consider the lessons learnt by Euro Rail and US Rail and comes out with totally different type of solution that has not been tested in real life then we are wasting money. Companies likfe TIBCO have worked withh US and European railways to design Sensor based solutions and they can guide Indian Railways. I would be keen to work on such a project that will change the security paradigm of Indian Railway and guarantee safe journey to each Indian traveler