While some law enforcement agencies are seeking technology to find patterns in existing data, others are clamoring for access to even more data on the web. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has faced mounting criticism for using what many consider to be antiquated technology. Critics referred the technology used by ATF as extremely outdated and the agency itself is a national embarrassment. The agency is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions. Instead, when federal agents want to trace the source of gun sales, they must search records on microfilm, a process that can take as long as five days.
The ATF is now seeking proposals for "a massive online data repository system" that could allow their agents to make faster connections between suspects' names, social security numbers, telephone numbers and utility bills, according to a request issued last month. The new database would not be used to analyze gun purchases, but instead would be used to gather publicly-available data without requiring agents to go to multiple sources.
The database used by ATF analyzes the data largely by hand resulting in longer turnaround times on important information and intelligence research and analysis requests. Mark Tanner - President of Law Enforcement and Intelligence consulting mentioned that it's difficult for law enforcement to use the information effectively because it's not connected in a single database. Computing power would dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes federal agents to link pieces of information on suspects.
Blog posts " "Minority Report" - Not that distant future? " by Jason Buckner and "IBM's tool to tackle crime" by Anto Jeson Raj throws light on how Police departments across the country are using data analytics to predict where a crime is likely to occur and deploy resources to those areas. The FBI is creating a database that will connect suspects to crimes using not just fingerprints, but also palm prints, iris scans and images of faces.
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