The importance of data-driven intelligence in driving positive change

24 February, 2022

By Matt Burns from CameraForensics & Christian Berg from Paliscope

The importance of data-driven intelligence in driving positive change

Working tirelessly to empower investigators to gain more insights from data-driven intelligence, our partners at Paliscope are on a mission to stop the increasing number of criminal activities in the cyber arena. Empowering their users to take ‘real and essential action,’ Paliscope streamlines the entire investigative process and enables teams to rapidly and seamlessly solve cases and find those responsible.

Working directly with Paliscope, we provide access to a greater range of data to further empower users more than ever before. In doing so, they grant access to data-driven intelligence to drive positive change in communities around the world.

We sat down with Christian Berg, founder and deputy CEO at Paliscope, to discuss the importance of data-driven intelligence and more.

How is data-driven intelligence empowering investigations?

Data-driven insights are transforming operations throughout each discipline, industry, and organisation today. With analytics capabilities becoming more and more sophisticated, businesses can access quality insights to make more strategic decisions. What’s more, they can gain comprehensive visibility over processes and trends, and identify areas for greater optimisation and streamlining.

For law enforcement teams, data-driven intelligence can enhance research and investigative processes for multiple advantages. Rapidly and more efficiently sourcing effective information, identifying victims and perpetrators for rapid case resolution and a quicker route to safeguarding those in need of aid are just some of these.

Data-driven intelligence can aid investigators in a wide range of means. With access to a greater suite of tools, users have more capabilities at their fingertips.

Identifying patterns for a pre-emptive approach

‘Using data to uncover new intelligence and vital information is the holy grail,’ says Christian – ‘but if you can spot new patterns or new ways of offending behaviour, you can more accurately and efficiently allocate resources and choose the right sites to focus on.’

By combining Big Data analysis with a data-first mindset, this observation of new patterns is made more possible than ever before.

With a greater emphasis on a data-driven approach to investigations, users can more effectively uncover previously unavailable patterns and trends, such as the journey of the perpetrator through sites. This can unlock the chances to adopt a proactive stance and prevent abuse and exploitation in advance.

This is more important than ever in an age where the tech landscape continues to evolve and develop at a staggering pace. As new routes for abuse and exploitation such as live streaming emerge, a proactive approach may equip investigators with the capacity needed to stay one step ahead of offenders.

Understanding behaviour with Big Data

As well as allowing users to uncover patterns and trends to adopt a proactive mindset, we can also leverage Big Data analysis to more effectively understand offenders and offer support.

Through the analysis of keywords used, sites visited, and other metrics, we can more effectively interpret the behaviour of offenders to support and offer aid.

A cross between tech and psychology, we may be able to identify intervention points where we may introduce extra barriers and counter-narratives to dissuade potential offenders from continuing on a harmful course – instead offering an avenue for rehabilitation, education, and treatment.

The challenges of adopting a data-driven mindset

While data-driven intelligence can equip investigators with the tools needed to rapidly resolve cases and proactively prevent exploitation, some challenges must be tackled.

Legacy systems

A considerable challenge could be technical restrictions. With users commonly tied to traditional legacy systems, they may find the process of Big Data analysis unrealistic or unattainable.

Analysing and crawling billions of rows of data is highly demanding on systems and architecture, often requiring a vast amount of time to aggregate and process datasets –demands that may not be possible on traditional legacy systems.

Balancing user privacy

Another critical challenge that is currently being navigated worldwide is the discussion of user privacy.

With a history of user privacy being exploited in the tech landscape, and in an area where analysing user behaviour requires a delicate balancing act, we need to carefully ensure that user privacy rights are being respected while working to analyse available data to safeguard victims of exploitation.

However, while these challenges are threatening to prevent data-driven investigations to reach and achieve their full capabilities, work is being done all the time to close these gaps and equip investigators with the tools and processes to more effectively research cases.

Innovations in data-driven intelligence

While the tech landscape’s continued evolution has had a profound impact on data-driven intelligence, it’s no new medium. While we here at CameraForensics and Paliscope have worked alongside intelligence investigators to help drive positive change, we’ve been able to recognise, identify, and in some realms contribute to exciting innovations in tools and capabilities.

The modes in which data is stored, presented, or utilised continues to advance, and the sizes of datasets, forms of data, and the number of users are only increasing exponentially. It’s amazing to see the great tools and techniques that can take advantage of this surge in innovation

Committed to driving change

Throughout our partnership with Paliscope, we are proud to be contributing towards providing access to greater capabilities, tools, and insights for investigators worldwide.

In leveraging advanced data-driven analytics, we hope to empower users to proactively and rapidly uncover potential victims, while finding those responsible.

With a unified approach, we hope to continue collaborating with worldwide partners to uncover greater intelligence and drive positive global change. Learn more about our network of partners.


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