Die digitale Glaskugel

Stellen Sie sich vor, es geschieht ein Einbruch und die Polizei ist schon da. Weil sie bereits vor dem Einbruch weiß, wo die nächste Straftat verübt wird. Und was wäre, wenn es einen Vorhersagemarkt für Regierungen gäbe, die immer schon wissen, was passieren wird – und das Geschehen deshalb verhindern oder befördern können?
Schnapsidee oder ein großes Projekt oder beides?

Ein Beitrag über Big Data und Predictive Politics nachstehend in der Anlage: Die digitale Glaskugel

Quellen

Max Biederbeck, 23. Juni 2016, Lassen sich Kriege und Terror berechnen, bevor sie passieren? WIRED.de. Abgerufen am 28.12.2016.

N.F. Johnson, M. Zheng, Y. Vorobyeva, A. Gabriel, H. Qi, N. Velasquez, P. Manrique, D. Johnson, E. Restrepo, C. Song, S. Wuchty (2016). New online ecology of adversarial aggregates: ISIS and beyond. Science, 17 June 2016: 1459-1463.

Moral Reasoning by Terrorists

See further down a groundbreaking empirical study on terrorist mindsets published in „Nature. Human Behaviour“ recently. Results offer new perspectives for threat assessment und prevention:

„We found that moral judgement in terrorists is abnormally guided by outcomes rather than by the integration of intentions and outcomes. This pattern was partially related to emotion recognition and proactive aggression scores but independent from other cognitive domains. In addition, moral judgement was the measure that best discriminated between terrorists and non-criminals.“ (Source: summary)

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Kostenlose Risikokarte bei German Business Protection

Eine kostenlose Risikokarte als erste Unterstützung bei der Reisesicherheit ist über die Website von German Business Protection hier erreichbar.

Neue Risk Management Lösungen: OSINT, Länderrisiken und Reise-Sicherheit

Jenseits der für den deutschen Raum – gerade unter Preis-/Leistungs-Aspekten wegweisenden Traxpat-Lösung für Reisesicherheit und taktisches Krisenmanagement bieten sich für OSINT-Anwendungen auch Echosec (für geo-basierte Suchen) und gegebenenfalls im angloamerikanischen Raum auch operative Produkte von NC4 oder iJet an.

TRAXPAT: „Der traxpat® Global Risk Monitor ist ein globales 24/7 Krisen-Informationssystem, mit dessen Hilfe kritische Ereignisse weltweit detektiert, analysiert und über ein Geoinformationssystem dargestellt werden. Kommunikation und Alarmierung erfolgen automatisiert. Ereignisse der folgenden Kategorien werden georeferenziert abgebildet:

• Meteorologie, Umwelt, Geologie
• Politik/Sicherheit
• Technologie, Transport
• Biologie, Gesundheit
• Komplexe Notfälle.

Über unternehmensspezifische Layer können Zusatzinformationen wie z.B. Länderdaten, Flughäfen, Krankenhäuser, Gesundheitsinformationen, Reisewarnungen und Risikobewertungen eingebunden und verknüpft werden.“ (Quelle: Website)

NC4: „NC4 Signal™ is a social media monitoring tool that is designed to filter through the endless flow of information across major social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, and presents you with a customized stream of rich, relevant data in real-time. NC4 Signal provides law enforcement, public safety and emergency management with the ability to leverage social media in developing intelligent insight. Delivered through the Microsoft Azure Government cloud, it is available anywhere, anytime from any web-enabled device.“ (Quelle: Website)

iJet: „iJET’s Global Intelligence solutions are designed to protect your personnel and help to ensure continuity of operations. (…) Our Global Integrated Operations Center (GIOC) is founded upon best practice methodologies pioneered by the world’s most advanced intelligence organizations, and staffed by analysts and subject matter experts with diverse backgrounds appropriate for supporting our nine threat categories – Entry-Exit, Communications/Technology, Legal, Financial, Environment, Culture, Health, Security and Transportation. We maintain an in-depth intelligence database on more than 191 countries and 363 cities. Our expert analysts monitor the globe in 30 languages, 24 hours a day, to ensure that our clients have the best information available to aid in critical decision-making.

• Worldcue Global Control Center: iJET’s global intelligence subscription-based products available in a single tool that allows clients to prepare for, monitor and respond to threats that may impact their people and assets around the world.
• Intelligence Alerts: SMS- and email-based notifications ensure clients are aware of potentially dangerous or disruptive incidents before they occur, or as they unfold in real-time.
• Daily Intelligence Brief: Released at 0630 EST, Monday-Friday, this tactical product covers recent developments by region and includes all alerts and situation reports from the previous 24 hours.
• Health Intelligence Monitor: iJET’s weekly publication capturing the latest intelligence on a range of diseases, and more deeply exploring recent developments in the field of travel medicine.
• Monthly Intelligence Forecast: Designed as a more long-term, strategic outlook, this publication offers our clients a 30-90-day assessment of key regional developments.
• Airline Safety Newsletter & Worldcue Airline Monitor: iJET’s Worldcue® Airline Monitor and quarterly Airline Safety Newsletter provide business leaders with two powerful tools to make decisions about airline carrier safety and help reduce travel risk across the entire organization.“ (Quelle: Website)

Wer Intelligence-Support auf der strategischen Ebene sucht, der wird möglicherweise – neben den bereits in diesem Blog diskutierten Angeboten von Recorded Future oder (für Web-Intelligence) Blab auch das Leistungsspektrum von Predata prüfen:

Predata: „Subscribers to the full Predata platform receive access to the prediction engine, which runs regressions between signals and event sets to identify sources indicative of volatility and build predictive indicators based on them. Predictions can be run using current data or benchmarked using historical data to calculate standard statistical measures of efficacy.“ (Quelle: Website)

Der hier verlinkte Bloomberg-Beitrag – das Medien-Unternehmen nutzt selbst die Dienstleistungen von Predata – gibt interessante Hintergrundinformationen. Die folgende Grafik verdeutlicht die Logik-des Systems am Beispiel des Social Media-Pegels zu unterschiedlichen Terror-Anschlägen.

Quelle: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/this-startup-is-predicting-the-future-by-decoding-the-past#media-2

Handwriting analysis: new data for an old debate?

If you are interested in the epic debates of psychodiagnostics at a distance, try this current piece in the Washington Post citing research that claims to have observed a statistical association between a large CFO-signature on official documents filed with the SEC and „creative reporting“.

Well, one thing is for sure: this will not end the discussions about pros and cons of – by the way, largely unvalidated for wider psychological claims – handwriting analysis …

Which of course, is of forensic interest, e.g., for authentification or signs of neurological disorders etc.

Down the Country-Month Rabbit Hole

A very interesting evaluation of publicly available datasets for politics and crisis analysis.

Good food for thought!

Down the Country-Month Rabbit Hole.

Extrem selten, aber keineswegs unbekannt: Fakten zum „Aircraft-assisted suicide“

Anbei der Link zu einem aktuellen Beitrag auf der Homepage von Proteus Secur Consulting & Solutions zum Thema „(Erweiterter) Suizid von Piloten: Faktenlage und Prävention“ mit weiterem Hintergrundmaterial: „Das Phänomen „Aircraft-assisted suicide“ ist extrem selten, aber keinesfalls unbekannt. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Thema existieren bereits. Wir wissen aus der Beratungspraxis im Bereich Personalrisikomanagement, dass gesundheitliche Probleme von Arbeitnehmern wie psychische Beschwerden und Belastungen im beruflichen Umfeld der Patienten selten offiziell adressiert werden und – wenn überhaupt – nur den Weg in private Praxen und das allgemeine öffentliche Gesundheitssystem finden. Suizidgedanken von Mitarbeitern, gerade in Hochrisikoberufen, gelangen dem Arbeitgeber und den entsprechenden Entscheidungsgremien im Regelfall nicht – jedenfalls nicht systematisch – zur Kenntnis.“ (Quelle: Homepage)

Der Text beschäftigt sich auch mit Vorschlägen aus der Luftfahrtsicherheit, um dieses Problem zu adressieren.

 

Echosec, or: on the uselfulness of geo-tagged social media search for security and crisis management

Over on their blog, the people from Echosec, provider of location-based search, have shortly dipped into the potential of geo-tagged social media analysis, when looking at the recent Paris terror attacks during the lens of advanced search-tools.

It is obvious that in the future any kind of structured threat-assessment (e.g., as in personal security and protection or travel security) will have to rely on comparable tools for threat management and risk scanning.

In terms of developing such a toolset for risk and security management cockpits, it will have to cover macro level analysis (see e.g. Stratfor or other providers), should be able to generate short term intelligence on temporal and geo-spatial patterns for crisis assessment (such as Echosec or utilizing the forward-looking capabilities of Blab) and it will need to deep dive into the internet for subtle crisis signals and longer-term build-up of critical situations (e.g. by the help of Recorded Future).

Looking at the corporate security staffing needs many European companies face, when setting the scene for a pro-actively managed global risk landscape, there seems to be quite some room for improvement!

Top Ten Ethics & Compliance Predictions and Recommendations for 2015 by Navex Global – what’s in it for (continental) Europe?

Recently, Ed Petry has published Navex Global’s predictions regarding trends in Compliance Management for 2015.

So, what is on their top-10-list?

1. Increasing pressure to maximize the ROI of ethics and compliance
2. Dealing with conflicting legal requirements: guns, drugs and marriage in the USA
3. Culture (still) trumps compliance
4. Maybe one size does fit all: Moving toward a uniform, global model for compliance
5. Regulatory enforcement moves down market
6. Gender diversity—are quotas the answer?
7. Crime and punishment: Chief Compliance Officers who fail, get targeted by law enforcement, as cases in UK and the U.S. do demonstrate
8. Key trends from the U.S. Dodd-Frank Whistleblowing Program annual report
9. Technology-enabled ethics and compliance is ready for takeoff
10. Cybersecurity: A risk that needs to be on your ethics and compliance to-do list

While this selection might be somewhat skewed towards an anglo-american perspective on compliance management (e.g., the strong focus on any kind of compliance-ROI), at least 6 of the identified trends  ring a bell in continental-european, especially German ears as well!

They coincidend quite nicely with findings from the recent trend study bei Proteus Secur Compliance and Solutions GmbH based on in-depth-interviews with a sample of German CCO’s (mostly DAX-based).

These interview-partners describe a growing importance of cybersecurity issues, they see – quite obvious when focussing on current German policy discussions – regulatory issues that tend to drive „a one size fits all“-approach as well as gender-discussions.

And, yes, there is no way for midsized and smaller companies to avoid embracing compliance and integrity. Who still thinks, his (mostly) or her firm can do without it, will pay dearly. This is – by and large – no  more a prediction, but a fact.

Alas, although sharing a view that these topics might be relevant, there is still some dissent that technology or unified processes might be all the answers. Culture very often is the root cause for  many compliance-dysfunctionalities. It is also an essential part of any answer to overcome the more complex forms of resistance to integrity and compliance management.

In intercultural terms, it seems to be quite interesting to notice, how much leeway we allow for individual dilemma management and integrity leadership vs. process-driven solutions: in the end both perspectices are neccessary – whatever will be the real trends for 2015.

In about a year we will know better …

It’s getting crowded in the niche of predictive intelligence and web-based future forecasting

… well, somewhat at least, as there is no longer only Recorded Future on the playing field.

They are ahead of the crowd, as they have rapidly expanded and promoted the integration of other services with their offerings (such as imaging, ethnographic sentiment analysis or forensic data analysis software), making higher value-offerings as well as conceding (at least as subtle byline) that the new toys are by themselves not as far-reaching, as expected …

But, while Google ventures-backed Recorded Future aims high at the intelligence and security communities, Seattle-based Blab seems to be targeting primarily those who want to see the next shitstorm coming right ahead (as a comment at „Gruenderszene“ aptly states it).

Want to try another angle? Look at renewed efforts to bring crowd-based intelligence prediction to life, e.g. as EMBERS is going to do (with an excellent overview on their background research-papers here)!