Figures released by the UN seem to speak for themselves: by 2030, over 60% of global population will reside in urban centers. This development is expected to increase even further the overload on critical infrastructure such as water and electricity grids. Additionally, many countries’ debt to GNP ratio has increased, and this is expected to drive poverty rates higher, and consequently, boost crime rates as well. Criminal activities have become increasingly sophisticated over the years. In addition to all these figures, a new report by the INTERPOL concludes that in the course of 2012, an inconceivable quantity of new data estimated at 2.5 billion Gigabyte was created each day. Video streams, pics, docs, emails, text messages and data received from digital sensors: all this is flowing into servers. This flow is expected to increase by another 60% each year until a level of 40 trillion Gigabytes in 2020. It should be noted that 90% of all the data worldwide did not exist two years ago.
These numbers were the talk of the entire convention the INTERPOL recently held at Singapore, comprising over 1800 participants from law enforcement bodies, private sector representatives, academics and scholars, who came from over one hundred countries. The conference focused on current law enforcement challenges as well as on possible solutions for border security, Safe City management and crime prevention.
The vast quantities of data that abound all around us consist of information that may be used to identify security threats both physical and cybernetic, and respond to them. Nevertheless, this data still needs to be processed and identified. Governments across the globe are examining various possibilities of analyzing the data received from sensors (video cameras, simulation devices, license plate identification systems, pressure sensors and much more). This, in addition to the data gathered from social media such as twitter and Facebook. All this is designed to garner intelligence which can be used to prevent unwarranted events.
Fuente e imagen: i-hls.com