IBM Has The Tools For Digging Deeper Into DataIBM Has The Tools For Digging Deeper Into Data

After the feds collect data, they may need some help making sense of it. IBM is assembling a portfolio of companies and technologies that can help government agencies analyze the raw information gathered as part of the effort to catch terrorists and crooks.

IBM last year acquired privately held Systems Research Development, which makes software that lets law enforcement identify significant links between individuals by combing through public and private databases. For instance, SRD's software might spot someone who once shared a phone number or residence with a known terrorist. "Every organization is trying to get their hands on more data so they can have an advantage over their adversaries. The U.S. government is no different," says SRD founder Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist in IBM's entity analytic solutions group.

Jonas won't say which government agencies use the software. SRD was previously backed with funds from In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm. The technology also is used by Las Vegas casinos to spot potentially dubious connections among staff and customers.

IBM also sells SRD software that, if it works as promised, could help resolve the current disagreement between U.S. and European regulators over the sharing of airline passenger manifests. DB2 Anonymous Resolution can encrypt two disparate data sets and spot matches based on user-defined criteria while the data remains encrypted and unreadable. That setup would let U.S. and European Union authorities identify a person who appears on both the U.S. no-fly list and the passenger manifest of a flight inbound from Europe without ever viewing the data of passengers who don't trigger matches. "With respect to the EU problem, this would be substantially better than what's in use," says Jonas, who blogs about the issue at jeffjonas.typepad.com.

IBM also bolstered its analytics portfolio earlier this year when it acquired Language Analysis Systems, a maker of software that identifies possible variations of a person's name, particularly those that have gone through several translations. That analysis could help U.S. authorities spot a known terrorist suspect regardless of how his name is rendered in the country from which his flight originates. The software is being used by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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