DIU seeks tech to digitally unmask transnational criminals

Transnational criminals are increasingly utilizing solutions to digitally mask their movements, anonymize funding sources, and create detail-rich false identities to avoid detection and circumvent surveillance. The speed at which criminals blend into the noise requires an equally advanced information collection, processing, and analytic identifying, tracking and due diligence capability. This Area of Interest (AOI) is focused with the long term intent of disrupting significant transnational criminal syndicate activity such as trafficking in persons.

In response, the U.S. Government seeks commercially viable solutions leveraging machine-driven analytics and datasets derived from Commercially Available Information to help identify, track and counter transnational criminals attempting to mask their identities and activities.

Desired Product Capabilities

It is envisaged that companies will deploy the following techniques:

• Data management: used to extract, transform, load, store, and aggregate large, dynamic, multi-modal data feeds;
• Natural language processing: used to translate and summarize text corpora, deep/dark web postings, and perform downstream analysis (e.g. various classification tasks). Must be capable of operating across both English and non-English language sources;
• Social and professional network analysis: used to identify linkages between individuals, corporate entities, financial institutions and other entities of interest;
• Anomaly detection: used to identify behavior that could indicate presence of fraud or illegal activity within datasets, e.g. travel itineraries and financial transactions;
• User Interface: used to allow SMEs to interact with and use platform output, and;
• Flexibility to plug into enterprise platforms or reporting tools.

The platform and data processing should maintain industry leading security protocols as well as tag data relating to known criminals based on user need-to-know protocols.

Qualities of Interest Include:

• Ability to access and process data from international sources in multiple languages and formats;
• Access to deep/dark web sources with visibility into the supply chain of sources;
• Ability to analyze structured and unstructured data from multiple modalities;
• Ability to integrate with other data and knowledge sources using open, accessible standards;
• Ability to interpret or explain modeling outputs in human-understandable and actionable formats;
• Built using open technologies with a modular systems architecture to enable performance auditing and integration with outside software, and;
• Provide a robust and accurate reporting mechanism enabling program/mission metrics, context around disparate data sources to inform analysis and data lineage on original data.

Companies providing analytic capabilities as well as those providing data sets/feeds are both encouraged to apply; in such cases teaming is highly recommended.

Full information is available here.

Source: DIU