How to Detect Criminal Gangs Using Mobile Phone Data

How to Detect Criminal Gangs Using Mobile Phone Data

And here we go.
Now you know how all that meta data can be used by law enforcement.

The TL;DR is that using phone call records and other officer entered data. The software creates a patter of the network that the leo's can explore to correlate crimes to calls.
It's very amazing what can be done with software. However this raises some very big privacy concerns.
And I'm sure this can be applied to anything.

Cell phone communication isn't safe anymore.

The study of social networks is providing dramatic insights into the nature of our society and how we are connected to one another. So it’s no surprise that law enforcement agencies want to get in on the act.

Criminal networks are just as social as friendship or business networks. So the same techniques that can tease apart the links between our friends and colleagues should also work for thieves, drug dealers, and organized crime in general.

But how would your ordinary law enforcement officer go about collecting and analyzing data in this way? Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Emilio Ferrara at Indiana University in Bloomington and a few pals.

These guys have created a bespoke software platform that can bring together information from mobile phone records, from police databases and from the knowledge and expertise of agents themselves to recreate detailed networks behind criminal organizations.

The new platform, called LogAnalysis, gives a unique insight into the make up a criminal organization. “It allows forensic investigators to deeply understand hierarchies within criminal organizations, discovering members who play central role and provide connection among sub-groups,” they say.

One of the first problems any law enforcement agent is likely to come up against when studying social networks is the sheer volume of data that this process generates. This is where LogAnalysis comes into its own.

It automatically imports raw phone call records, removes ambiguities and redundancies in the data and then converts it to a format that can be easily displayed in the kind of visual graphic format that allows more detailed analysis. It also allows agents to add other data such as mug shots from police records and other information that the officer might have to hand.

reply to post by grey580


One more reason to question why criminal street gangs still exist in their present form in the US.

The biggest flaw with social network theory is that it pronounces someone guilty or innocent based on who they know, not what they did.

Lets take the traffic analysis going on in San Diego right now. They monitor your driving habits day in and day out, if your habits suddenly change it's a sign that you just committed a crime or are about to commit a crime. Lets say a woman has a fairly routine schedule, this is recorded in a database. At some point during this routine she meets a guy she likes but the guy lives far outside her normal travel schedule. Nevertheless she likes him and starts going to his house, or meeting at restaurants near where he lives. This takes her outside her normal traffic patterns.

To these monitoring systems, that red flags her as a potential criminal. At this point police have enough evidence to start looking at where she's going and what she's doing. They see she's meeting some guy. This guy also now gets investigated because the woman he's meeting is doing something unusual according to previous activity.

Two people that get investigated with the job of finding evidence of any law breaking, just because they meet and want to have dinner together.

That is the situation social network analysis creates, and to do it physically is blatantly illegal. It should be the same to do it digitally.