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Had COPLINK been up and running during last fall’s sniper investigation, it
would have quickly flagged investigators to the multiple times that police had
stopped John Muhammad and Lee Malvo near a shooting scene, say law enforcement
officials. The system is now being used to help build the federal and state
cases against them.
Chen has been touting COPLINK since he developed it with the Tucson Police
Department in 1998. But it’s been only in the last two years that it’s caught
on. The CIA and the National Science Foundation are now looking at ways to use
the software, and police departments in a half-dozen states either have it
already or have signed up.
How Does It Work?
Basically, COPLINK®
searches through the separate databases of different agencies and identifies
connections among suspects, vehicles, crimes, locations and other data to
provide investigative leads they cannot obtain anywhere else. COPLINK®
differs from standard database search software in that it uses artificial
intelligence, or AI. Its neural network continually updates information from
many databases to "learn" patterns of association so it can perform searches
with ever increasing intelligence. Knowledge-based databases (like COPLINK®’s)
are generated directly from multiple data sources to provide large-scale
intelligence analysis capabilities, including the identification of previously
unknown relationships. The bottom line is that COPLINK®
can take millions of pieces of seemingly random, and often inconsequential,
pieces of information and find connections between things like a license plate,
weapon, nickname, speeding tickets or tattoos.
Three
Programs
The
COPLINK®
Solution Suite consists of three integrated software modules. COPLINK ConnectTM
is a software program which allows easy information sharing within, and among,
various jurisdictions and government entities stored on widely differing systems
and computer platforms. Users query and view information gathered from different
sources using a single easy to use interface. COPLINK DetectTM
builds on COPLINK ConnectTM
so users can perform sophisticated analysis on the shared data to discover
hidden relationships and co-occurrences which are beyond the capabilities of the
human mind. Unlike traditional crime analysis programs which pinpoint when and
where crimes occurred, COPLINK DetectTM
frequently shows WHO is committing the crimes. COPLINK AdministrationTM
manages the tools necessary to perform routine security and maintenance on the
COPLINK®
system.
User-Friendly
Data
is organized and displayed rapidly in a user-friendly, logical, and flexible
Web-based format and is based on popular Internet Web browsers so it can be
mastered by even inexperienced computer users in less than a day. Queries can be
made based on several categories with maximum versatility on each quick loading
search page. Query results are displayed in easy to sort summary tables showing
key information in column format designed to find specific information fast.
Summary tables contain hypertext links for each matched entry to underlying
detail data and source documents.
Success
Stories
COPLINK®
is already in use in more than a dozen jurisdictions around the country and has
helped in many criminal investigations. For example, one case involved a victim
who was found shot with his throat slashed and run over by the suspect's
vehicle. The victim provided very little information - a man named "Shorty" who
had "Caeser" tattooed on his arm. With only these clues, a Tucson detective
(using COPLINK®)
found the potential suspect and printed out a mug shot. Shorty was arrested
within five hours. In another example, a federal agency sought a man wanted for
a firearms related incident. The only clue was that the criminal's sister lived
in Tucson, Arizona, and had an abusive boyfriend. Using COPLINK®,
officials searched hundreds of case files until they found a woman involved in a
domestic violence case who was also linked to a man of similar age with the same
last name. This took 25 minutes. The program has also helped build the case
against John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, the two Washington area snipers.
September 11 showed how small warnings buried deep in various agencies’ files
could be deciphered and pieced together. Therefore, the Department of Homeland
Security is looking very carefully at the technology. Depending on the
capabilities included and the agency size, COPLINK®
can cost anywhere from $40,000 to over $200,000.
As to
security, COPLINK®
was designed to maintain a secure environment -no matter the source of the data
- by protecting data transactions within a secure law enforcement communications
network using data compression and 128 bit encryption. The system operates in a
dedicated private network, a Virtual Private Network (VPN), or an Intranet.
Individual agencies have control over the data which is integrated and updated.
Available Demo
The
COPLINK®
system is available only to authorized law enforcement personnel, but several
demonstrations are available at www.coplinkconnect.com. Users have to
request a user name and password from Knowledge Computing Corporation prior to
gaining access to the system. Because of the sensitive nature of the COPLINK®
data, the demo version uses data which is fictitious. A sophisticated algorithm
scrambles the names, addresses and other information, yet preserves the
associations between the database objects. In this way, the demo system can
provide a realistic example of the capabilities of COPLINK®.
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