24: The Christmas Special (YouTube)

MethHunter: Find, Fix And Incarcerate! (DagirCo)

Want to cut your town's meth problem in half next year? You can. Really.

The guys over at Dagirco have finally done it! MethHunter is on the streets and check out these early stats: One of our small, local police departments is using it and they have had over a dozen busts and over a half dozen convictions in the last six months. The best part? The program has cut the time it takes to conduct an investigation in half!

One of local TV stations (WICU) recently did a five part special series on meth in NW Pennsylvania in general and on the MethHunter in particular. The video below is only one part of the five part series. The other four parts can be accessed at the end of this video:



I am particularly proud to say I know the team at DagirCo that put this piece of software together. Most of them, including Mark Blair, the CEO, are Mercyhurst grads and I have had the great good fortune to have many of them in class over the years.

Beyond this, though, I am particularly impressed with the way they tackled the problem. They have essentially created an expert system that looks at pill shopping patterns and "thinks" about them the same way a meth expert might think about them. It automates, as Mark puts it in one of the videos, the "80% of the tedious, time-consuming" work of analyzing purchase records. It even examines the shopping patterns for evidence of denial and deception on the part of the pill shoppers!

It is easy for you to imagine this all getting very technical and difficult to interpret. That is where this program really shines. The DagirCo team has worked particularly hard to make the program user friendly for small town and rural police forces. Their thinking was that large cities often have dedicated meth experts but that small and rural police forces may not have the resources for such a position. This meant that the program had to produce something that was understandable and actionable by a police officer who had received no special training.

It turns out that the straightforward, cop-friendly way the program generates output benefits both small and large police forces. It gives the smaller police force a capability where it had none before and it saves the experts in the larger forces time that can be better spent looking at aspects of the meth problem that the software cannot address.

The DagirCo team is also particulaly proud of the "engine" they developed to drive the MethHunter. They think it can be used in a broad range of applications. Currently, they are thinking about how it might be applied to other problem drugs and even other crimes in general (they are working on an anti-graffitti version right now). Mark, a former marine, also believes a modified version of this software could be useful in analyzing insurgent attack patterns in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Surreal Saturday: The Pong Prom (Vimeo)

From the interestingly titled Department of Covert Athletics...

Pong Prom from Ed Keeble on Vimeo.

SNOWINT (CommunityWalk)

Want to know the odds that your location will have a white Christmas? Check out this map made using one of my favorite online custom mapping tools, CommunityWalk...

CommunityWalk Map - What are the odds of a White Christmas?

The Eleventh Balloon (DARPA Network Challenge)

I was discussing the DARPA Network Challenge with another participant in the contest the other day and the conclusion of our conversation led me to ask why couldn't a similar system be used to locate Osama bin Laden?

For those of you unfamiliar with this challenge, DARPA offered $40,000 to the first individual or team to identify the location of 10 large red helium balloons that DARPA had moored at various locations around the US. The contest was to go on for a week but a team from MIT won the challenge in a little less than 9 hours (for the Lessons Learned from the Mercyhurst effort, see this post).

It occurs to me that the Osama bin Laden problem is a similar one and that social networks might well be as effective in identifying his location (particularly if he is not in the region where most people seem to think he is...).

Moreover, the conditions are much the same -- only better. The reward for bin Laden is 25 million! MIT's winning system seemed to work so well (to me) because everyone in the chain got a piece of the pie. With a much bigger pie, it should work that much better.

Furthermore, there appears to be no reason not to try. Secretary Gates recently stated that there has been no good intelligence on bin Laden "in years". In addition, GEN McCrystal recently testified that he didn't think we could finally defeat Al Qaeda without capturing or killing Bin Laden.

And its not like Pakistanis and Afghanis don't use social networks. They do. Facebook and Orkut are both popular in Pakistan. If the system were optimized for cell phones, it would likely be even more effective as 49 of every 100 Pakistanis (29 of every 100 Afghanis) has a cell phone (Note: These are 2008 numbers. They are likely higher today.) Even the FATA in Pakistan has cellular service. If bin Laden is not where we think he is, then the system could be even more effective.

Using social networks allows us to tap into those people in and around bin Laden who disagree with his message or tactics or both but see no way to get their info to those who can do something about it (and frankly, even if they could, they likely see no advantage in it). It allows us to negotiate with the innocents who are victims of radicalism rather than continue to do business with the guilty that traditionally operate within the elite levels of a state.

Crowdsourcing the bin Laden hunt would also be a real test for these new technologies. A successful effort here would likely have as much impact on the practice of intelligence as 9/11 had on our thinking about terrorism.

So what say you, DARPA? The "eleventh balloon" is out there! Get with the Rewards for Justice people and announce another challenge (this time for some real money).