What Happens in Vegas . . .
Identity resolution guru Jeff Jonas, distinguished engineer and chief scientist, Entity Analytic Solutions, IBM, is back in the news again. The Washington Post recently featured him in an article on how technology developed for casinos is being applied to solve other problems like terrorist threats and money laundering. Who knew that Las Vegas was not only a great place to see the Rock Paper Scissors national championship or to (allegedly) commit a hotel room sports memorabilia theft but is also a hub of technology R&D?
Jonas originally created his Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness or NORA technology to detect aliases used by people trying to defraud the casinos. He then was able to use the technology to discover employees and fraudsters who were working together by, for example, identifying a shared home address. In other words, determine who’s who and who knows whom.
From the article:
“The casino industry, like the national security industry, is seeking information to answer a fundamental question: Who are you? ‘It’s, are you a good guy or a bad guy? A threat or a non-threat?’ explained Derk Boss, the vice president for surveillance for the Stratosphere hotel and casino . . . ‘There are going to be people that just want to come and gamble and enjoy your services,’ he said. ‘And there are going to be people that are going to come to take your money. Our job is to distinguish between those two groups.’”
After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security had an even more pressing need to separate the good guys from the bad guys, the threats from non-threats. They produced a request for technology that could:
- Compare information contained in a passenger reservation with data contained in watch list records
- Verify, report, and validate matches between passenger and watch list information
- Resolve potential matches identified in the execution of the processes
- Adjust the process in response to changes in security threat levels
- Protect individual privacy and civil liberties
They received over 1,000 responses but ultimately they selected an identity resolution solution because that was the only type of technology that could meet the needs of the program. There are only two companies that produce identity resolution software as we define it - IBM (formerly SRD) and Infoglide Software. DHS chose Infoglide Software’s solution. Interestingly enough Infoglide Software’s origins also tie back to gambling as the technology was originally created to help investigators solve a murder that was linked to gambling activities.
This technology with its birth in the big money world of Vegas also can be applied to the problem of money laundering.
“At the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, for example, investigators have used [Jonas’ technology] to track money laundering. From one Suspicious Activity Report — which financial institutions are required to send to the government — they have identified a money launderer’s partners in crime. FinCEN has a decade’s worth of data on 170 million report forms. ‘We find a tremendous amount of connectivity,’ said Steve Hudak, FinCEN spokesman. ‘We find suspects linked by addresses, suspects linked by phone numbers. So we definitely know that these people are operating together.’”
Other technologies, like surveillance equipment and biometrics, are also finding their way from the casinos to homeland security and other industries. So apparently what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas.
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