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Covert mobile surveillance tool for Northern Ireland police service brings increased efficiency
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has gone live with a software solution designed to manage requests for accessing and analysisng an individual’s communications data, as required under the Regularion of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000.
As a result, PSNI has eliminated hand-written forms, reduced time intensive paperwork and largely automated the request approval porcedure. Already since the beginning of October 2006 when the solution was implemented, PSNI has reduced the time take to manage aspects of the process from half a day to just 20 minutes.
Under RIPA, all police forces must gain authorisation from a ‘designated person’ prior to accessing the mobile phone, internet and postal data of suspected offenders or other individual’s of interest. This process is managed by an authorised person known as a ‘single point of contact’ (SPoC) who liaises with the Communications Service Provider (CSP) - which is any company in the world providing public communications.
Police forces across the UK analyse the mobile phone records of suspected offenders for a number of reasons. A mobile cell site search can help identify where a particular individual was at any given time. A subscriber check identifies the owner of a particular handset and a records search reveals numbers called - thereby identifying people a criminal may associate with. All requests from Police Forces for access to such information must comply with RIPA, which in turn is compatible with the European Human Rights Act.
Detective Inspector Kevin Geddes of the PSNI explains the benefits of using ABM’s software, “Previously the process of requesting authorisation to access telecoms records was very paper intensive and would result in documents having to be physically signed. The manual administration of this could take anything up to half a day and would be particularly time consuming if a single request had to cover several mobile operators, for example the investigation of an individual and their associates on different mobile networks. Using Telecoms, the process has been dramatically speeded up and means the administration time spent by PSNI is just twenty minutes. Since documents can be authorised electronically, requests for information can be presented to the CSP more quickly and turned around faster.”
Alastair Luff, ABM Group Managing Director said, “ABM software is designed to let the Police get on with their job of protecting the public and preventing crime. With a full range of compliance modules and workflow functions the PSNI can be confident that by using Telecoms it not only experiences time savings but also meets all of its legal obligations under RIPA and the European Human Rights Act.”
