How do you find useful information in 127 million chat messages?
This article is based on the article ‘Anom and EncroChat – How to find useful information in 127 million messages’ by our partner Paliscope.
EncroChat and Anom were two services used by criminals worldwide to communicate with each other. With the end-to-end encryption and thus the ability to communicate in encrypted form, criminals thought they were anonymous. A perfect way to trade in illegal substances and organise criminal activities. Both services were eventually infiltrated by the police. This yielded as many as 127 million messages hiding valuable intelligence. But how do you find useful information in 127 million chat messages?
This article describes how investigative agencies, using the YOSE software by Paliscope, can search hundreds of millions of messages for relevant texts, videos and photos.
Structuring, searching and making connections
Successful infiltrations such as EncroChat and Anom often produce large amounts of data. Manually structuring, searching and correlating all this data is an impossible task. Software that makes use of Artificial Intelligence offers a possible solution.
YOSE by Paliscope is a very suitable solution for searching and structuring large amounts of data to find valuable texts and video materials. YOSE uses advanced AI technology to recognise different types of images. For example, it is capable of detecting photos of drugs and weapons. YOSE can also read text on photos, which is useful when screenshots have been sent. Furthermore, YOSE establishes links between different pieces of information. For example, someone can order a murder for €542 on one platform, but ask someone else on another forum for a weapon for a murder of €542. YOSE can recognise the similarity and correlate the information.
In short, YOSE can save investigative agencies a great deal of time and bring to light information and connections that would have been overlooked during a manual search. YOSE also gives you the opportunity to delineate your investigations and look for only relevant information, without any noise.
Session at Digital Experience
On 6 October, during Digital Experience 2021, Kristofer Jobson from Paliscope will provide a session about the Paliscope Investigation Platform. During the session ‘Paliscope 101: An introduction to the Paliscope Platform’ he will give a demonstration of both YOSE and Paliscope Discovry. More information about this session and Digital Experience can be found here.
