New Delhi: Collecting and collating information from airports, railways, PAN records, banks, passports, Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), telecom service providers, vehicle registration data, the National Population Register (NPR), open source intelligence (OSINT), corporate details, and any other source, the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) is ready to scale up surveillance by offering real-time 360 degree profiling of individuals and other entities, reports Hindu Business Line.The centralised database being developed by NATGRID under the Union home ministry will capture all digital footprints a person or a company leaves in financial and government dealings, and also have an inbuilt feature of flagging suspicious transactions, reports the newspaper. This surveillance effort, using private, public and official data, is being executed in two phases.In the first phase, the NATGRID is integrating in parallel telecom companies, the Election Commission and airlines onto its digital database. Once this connectivity is established, the NATGRID will be able to offer complete and comprehensive actual time data about an entity or an issue to 39 Central and State agencies. PAN records, bank facilities including credit card details, passports, Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), company details, railways cargo, immigration, vehicle registration and the NPR data are already available to Central and State agencies at a click, sources told Hindu Business Line.In the second phase, data analytics, OSINT tools and web-based applications, such as of Facebook and Twitter, will be integrated to provide complete digitised information packets for national security usage, reports the newspaper. The data analytics software will use entity, face and speech resolution applications for profiling. Further, the NATGRID intends to eventually hyphenate OSINT tools and web-based applications to capture full-circle description that would give a larger picture about an entity or an issue which can be focussed as well as amplified with the help of human intelligence, sources told the newspaper.The OSINT tool to be incubated will have the potential to extract entities, relationships and other linked written, audio and video information for summarising into a report. The newspaper reports the official claim that only an authorised government customer can access data by logging onto the NATGRID portal and will be kept secure because the end-to-end encrypted portal can be accessed only after proper authorisation and authentication.As per Hindu Business Line, the centralised database access solution of NATGRID is facing challenges like lack of standardisation of data structure which requires time consuming re-indexing of voluminous online information.
