Border security

How to Boost Border Security While Protecting Privacy

With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are now many new tools available to help border control agencies identify potential criminals and predict criminal cargo shipping activity.

However, for each step forward, we should be wary of the impact to personal privacy. The data used to fuel these new systems—and the resulting intelligence reports—could be vulnerable to data breaches and other types of hostile hijackings.

Yet while these concerns are real, the tools themselves bring great value to law enforcement and border security. The ability to better target criminals by identifying suspicious patterns of behavior elevates the quality of border patrol work and enables better protection. Existing mechanisms, which involve rudimentary pattern matching, are sometimes effective but often yield way too many false leads.

New machine learning tools free up busy security agency personnel and allow them to spend more time stopping legitimate threats and less time pursuing false leads. These artificial intelligence-based systems have the ability to learn and improve through each analysis. If a border agent inspects a cargo shipment flagged as potentially risky and finds nothing, that result goes back into the system and the targeting algorithms are automatically updated to be more accurate.