Did You Know?

International proliferation networks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) rely on illicit procurement of military and dual-use equipment, materials, and technology to supply WMD programs. Strategic trade controls regulating exports from the United States are enforced by several federal law enforcement agencies. These agencies convict or sanction individuals and entities involved in illicitly exporting strategically-sensitive goods from the United States.

Opportunity

Documents related to these cases represent a rich and largely untapped source of data that could be analyzed to reveal trends in smuggling activities and uncover parties that may still be involved in illegal activities.

Solution

Combining in-house nonproliferation with software engineering expertise, two groups in the Strategic Security Sciences (S³) Division paired intelligent information retrieval technologies with subject matter expert (SME) oversight to create a supervised machine learning system to extract, organize, and make searchable this proliferation network information.

Results

Foxhunt is a database and analytical tool that contains actionable information related to entities involved, modus operandi, commodities sought, methods of transportation, routes and destinations that were used in these diversion efforts.