Fighting with Terrorism through Technology

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Terrorism is a huge problem the modern world is still facing and trying to fight with. Governments, companies, organizations and individuals – people from all kinds of backgrounds and specialities are constantly working on possible solutions to this issue. To put terrorism to the end, we need to invest all of our skills and resources, and use them wisely.

Technology comes with help in many challenges regarding anti-terrorist operations. It gives a wide range of possibilities and enables new ways of tracking down terrorists. One of the technology-based ideas was to create a system, that helps catching any entity related to terrorism right at the beginning of a financing process. This way, any suspicious transaction would be quickly noticed and investigated.

On the request from IRC, SolDevelo worked on such a system. In this article you can read about this project.

International Rescue Committee (IRC)

International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development non-governmental organization. Founded in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein, the IRC offers emergency aid and long-term assistance to refugees and those displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster. The IRC is currently working in over 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities where it resettles refugees and helps them become self-sufficient. The President of the International Rescue Committee is the former U.K. Member of Parliament, David Miliband. Consisting of first responders, humanitarian relief workers, international development experts, healthcare providers, and educators, the IRC has assisted millions of people around the world since its founding in 1933. SolDevelo is involved in many IRC projects.

Anti-Terrorism Compliance

ATC acronym stands for Anti-Terrorism Compliance. The project was started to help manage safety checks for terrorism links due to the Patriot Act, which was a US federal law for preventing terrorism funding.

What we could help with

To be compliant with the law, every financial operation has to be considered as clean, meaning that any involved party is not connected with terrorism. 

IRC needed a system that is straightforward and easy to use. Application had to be integrated with an external service called LexisNexis Bridger, which serves as a repository, a database of individuals and companies as well as their potential connections with terrorism.

What we did

Solution was implemented using the Django web framework. Main feature revolves around external API integration with Bridger service. We developed a stable mechanism for managing huge amounts of requests going outside of ATC. 

System included a feature for email notifications about each change of a status. Other features were focused on: PDF/Excel export, Amazon S3 hosting for instructions file, filtering of ATC requests, external authentication with IRC’s credentials. 

Throughout the whole project there were, at most, 5 people involved.

What was the result

ATC was successfully implemented and deployed on production. System is used on a daily basis by many users from around the world. It helps to manage a huge number of safety checks. Thus it helps IRC to catch any entity related with terrorism quickly, at the the very beginning of a financing process.

Project was extended to the 2nd phase after the 1st version went live. There is also discussion about starting development of a new version of ATC.

Technologies used:

If you want to read more about our collaborations with IRC, check out this article.

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