Technology Innovation In Global Security And Government: Voice Analytics Use Cases To Assess Risk

Governments historically have not been quick, nor consistently bold, when it comes to innovation. We know that’s driven by a variety of factors - bureaucracy, constrained budgets, training requirements associated with complexity, and a general resistance to change due to comfort with sticking with the status quo. 

And while we’ve seen significant digital advancement over the last few decades, in the words of Deloitte, while governments have made progress, they “became wired but not transformed. Too many still focused mostly on digitizing front-end services while postponing the tougher issues of fundamentally reengineering underlying government operations, processes, and systems.”

Fraud and risk challenges in government and security today

This is especially evident when we look at the challenges government and security organizations are fraught with, like vetting and clearances for immigration and asylum, and the onboarding of individuals within government and related agencies - essentially, the large-scale human problems where there’s an element of fraud or risk.

• Scale: Since security involves humans, the main challenge is the sheer number and volume of people involved in various security-related processes, whether it’s managing immigration and asylum, conducting security clearances for employees, or screening and vetting individuals to ensure they’re qualified and trustworthy.
• Speed: Simply put, there’s crushing demand to solve problems fast. We’re well aware that one of the thorniest issues in security is not processing clearances fast enough. With organizations needing to fill critical positions quickly, today that process can’t be consistently expedited without sacrificing thoroughness, accuracy, and a satisfactory level of risk assessment coupled with intelligent risk mitigation or risk tolerance. The demand for clearances also outstrips organizational capacity to process them, resulting in backlogs and delays that further exacerbate the challenge of time. It’s a constant balance between the need for speed with the need for security. 
• Ethics: There are still too many variables in processes today that can lead to unethical practices, whether that’s discrimination, conscious or unconscious bias, inadequate privacy protections, lack of transparency, or human rights abuses. More consistency and standardization can lead to more reliable and objective results. 
• Data: With screening, vetting, and clearances we see a lack of data, particularly if an individual has lived or worked in a foreign country. On the individual level, fewer data points means a less comprehensive picture of an individual’s background and potential risks. On a macro level, without the capacity to process and analyze large amounts of data quickly, organizations can’t quickly identify patterns and trends, make informed decisions or respond effectively.

With Clearspeed, we’re providing a path for organizations to assess security risk quickly and accurately. Our voice analytics technology provides objective and unbiased risk alerts during the process of screening, vetting, and addressing potential risk blind spots - with greater than 97% accuracy (as assessed by US SOCOM). Simply put, Clearspeed helps organizations more quickly process and clear people at scale. And our technology can be used anywhere in the vetting process, whether in initial, continuous, or post-event risk assessments.

Using voice analytics to detect risk indicators in government and security organizations  

Here are some critical Clearspeed use cases for government and security organizations.

Screening and vetting individuals for security risk

One of the biggest challenges in screening and vetting individuals, due to the sheer scale and speed required, is fundamentally inadequate design. Particularly if individuals have lived or worked in foreign countries, there’s a lack of data available to create a complete picture of a person’s background, not to mention situations where references may have questionable legitimacy. Add to this the biases and assumptions that result from a lack of consistent and repeatable screening processes, which can lead to critical blindspots.

Clearspeed covers this critical gap so that organizations can make better decisions faster, identify high-risk behavior, have more accurate risk data, and identify risks before they become threats. 

As one key example, we validated our technology through our work with the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Clearspeed was chosen to screen Afghan recruits to train and expand the country’s defense capabilities, without jeopardizing U.S. personnel. We were able to screen 715 recruits in under 20 hours, in both Dari and Pashto local languages, to identify the potential for risk with >97% accuracy.