D-SCENT: Raising challenges to deception attempts using data scent trails

自9-11和7-7以来，恐怖主义一直是公众关注的主要问题。为了确保公共安全和保护英国经济，需要进行研究，提供新的方法来在攻击执行之前挫败攻击，识别可能正在准备或进行攻击的人员和网络，并提供明确的证据，用于证明质疑，逮捕和起诉的合理性。在这项研究中，我们将研究是否可以通过“气味跟踪”来识别和证明欺骗，即，通过跟踪嫌疑人的行动、通信和行为，对嫌疑人一段时间内的活动进行连贯的描述。我们将开发软件来推断哪些活动与嫌疑人的气味轨迹一致，哪些被排除在外。这些推断将使调查人员能够质疑嫌疑人，无论是在真实的时间（例如，以鼓励嫌疑人放弃正在进行的攻击）和在面谈期间（例如，指出嫌疑人的陈述和气味线索证据之间的不一致之处，这可能会改变面试的过程）。该项目将调查气味线索的背景下，人们进行欺骗活动，以获得优势，在对抗性的“寻宝”型游戏。游戏将与利益攸关方协商开发，以提供反恐背景下的非敏感类比。玩家，通常是付费参与的本科生，将在游戏期间通过从启用地理空间定位设备的移动的设备获得的位置和通信数据进行监控。将开发用于整合这些数据的新软件，以建立玩家在游戏过程中活动的气味轨迹。结合人工智能的方法，根据玩家的位置、轨迹、活动和与他人的联系，从气味轨迹中推断出哪些活动是可能的，哪些是不可能的。我们设想游戏有3支队伍：A队代表对手，B队代表警察或公众，C队代表情报部门。A队通过在一组游戏规则下的时限内访问目标位置来得分，如果他们要获胜，他们必须违反这些规则。他们必须设法向B队隐瞒违规行为，B队通过成功地阻止或识别A队的欺骗行为来得分。C队可以通过向A队发送所持有的气味轨迹的指示来挑战A队，或者可以向B队提供情报信息。此外，气味线索的推断将支持C队在比赛中的关键时刻与A队球员进行访谈时决定如何最好地证明或伪造怀疑。通过在比赛中观察球员，我们可以研究人们在面对暴露他们欺骗行为的证据时如何改变他们的行为。我们还将在游戏过程中的关键点采访玩家，作为对嫌疑人采访的模拟，从玩家那里引出他们的活动，然后根据他们自己的气味轨迹向他们提出挑战，这些气味轨迹与法律的游戏一致或不一致。这将使访谈和分析技术得到改进，并将提供线索，说明人们在面临欺骗后如何改变他们的行为。研究结果还将使我们能够检验来自法医心理学的假设，以确定如何最好地发现欺骗行为。研究还使我们能够探索公众对反恐监测和监视的认识和反应。我们将与代表主要公共和学术机构的利益攸关方和学科专家组成的咨询小组一起，确定与收集和使用有关公共空间人员流动的数据有关的伦理和法律的问题。我们还将对游戏玩家和其他未参与游戏的人进行问卷调查，以衡量他们对游戏和其他环境中的监控和监视的态度。

Since 9-11 and 7-7, terrorism has been a major public concern. To ensure public safety and to protect the UK economy, research is needed that offers new methods to foil attacks before they are executed, to identify people and networks who might be preparing for or undertaking an attack, and to provide clear evidence that can be used to justify questioning, arrests and prosecutions.In this study, we will investigate whether deception can be identified and proved from 'scent trails', that is, coherent accounts of suspects' activities over time compiled from tracking their movements, communications and behaviours. We will develop software to derive inferences about what activities are consistent with suspects' scent trails and what are ruled out. These inferences will allow investigators to challenge suspects, both in real time (e.g., to encourage suspects to abandon an ongoing attack) and during interviews (e.g., to point out inconsistencies between a suspect's account and scent trail evidence that might change the course of an interview).The project will investigate scent trails in the context of people undertaking deceptive activities to gain advantage in adversarial 'treasure hunt'-type games. The games will be developed in consultation with stakeholders to provide a non-sensitive analogy to counter-terrorism contexts. Players, typically undergraduate students paid for participation, will be monitored during games via positional and communication data obtained from mobile devices enabled with geospatial positioning devices. Novel software for integrating these data will be developed to build up scent trails of players' activities during game play. Methods of artificial intelligence will be combined to derive inferences from the scent trails about what kinds of activity are possible and impossible given a player's location, trajectory, activities and links with others.We envision games with 3 teams: Team A represent the adversary, Team B the police or general public, and Team C the intelligence services. Team A scores points by visiting target locations within a time limit under a set of game rules that they must violate if they are to win. They must try to hide rule violations from Team B, who score points by preventing or identifying Team A's deceptions successfully. Team C can challenge Team A by sending them indications of the scent trails that are held or can feed Team B intelligence information. Moreover, the inferences from scent trails will support Team C in deciding how best to prove or falsify a suspicion during an interview with Team A players at key points during the games.By conducting observation of players during games, we can investigate how people change their behaviours when they are confronted with evidence that reveals their deceptions. We will also interview players at key points during games as a simulation of interviews with suspects, eliciting from players accounts of their activities before presenting them with challenges based on their own scent trails that are either consistent or inconsistent with legal game playing. This will allow interview and analysis techniques to be improved and will provide clues as to how people subsequently change their behaviour after they have been confronted with their deception. The results will also allow us to test between hypotheses deriving from forensic psychology as to how best to detect deception.The research also allows us to explore public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism. With an advisory panel of stakeholders and subject specialists representing key public and academic bodies, we will identify ethical and legal issues associated with collecting and using data on peoples' movements through public spaces. We will also conduct questionnaire studies with game players and others not involved in the games, to measure attitudes to monitoring and surveillance in game-playing and other contexts.