Browse Books

Reviewer: Peter P. Mykytyn

Since 9/11, there has been a significant amount of attention devoted to all of the various aspects of physical security, such as security at airports. In addition, law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and, more recently, the Office of Homeland Security, have invested considerable resources in ways to analyze information before the fact, in order to prevent terrorism and crime. In his book, the author often refers to this information as “precrime.” Mena discusses and identifies a number of specific technologies that have been in use in business and industry, and provides great detail regarding their application to identifying information that can be used for crime prevention. He accomplishes this without burdening the reader with excess mathematics. The book integrates data mining concepts, which involve terms like “discover,” “identify,” and “probe,” with important aspects of artificial intelligence (AI), involving terms like “link analysis,” “intelligent agents,” “text mining,” “neural networks,” and “machine learning.” The purpose of the book is to provide explanations of these technologies, and to discuss their applications to precrime. The information provided will be of interest to law enforcement investigators, fraud specialists, information technology security personnel, military and civilian security analysts, and decision makers who are responsible for criminology and criminal analysis, but who have little or no experience with data analysis and data mining, behavioral analysis, modeling, and prediction. An introductory chapter introduces a number of the important concepts that are elaborated on in later chapters. Terms such as behavioral profiling, data mining, and data warehousing are defined for the reader, using terminology applicable to the precrime setting. AI aspects are also introduced and explained briefly. In addition to in-depth discussions of AI issues, such as machine learning and neural networks, Mena includes a chapter titled “Net Fraud: A Case Study.” This chapter focuses on credit card fraud in a real-time environment. Other chapters include “Criminal Patterns: Detection Techniques,” “Intrusion Detection: Techniques and Systems,” “Mapping Crime: Clustering Case Work,” and “The Entity Validation System (EVS): A Conceptual Architecture.” Several appendices are also included in the book. Appendix A lists URLs for 1,000 online sources for the investigative data miner, divided into several subcategories. Appendix B lists products, services, freeware, and projects relevant to intrusion detection systems (IDS). Appendix C is a comprehensive intrusion detection glossary. Appendix D is a list of investigative data mining products and services, complete with names, organizations, and Web site addresses. The book also includes a substantial index, as well as numerous end-of-chapter references. The entire text is approximately 460-pages long, including the introductory pages. One of the nice features of the book is its generous use of charts, graphs, and figures. Often, the figures are screen shots from various software tools and packages, making it easier to comprehend some of the material. Several case studies are also included in various chapters, which also adds to the comprehensibility of the topics. The author makes generous use of headings and subheadings within the chapters, which serve to provide appropriate segregation of materials for the reader. However, I found the repetition of certain paragraphs rather strange: two paragraphs in chapter 1 dealing with calibrating crime (Section 1.4) are essentially verbatim repetitions of the same paragraphs presented on page 14 dealing with precrime (Section 1.10). These were the only two occurrences of repetitions I found, but it made me wonder if there were others that went unnoticed. Overall, I found the book interesting and very informative. The intended audience should certainly find this book very worthwhile. It is essentially a “how to” book for detecting and discovering information age crime before it happens. Other readers, such as corporate executives, and even the general reader, might also find the book worthwhile, informative, and enlightening. Online Computing Reviews Service