The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has launched a new tender for partners to overhaul its data management technology.
According to tender documents, the AFP seeks a partner to replace its telecommunication interception (TI) and surveillance device (SD) monitoring and collection platform, which forms part of its existing Law Enforcement Monitoring Facility (LEMF).
The new tender comes just weeks after the AFP issued an approach to market seeking partners to overhaul its legacy people tracking systems.
Coming as part of a wider upgrade of the LEMF, the current tender will focus on the TI collection capability and the front-end applications used by monitors and investigators to view and analyse TI and SD product.
The selected partner will be responsible for ensuring that the solution is capable of being integrated with the upgraded LEMF but will not be responsible for the integration itself.
“The rapid advance of communications in Internet Protocol (IP) networks has enabled multiple means of communication via Short Message Service (SMS), email, messaging apps and social media platforms. Many of these platforms provide encrypted communication meaning that the content is not readily intelligible,” the tender document noted.
The AFP claimed that the data and metadata collected from sources such as SD and OpenSource Intelligence (OSINT) can be combined with TI products to “provide a more complete picture for intelligence and investigation teams”.
As such these additional data sources were said to be bringing “challenges” to the TI Monitors and other AFP teams due to the large volume of data available.
“Additional capabilities such as advanced searching algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) tools ... provide an opportunity to enrich data to aid monitors and investigators,” the document added.
Partners have until 21 September to respond to the tender with the solution expected to be implemented and operational by September 30, 2022.
