Military contractors move aggressively into civil security

contract. Detica’s Streamshield communications monitoring systems (40Gbit/s carrier-class, deep packet inspection) are used by telcos including BT, 02, and TalkTalk to filter internet content, catch spammers, and watch for suspicious behaviour patterns. Detica has an £18.1 million contract to supply London’s Metropolitan Police with handheld computers and supporting systems for the next five years. It has a £25 million contract with the Home Office to supply part of the Eborders system that will monitor civilian travellers. Detica also operates a system for AutoTrader that checks cars for buyers using intelligence gathered from the DVLA, the Association of British Insurers, the Police National Computer and third-party insurers, financiers and, vehicle valuers. “Many of the U.K.’s largest banking and insurance companies, as well as leading Government, law enforcement and telecommunications organisations,” use Detica’s Netreveal system, said the firm, “to detect and investigate organised fraud”, says the firm’s publicity materials.

RBS Insurance has employed Detica’s Netreveal to look for fraudulent activity. The U.K. Insurance Fraud Bureau uses the same system, while the Financial Services Authority, U.K. banking watchdog, has agreed to use Detica information intelligence systems to analyze financial transactions for things like “market abuse and insider trading.” Detica’s Market Surveillance Accelerator allows financial institutions to do the same by monitoring their own transactions. Detica’s area of expertise is social network analysis, which involves surveilling vast numbers of civilians and analyzing links between people, organizations, and data, and patterns of behaviour that might indicate suspicious behaviour. Tom Black, Detica’s CEO, told a U.K. homeland security conference early this month that its systems did not infringe citizens’ privacy because they did not look for specific people, but for patterns of suspicious behaviour.

BAE has already been building a civil security arm, which manages civil CCTV networks and supplies intelligent CCTV monitoring and control systems for local authorities. Ballard says that the Inquirer understands that this business involves the provision of CCTV systems covering the U.K. transport network but was unable to find anyone at BAE or Detica to confirm this today. Detica also developed the transport information website of Transport for London and supplies capital systems to Lloyd’s of London. BAE said in a statement that it its civil security business was not growing fast enough so it had given it a boost with an acquisition. “The proposed acquisition of Detica is consistent with BAE Systems’ strategic objective to establish security businesses in its home markets,” said the statement. “BAE Systems has identified National Security and Resilience as an evolving and growing sector benefiting from increasing priority government attention and expects the accessible NS&R sector in the UK to double to over £3 billion by 2011,” it said. “While BAE Systems has been developing plans for substantial organic investment to pursue growth NS&R opportunities, the proposed acquisition of Detica provides an economically attractive and accelerated implementation of its strategy to address these growth opportunities,” it added. BAE said it hoped to complete the acquisition by the end of the year. Detica said it would advise shareholders to accept the offer which was a 70 percent premium on its average share price for the last six months. Garton said the market average premium was 35 percent.