In any aircraft incident, accident or disaster, the cause is almost always quickly identified once the Black Boxes are interrogated - why should it not be the same for Police Forces?
Not to be confused with home user "spyware", Protective Monitoring or Lawful Business Monitoring is a requirement for most organisations, particularly law enforcement and government, but there is still much confusion as to how it should be approached, implemented and budgeted for. How much to spend? What should be included? How secure and accurate is the recorded material? Can the data be manipulated or altered by IT or other staff? In 2019, HMICFRS published the National PEEL Report which recommended that all forces have proactive protective monitoring by September 2020. With over 20 years’ experience in the sector, Corporate IT Systems Ltd (CITSL) have the answer in their Audit Trail Appliance® or "ATA®”.
Every IT action such as applications used, keys pressed, documents altered, emails sent and received, URLs visited, GPS locations, SMS and phone call activity can all be recorded, but seldom are. Security of the recorded data and the headache of installing and maintaining such a system on a large scale are often cited as the biggest hurdles, but the ATA is different, supplied as a physical device and working for an entire force in much the same way as the flight recorder does for an aircraft. There is now absolutely no reason why any IT activity cannot be identified and retrieved for investigation very quickly after any incident involving corruption, abuse of position and wrongdoing, or ring alarm bells when potential misuse occurs in real time. In the past, IT departments would baulk at the logistics of storing such vast amounts of data, this is completely overcome by the ATA as it is provided as a managed service.
An ATA is impossible to alter, unreadable to all but anti-corruption and intelligence staff, continuously recording every user action from Windows, Email and Android. There is no maintenance or storage requirement as the appliance hardware is supplied preconfigured. With units available covering 3,000 staff to 40,000+ staff, the ATA is secure, scalable and does not depend on an organisation's own IT infrastructure.
CITSL offer a managed service and are always keeping up with evolving technologies. We are currently supporting Professional Standards divisions across 41 UK Police Forces and Agencies.
The ATA is designed from the ground up to be focused on protecting both the organisation and the employee, not to intrude on personal privacy, which can be another criticism of protective monitoring systems. After all, when was the last time you heard an airline pilot complain about being recorded by a cockpit voice recorder?