Blog Viewer

How I Met, Fell in Love With and Married i2

By Dallas Knight posted Mon April 15, 2019 06:18 AM

  


My name is Dallas (Ryan) Knight.  I started traveling down my career path when I was a lost
17-year-old living in Las Vegas, NV by joining the United States Army.  I didn't know at the time where this first step would take me — let alone that 18 years later I'd be helping to protect the world. 

I joined the US Army with the intention of leveraging financial aid for my education as well as for the real world experience necessary to one day apply to be a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.  Six years as a military police officer and a slight derailment when I became a single mother later, I became an intelligence analyst for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department assigned to the Nevada HIDTA under the DEA. 

For nine years, I had the privilege of working on an array of investigations.  Las Vegas is a melting pot of people, and it is also a melting pot of crime. There were the typical (for the area) Mexican cartel related narcotic cases.  Being the party city Las Vegas can be, there was a period of high ecstasy/MDMA and other similar drug cases.  I even ventured into the narco-terrorist world — a very stressful and scary case. 

As unique as these cases could be, there was always at least one consistency: my tools. 

In 2005, we had the standard law enforcement indices available plus a few open source record vendors we leveraged.  I remember a long, yellow sticky note stuck to the side of my computer monitor with a list of all the different (and separate) data sources I needed to query for any person, vehicle, location, etc.  The results were printed and filed.  Everything pertaining to a specific target was placed in the same manila folder and those were filed alphabetically in a file box that was designated for a specific case and stored at my feet.  Anyone else operate this way 10-15 years ago?  Anyone still operate this way?   

Meeting i2 


We also had i2 Analyst's Notebook (ANB).  By using ANB, an entire picture of our case was manually built containing all the pertinent information and relationships — similar to what you see in the old cop shows with bad guys photos on cork board with yarn drawing out connections but in a computer program.  We, the analysts, often used this picture as a way to convey the hierarchy and organization of the case to our manager, agents and task force officers, attorneys, and even juries during prosecution if necessary. 

These Analyst's Notebook charts were real works of investigative art.  They were built, printed, shared, added to, reorganized, printed, shared, printed, and printed again.  The ANB charts were sometimes printed with plotters on 3x10 foot displays (a couple times over, due to minor mistakes overlooked).  No lines were crossed.  Angles were at 90 degrees.  Entities were perfectly aligned.  Any of this sound familiar? 

So here's the problem: these beautiful, time consuming, information overloaded works of art pertinent to every investigation I was assigned to, ended up to be another stagnant document no one knew to exist.  Well, except me, and maybe the officers that worked with me on the cases.  Once the case was closed and the print outs was replaced by more current investigations, all this valuable information was just sitting in a deep, dark network folder somewhere — unable to be queried or easily leveraged in future cases.  Too often a name or address would come across my desk sounding all too familiar but I just couldn't place it.  I'd tear through folders and boxes.  I'd open chart after chart.  Sometimes, I'd get lucky and find the familiar data.  Sometimes, I'd lay in bed at night querying my internal case files and never make the connection. 

Falling for i2

 

Fast forward a few years (to 2010, I believe), and I was attending the annual i2 conference in DC and came across a complimentary solution to Analyst's Notebook.  It was a way to take all that valuable, irreplaceable information contained in those 100s of charts and store it, query it, leverage it.  Its name was iBase, and I had to have it.  I immediately presented my findings to my manager, who welcomed a demonstration of the product to the team.  Arrangements were made, a demo was completed, and my group unanimously decided this was a necessary tool. 

Years and years worth of charts could now be queried.  555 Main Street sound familiar?  Quick search in iBase, boom!  Results, bang!  Push to ANB, pow!  Expand, expand, yeah!  Did I mention this was a shared, collaborative environment?!   

I could write another whole blog on all the benefits of having an i2 intelligence repository to feed your Analyst's Notebook charts — and maybe I will.  However, for now I will leave you with this... 

i2 Analyst's Notebook (ANB) builds an entire picture of a case, containing all the pertinent information and relationships

Every single day that I woke up to wear my Intelligence Analyst for the Nevada HIDTA hat was a glorious day.  I loved my job. I could be sick, lack sleep, and dealing with a terrible two year old, but I'd still skip across a rainbow on my unicorn to the office every day.  It gave me pride, value, and allowed me to make a difference while protecting the community. 

Making My i2 Love Official


A large part of doing my job so effectively were the tools I used.  I can honestly say I used i2 in one way or another every single day in my life as an intelligence analyst.  I believe wholeheartedly it can help to make or break a case.  Because of my passion and belief in the i2 solutions, I now represent i2 as part of the IBM technical sales team, where I try to arm analysts and investigators all over the w
orld with (what I strongly feel is) the best analysis and investigative tools on the shelf. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and allowing me to share my i2 journey with you. You can learn more about i2 here and if you’re an i2 customer, I invite you the join the i2 user community, where you can engage directly with myself and other IBMers and share experiences and best practices with your peers.

If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to reach out.  I look forward to chatting with you in the comments section below.

1 comment
40 views

Permalink

Comments

Tue April 16, 2019 10:48 AM

Thank you for the blog!  I plan to share your experience with my less experienced clients that face the same frustrations that you did early in your career.