Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRESSPASS (robusT Risk basEd Screening and alert System for PASSengers and luggage)

Teaser

Risk-based border management is about using border crossing points (BCPs) as a risk management measure that supports flow-, border- and national security. As such, border management is an essential element in a toolbox for mitigating a wide range of risks. Risk-based...

Summary

Risk-based border management is about using border crossing points (BCPs) as a risk management measure that supports flow-, border- and national security. As such, border management is an essential element in a toolbox for mitigating a wide range of risks. Risk-based approaches are typically used to select risk measures that are more proportional to the actual threat, while maintaining or even reducing the remaining risk: relaxed if possible, more stringent when needed. This implies that for people and goods that pose no significant threat, invasive checks at border crossing points can be limited. This should lead to less and shorter interruptions in the flow of people and goods, more freedom for passengers and less additional personal data (w.r.t. data already collected before arriving at the border crossing point) that must be transferred at those points. It is expected that this holds for the vast majority of people and goods.

TRESSPASS will leverage the results and concepts implemented and tested for airport security within the H2020 FLYSEC and FP7 XP-DITE projects and for land border control in H2020 iBorderCtrl project, and expand them into a multimodal border crossing risk-based security solution within a strong legal and ethics framework. The TRESSPASS Consortium has been the Coordinator of all XP-DITE, iBorderCtrl and FLYSEC projects, and includes technical partners that bring on board an extensive experience in complex security projects and a roster of end users representing all three BCP modalities: air, sea and ground, including customs. The TRESSPASS solution will be tested “in-vitro” with extensive simulations and “in-vivo” in three carefully designed pilot scenarios and field tests.

Objectives:
O1. Develop a single cohesive risk-based border management concept that covers the entire scope as described above, i.e. a four-tier trans-national, multi-modal security tunnel, including the accompanying concept of operations.
O2. Apply an ethics and data protection “by design” approach to ensure legal and ethical compliance of the solutions and provide ethical guidelines for decision makers regarding the planning and implementation of risk-based screening at borders.
O3. Include passenger trust in risk management model and perform sensitivity analysis and optimization by taking into consideration a trustful passenger as a proactive and trustworthy source of voluntary information and determine the benefits from the development of such trust-based interaction between security system and passenger in order to optimize the performance of the system in terms of efficiency, cost reduction, and increased security.
O4. Develop three pivoting pilot demonstrators for practical demonstration of key conceptual, operational and technical aspects of this concept using multiple threat scenarios, including terrorism activities at air borders, cross border crime at land borders and irregular immigration via sea (port) borders.
O5. Demonstrate the validity of the single cohesive risk-based border management concept by using the developed pilot demonstrators, red teaming and simulations.
O6. Prepare for the further development of this concept beyond this project by linking to other known risk-based border management projects and describe how their results contribute to a single cohesive risk-based border management concept. This will give all stakeholders a perspective for their respective further development.

Work performed

O1: Risk Based Border Management, Scenarios and Requirements elicitation

O2: Definitions and high-level methods for ethics methods have been defined. The focus in the 1st year of the project has been on the ethics of the research phase, not on the post-project operational phase.

O3: Trust has been placed in the overall concept, and its relevance and our approach has been defined in WP6 and WP9.

O4: We have defined three generic scenario’s – one for each modality.

O5: The pilots have not been designed yet.

O6: KPI 15: We have linked to FLYSEC, XP-DITE, PERSONA and PROFILE. We have not yet demonstrated capabilities yet, this is planned for the pilots.

Final results

Provide an extended situational awareness by the effective use of heterogeneous data from different sources such as external sources, legacy systems of the involved authorities and sensing systems.
Employ Risk assessment based on local threat and on transparent reasoning taking into account capability, intent, identity, and possession.
Enable Operational & Tactical decision capabilities, through the C2 services offered for situational awareness. The identification of risk levels of various people, groups and associated goods will enable operators to identify and take action on the highest risks whilst enabling smooth flow of low risk subjects.
Involve Border, Customs & Coast guard authorities in the three pilots to demonstrate coordination and cooperation, covering all possible modalities (air, land, sea).
Support info exchange and international alerting among authorities.
Utilize machine learning and signal processing techniques to evaluate a person behaviour based on facial cues (using remote heart rate detection, facial valence / arousal, action unit detection, blinking rate and eye movement) and body language, in order to remotely detect abnormal behaviours.
Employ deep learning architectures to analyse video frames blocked together (vs. frame-by-frame) to better attain the temporal features of a person’s walking behaviour for more robust re-identification across the same and other CCTV feeds.
Apply red teaming, simulation & training to continuously challenge and improve the threat/risk identification and the real time behaviour analysis module.
Provide a validated method for assessing the ethical impact on behalf of the traveller of implementing risk based border management concepts.
Provide ethical guidelines for decision makers that support ethically informed decision making for implementing risk based border management concepts.
Contribution to the research debates on risk based screening in humanities and social sciences regarding the acceptance and acceptability of risk based and seamless screening.
Apply Design Basis Threat approach, taking into account intelligence for making assessments based on risk indicators, will lead to differentiated but proportional measures at different border crossing point.
Complement heterogeneous data with data fusion services, such as risk identification and behavioural analysis data.

Social Benefits: Increasing safety level and decreasing cross border crime: TRESSPASS promotes better handling of cross-border crime and irregular immigration, enhancing coordination and sharing of information among border/custom control and law enforcement agencies, among Member States and third countries. The new TRESSPASS Risk-based border management concept will alleviate the social-economic impact from fight against cross border criminality and protect EU citizens from potential terrorist threats. The early detection of individuals and illicit products, such as drugs, arms, ammunition, substances that could be used in the making of explosives, will prevent terrorism activities.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.tresspass.eu/.