It’s all over the news how Belgium was informed in July 2015 that a terrorist was going to their airport but it was only until the evening that this information was received by Belgian security services and acknowledged, thankfully the terrorist did not blow himself up, but he did escape control from authorities.
Any integration expert will tell you how many times 24 hours delay batch processing is “good enough” for project managers and legacy technology experts, mostly in the SAP and Tibco branches, where queue oriented integration is usually the way to go based on non standard formats. Just a sample:
In one of the starkest examples, local Belgian police in the town of Mechelen said Friday they had the address of a possible safe house of alleged Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam in their files since December but didn’t upload the information into a national police database. WSJ.com
And this other (older) news about how the procedure goes when a terrorist is dumped from a country (in Spanish):
El ministro belga de Exteriores, Didier Reynders, quien también intervino este viernes ante la comisión parlamentaria conjunta de Interior, Justicia y Exteriores, subrayó que el método utilizado por Turquía para comunicar la expulsión de El Bakraoui no es el habitual. “El método habitual de trabajo es que los servicios de policía turcos se pongan en contacto con los funcionarios de enlace cuando hay una extradición en el orden del día“, sostuvo. Desde mayo de 2013 ha habido seis comunicaciones de este tipo entre Turquía y Bélgica, cinco de las cuales se realizaron a nivel policial y la única remitida al portal electrónico de la embajada fue ésta, según el jefe de la diplomacia belga. elmundo.es
We are talking about public servants using direct access to their databases to update an entry (where hopefully an offline export process is done hours afterwards) or calling by phone (if someone is attending the phone at the other side) or going into a web site and filling a “contact us” form to communicate “terrorist incoming”.
That is how bad security services are right now… sadly so bad as many companies worldwide, if we are talking about terrorists willing to fly at 10:00 and exploding at 12:00 we can all agree real time integration and global alerts is the only way to go.
Yet, legacy systems and legacy experts keep on putting hurdles to evolution.