Lloyds Register launches SeaThreat
http://cdlive.lr.org

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Classification society Lloyd’s Register has launched SeeThreat, an online tool to help company security officers (CSOs) evaluate the changing security risks their vessels face, as they are required to do by the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code. 

The online tool can sift through up to 100,000 news stories a day and can pick out news stories which indicate possible maritime threats in specific locations selected by users. A company can then decide if any of its vessels are under a specific threat.

The tool accesses about 80 English-language news sources published every day by the different news wires around the world, as well as the national and international news services.

Annual subscriptions for the service cost Euro 4,750, with Euro 475 for each subsequent user license (‘seat’) within the company. But the Lloyd’s Register Group is offering introductory one month trials to the first 125 subscribers. 

There is a growing concern that crimes like piracy and kidnapping are on the increase as a source of funding for terrorists. 

The tool searches for information related to these threats, as well as many others specified in the ISPS Code such as, piracy, smuggling, use of ships as weapons and terrorism.

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The technology

SeeThreat was developed in partnership with QinetiQ, Europe’s largest science and technology company, which built its world-class reputation as the UK Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) elite research and development group. 

The tool uses search-engine technology originally developed by QinetiQ for the MoD to meet UK security needs. 

Current technology to analyse written content is still a hit-or-miss affair, as everybody who has a spam filter on their email or regularly uses an internet search engine knows. 
The technology used for SeeThreat uses an open structure based on standard computer search engine technology developed, improved and proven over many years by QinetiQ, which has significantly improved this structure. It is this improved structure which gives SeeThreat its ability to search large numbers of key words and align them with geographical regions and features.

The technology is not as accurate as a human being might be in understanding written content, but it is much quicker at finding information that might be relevant.  It’s then a simple matter for the human element to decide what is important and what can be disregarded.

The technology looks for words and phrases in news stories which relate to a certain threat the ship might be under. It has been programmed to search by using “and”, “or” and “nor” options for all the ISPS-specified threats in the locations input by the user. In particular, it searches for stories relating to any terrorist activity, sea-related smuggling, kidnapping, piracy and unauthorised access to vessels. 

The software uses a database of the world’s 4,500 ports and some 4,500,000 geographical features around the world to relate the geographical position of an event reported in a news story to the location of the user’s vessels.

The technology then uses algorithms to make an assessment of the threat level arising from the news story by assigning it a relative value between 1 and 10. These values are derived by the user from his ship security threat assessment. 

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Using SeeThreat

Lloyd’s Register has made a considerable effort to make the tool as easy to use as possible.

The CSO needs to regularly update SeeThreat with information about the location of vessels in the fleet, or ports in the world where he needs to monitor the security risk.

When he gets to work in the morning, he can check the online tool to see what the current threat level is in these locations.

SeeThreat has a traffic light system - green, amber and red - with red indicating that something has happened in the area to raise the threat level.

The user can download all the news stories which generated the increased threat level, evaluate these and draw his own conclusions about whether the ships are indeed under increased threat and precautions should be taken. 

Lloyd’s Register makes clear that it is not able to make the risk assessment on behalf of the CSO - it is only providing an information tool, not actually making the assessment.