RIM and Airwave vie to cut police paperwork

"Data breach" is no longer purely an IT security term, having entered common parlance over the last few months thanks to a rash of public-sector data-loss mishaps, including the loss of 25 million personal details by HM Revenue & Customs.

The inevitable backlash against such breaches has seen government departments trying to lock down data policies, with one example being the implementation of a ban, following yet another data breach at the Ministry of Defence, on unencrypted BlackBerry devices and PDAs being taken out of Whitehall.

However, amid all the fears about lax data control, some experts have been keen to point out that secure access to remote data has enabled a huge step forward in terms of productivity in the public and private sectors, and any attempts to tighten data-management policies should take this into account.

Earlier this month, the home secretary's senior professional adviser on policing, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, released a report, Review of Policing, into how the police service could improve its efficiency. In the review, Flanagan recommended that officers be given mobile data devices to cut down on the bureaucracy involved in "stop and account" procedures, automating the predominantly paper-based process.

In London alone, stopping members of the public to ask them to account for their behaviour generates 48,000 hours of police work annually, according to the report. Recording details of such encounters on pieces of carbon-copy paper takes, on average, seven minutes, before the same information is taken back to the station, transcribed, checked and countersigned by police supervisors. A copy of the paperwork is also given to the member of the public who has been stopped.

Police in Lancashire are already using voice-recording technology to replace the use of carbon paper in stop and account procedures, and Flanagan is keen for this approach to become more widespread. The technology provider in Lancashire is Airwave, which has an established history of providing mainly voice communications platforms for the emergency services.

"I have explored with Airwave the practicality of an officer digitally recording the details of the encounter verbally rather than manually, in writing," wrote Flanagan. "I am assured that this can be done in a way that ensures there is as good a record of the individual encounter as presently exists."

Airwave is keen to expand on its existing role of providing voice services to the emergency services, aiming to also take advantage of the increasing need for secure mobile data provision.

Jeff Paris, director of business development for Airwave, told ZDNet.co.uk that the company is in a position to provide the voice-recognition technology highlighted in the Flanagan report. "With Airwave, that technology is available at the moment," said Paris. "You could ask an officer to make a brief verbal record of the stop, which can be recorded on a central database and translated using voice-to-text translation."

Airwave purchases communications devices from suppliers such as BlackBerry-manufacturer RIM and Motorola and then supplies the device, the communications data platform, a suite of mobile applications and the service to transmit the encrypted data. All packets of data are encrypted when sent over the network.

Devices that have been mislaid can be temporarily disabled, or "stunned", remotely, while devices that have been lost or stolen can be "killed" remotely, with all data wiped and utilities permanently disabled, said Paris.

The Airwave communications platform is called the Mobile Applications Gateway. While it is a homogenous platform, Paris insisted that it is technologically agnostic.

"The logic is: if you have [an interoperable] platform, you give local choice — there are a range of suppliers, and we may be one of them," Paris said.

But, despite the name check from Flanagan, Airwave is not the only technology company providing mobile-data services...