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Simplifying investigations to strengthen French national security

“ Every application used by the Gendarmerie and the Police requiring or producing data runs through Talend.

CA S E S T U DY

” Commander Christophe Tedesco, Head of the Service des technologies et des systèmes d’information de la Sécurité intérieure (STSISI, National Security Technology and IT Department), French National Gendarmerie

The National Gendarmerie is a branch of the French Armed Forces under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, consisting of 100,000 men and women tasked with ensuring the peace and safety of French citizens and protecting their property. The Gendarmerie assists the French Judicial Police, provides assistance to individuals, maintains public order, and participates in national defense, including operations outside of France.

In 2010, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) named France the 2016 host of the European Championship. Then in 2015, one year before this high-profile international event, France was hit hard by terrorism. “It was a big wake-up call,” Commander Christophe Tedesco, Head of the Gendarmerie’s information security department, the STSISI (Service des Technologies et des Systèmes d’Information de la Sécurité Intérieure), recalls. “We realized that people would have access to very sensitive areas, such as fan zones, and we had to be able to identify dangerous individuals.”

The Gendarmerie decided it needed a solution that would cross-reference security information currently stored in separate databases. This is where Talend came in.

Paris was also set to host the UN Climate Change Conference, COP 21, in late 2015, another major international event with high-stake security issues. Suddenly, Talend became a key figure in the Gendarmerie’s efforts to correlate masses of data. Two deadly terrorist attacks (November 13, 2015 in Paris and July 14, 2016 in Nice) pushed the Ministry of Interior to further strengthen its authority over the automated

processing of personal data as part of the fight against terrorism. Known as ACCReD (Automation of centralized consultation of information and data), this official decree allows law enforcement to run “automated and simultaneous consultations” of existing files, such as files on wanted persons; S fiches (wanted person warning cards); and government investigations concerning public security. The decree is meant to facilitate the issuing and monitoring of access authorizations to nuclear facilities or other sites vital to French national security.

Cross-referencing multiple government security files

Personal data files in France consist of national government files and files at the European level, which can be accessed by the same government entities and sometimes by private organizations. The usage of these files is governed by the Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL), a French administrative regulatory body that ensures data privacy laws are adhered to in the handling of an individual’s personal data.

To carry out its duties, the National Gendarmerie uses hundreds of applications and dozens of files from the National Police, the Ministries of the Interior, the Armed Forces, the Justice Department, and the Environment Department. For example, a TAJ (Traitement d’antécédents judiciaires) file contains information on a person’s criminal record. CASSIOPEE is used to monitor judicial procedures. The Police and the Gendarmerie use an editing software known as LRP to draft procedural documents. Since EU citizens are allowed to freely travel within the Schengen area, the Schengen Information System (SIS) is used to monitor

INDUSTRY

• Public sector

INFORMATION• HQ: France

• 10,001+ employees

USE CASE• French national security

CHALLENGE• Cross-reference a large number of government security files

TALEND PRODUCTS USED• Talend Data Fabric: - Talend Data Integration - Talend Application Integration (ESB) - Talend Real-Time Big Data

RESULTS

• 3 TB of data processed every day

• From 300,000 identities screened each year to one million each month

• 1 to 30 seconds to return information from dozens of files and hundreds of applications

flagged individuals and stolen vehicles, and FOVeS files contain information on flagged vehicles and objects.

“Our problem was that all these files were separate,” says Tedesco. “Each file had to be accessed one by one to retrieve the information it contained. Sometimes you had to type in the same first name and the same last name four to five times to view the data, which took forever.”

Talend’s key role was to manage all queries on the various files in a unified and controlled manner that would give users access to the information they required. “Our IS department collects all of these files in the Système d’Interfaces et de Référentiels (SIR), and we work with Talend to handle the data exchange between applications (Data Integration and Real-Time Big Data),” explains Tedesco. “There is no centralized data. The ACCReD receives a list of identities to screen. Talend accesses dozens of existing files and delivers the information.”

The National Gendarmerie has also set up repositories to manage all of this data. When a search is run on the various databases, whether it is a municipality, a vehicle brand, a narcotic, or a type of crime, the information has to be uniform on all systems and spelled in a consistent manner. “Talend manages these repositories across all the systems,” says Tedesco with satisfaction.

Today all data exchanges between applications used by the Gendarmerie and the Police are centralized on the Système d’Interfaces et de Référentiels (SIR), which manages over 3 TB per day and 600 jobs. The system also handles information sharing between the various Ministries and generates statistics as anonymized or partially anonymized data.

Why Talend?

This was not the first time the National Gendarmerie and Talend had worked together. Already in the early 2000s, the Gendarmerie’s IS department used Talend to help switch its workstations to Linux. Naturally, this included its production center, but its ETL process was completely Windows-based.

After analyzing the Gendarmerie’s options, IS found in Talend a software company particularly attentive to its needs. “We felt Talend had a dynamic attitude and a genuine willingness to move the product forward,” recalls Tedesco. Talend has meanwhile released connectors for SAP HANA and Big Data, both needed by the Gendarmerie. “Talend is continually keeping pace with technology developments. You don’t have to wait ten years for the solution to be updated,” Tedesco comments. “And when we migrated to SAP HANA, IS only needed to change the connector. It was available, practical, and easy to use.”

The fact that Talend is a French company was also a plus for the Gendarmerie. So is its open source approach: IS teams appreciate how the open source community can quickly provide answers to most issues.

At the core of French national security applications

“This automated access of all security data is highly sensitive,” Tedesco says. “You can search a TAJ file for any incident, say a dispute with a neighbor or something more serious. The same file can also indicate a wanted person, unpaid alimony or taxes, or that the person skipped a hearing to revoke their driver’s license. This does not mean these individuals are criminals or terrorists.”

Given such complexity, the government adopted CNIL recommendations and has issued a restricted list of users authorized to access intelligence files. And every night, Talend uses various data sources to construct a “pivotal HR repository,” which factors in certain elements such as relocations or assignment changes, thereby restricting file access to authorized individuals only. Basically, all access to files depends on this repository in connection with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Ultimately, a person rather than the system decides who is qualified to access the data. “Talend helps in processing multiple accesses. But the overall results are subject to the approval of the Officers of the Judicial Police (OPJ),” explains Tedesco.

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“Talend has become the orchestra conductor of all inter-application exchanges for our security data and a critical element in our information system. If our system does not send the information quickly, we receive a call within a minute. The solution is strategic.”

“We started by analyzing 300,000 screened identities per year. Now we have stepped that up to one million per month, without any extra effort.” This higher volume is because other security-risk operations (public transportation, nuclear facilities, etc.) can now access ACCReD as a means of ensuring that their employees are not suspects. Many individuals frequently appear in files because of their highly sensitive jobs.

The ACCReD has allowed the nuclear industry to go beyond mere character assessments in their hiring practices. Companies can now verify if an individual’s record shows any misconduct by quickly querying updated source files, including the TAJ.

The same procedures are part of mobile applications used by the Gendarmerie officers. During a traffic control, the Gendarmerie officer used to have to query each separate database: vehicle registration, insurance, the FOVeS database for stolen vehicles, wanted persons, etc. The time needed to enter all this information dragged out the entire process. Now the officer simply enters the driver’s name or the vehicle registration and selects which checks should be run. Talend and the SIR handle all the details. The data summary usually appears within 8 to 10 seconds.

The exact same procedure is now used for automated border controls in French airports, which takes between 1 and 20 seconds. The application used by the French Air and Border Police also relies on the SIR and Talend to access wanted person files in real time.

Finally, the exchange server makes it possible to connect to outside entities via a DMZ (demilitarized zone), such as the ministries and other countries in the Schengen area—all in real time. What about a traffic control in Germany on a French vehicle? Verifying an individual’s identity and whether they pose a threat? All these requests go through Talend. Other French ministries also rely on Talend solutions: the Ministry of the Interior for adding to and querying TAJ and statistics; the Ministry of Justice for the CASSIOPEE database and for transmitting court documents; the Ministry of the Armed Forces (also in charge of the Gendarmerie) for handling medical issues

for its members; and the Ministry of Finance and the CHORUS application for paying government employees. The Gendarmerie’s IS division also handles operational issues, such as monitoring the force’s vehicle fuel consumption, or sending fuel bills to the Ministry of Finance for payment.

There are now many other SIR transformation projects with Talend, including geo-localizing patrols.

“That’s our flagship big data project,” says Tedesco. “Gendarmerie radio technology tracks the location of each unit in France at all times. And with Talend, we monitor about one million positions per day.” The benefits are twofold: visualize and better mobilize resources in the field and if necessary, analyze afterward how an intervention played out (delayed because of construction, a more urgent intervention while en route, etc.).

The Gendarmerie’s IS is currently setting up a platform to monitor banking requests such as account positions or movement of funds, its latest project involving Talend. Until now, the process has been entirely analog on paper but will now be progressively digitized to speed up responses and avoid any errors.

“In five years, Talend has become a key element in our information system. The mechanics of the infrastructure are so reliable that every single meeting addressing IT needs involves SIR and Talend,” says Tedesco. “Our users present a list of files they want to access. Talend consolidates, cleans, and returns the data after authentication. Exchanges between applications have been simplified in a completely transparent way. Access to information takes just a few seconds.”

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