Briefs

01/28/04 - To nab terrorists, DHS will plumb trade data - By Wilson P. Dizard III GCN Staff

To detect money laundering by terrorists, drug smugglers and other criminals, the Homeland Security Department will buy new tools to analyze trade data.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the department's Border and Transportation Security Directorate, plans to acquire 14 copies of LeadMiner, an improved version of the Numerically Integrated Profiling System (NIPS) now used by ICE to track down financial crimes.

The ICE Financial Investigations Division's Money Laundering Coordination Center will award a sole-source contract for the software and support to DataMining International Inc. of Washington.

"DataMining International is a new company started by the original programmer who wrote NIPS," ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi said. Mark Laxer, the original NIPS programmer, now is the chief technology officer for the company.

ICE's predecessor agency, the Customs Service, began using NIPS in the early 1990s to investigate financial crimes.

Here is the rest of the story from GCN.