There is more to risk intelligence than the truth!

Perceptions and beliefs at the scene of an event may not reflect the outside view of truth

A quick thought for risk intelligence providers ... do we always want a curated truth?

I don't mean this in a way that goes to suggest 'I want anything but the truth' ... I am saying that in our complex world, understanding alternate viewpoints can be useful. Naturally, we want to know your trusted position, but alongside the other news reported 'on the ground', so that I can gauge what impacted people 'may' currently believe. I think this is important, when you have such varying political agendas and biased media presenting you with their opinions ... sorry news.

Now, this is the heavy burden on risk intelligence organisations ... their audience needs those assessments, advisories and alerts based off the analysis and expertise from these agencies. This audience (often security teams in op centres) are trying to find reality, sat far away and working through the noise themselves. When they send critical communications and actions to responders and the impacted, they need to do it with authority and empathy ... whilst understanding any conflicting information at the scene of events.

An area I have advised many risk intelligence agencies to think about is presenting a mix of the following data:

• Your curated assessments, advisories and alerts that you are best at delivering today ... these are core to how many automated and manual response platforms work today, so keep it up!

• Wider, contested viewpoints on what is happening ... labelled clearly as false/untrusted/unchecked referencing that they are being communicated at the scene.

• Give us access to analyse your historic data (hey and commercialise it). The risk intel provider community is sat on decades of events and assessments ... we now live in a world of AI ... this information can be used to guide or challenge how people and AI itself predict the future.

• Think more on how you describe and categorise threats. Sadly, there is no international standard, but how you articulate threats, developing situations and vulnerabilities should not just be hidden in the text but built out into the accompanying meta data. Leaving it for AI to extract from the text is hopeful, don't just give us 1-5 severity ratings give us more, e.g. for earthquakes provide the Richter scale rating etc.

In summary, our technologies that consume the risk intelligence are getting more sophisticated. With the dawn of AI, we need to ensure that wherever it is used, there is sufficient content without ... or with less bias, with more detail on the wider situation and usable meta data new solutions can use without trying to get too clever ... but be clear when something may be false of course!?