Develops IPN and Sedena military intelligence software

The Mexican Army, together with engineers from the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), is developing an “Information System for Decision Making” with which it plans to group information that ranges from the operation of organized crime, to organization charts and profiles of actors of organizations political and social.

The development of the system was disclosed publicly, by the Mexican Army itself, through the National Transparency Platform in the field of studies paid with public resources.

However, based on a resolution of the Transparency Committee of the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), taken from November 11, 2020, which classifies military projects developed with public universities, the agency limited the details of the project.

However, among the emails stolen from the Army by the Guacamaya group, are the investigation protocol of the project, which belongs to the Military Intelligence System (SIM), as well as its progress.

Use of the software

The project summary specified that the objective of the Information System S2 (Intl.) EMCDN (Joint Staff of National Defense), as it is called, is to “systematize the process for the generation of information products that currently are used and elaborated manually (criminal panoramas, from the four fields of power (politics, economy, society and delinquency.

“(Analysis of criminal incidents and events, time lines, link networks, statistical graphs, heat maps, mapping of event incidents in digital cartography, actor profiles and files and organizational charts of criminal, political, social organizations, etc. )”.

The project also plans to integrate, in its second stage, Artificial Intelligence tools for voice and face recognition, as detailed in the protocol.

In turn, it was indicated that the program is expected to be used by the personnel of the Military Information System, in addition to the intelligence agencies of the National Guard.

Costs and legal loophole

In general, for the project, the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) plans to allocate 16 million 339,700 pesos for its development, which began in March 2022 and is estimated to be completed in September 2023.

In the project, it was mentioned that in Mexico there is no company that offers services similar to what the Army wants, while at the international level there is software whose use licenses, for one year, range from 26 million 200,000 pesos to 400 million. .

Therefore, it was argued, it is more efficient for the Army to develop its own program.

Regarding the legal issue, it was argued in the documents consulted that the purchase of this type of software sometimes requires the approval of the government of the country in which it will be used, while the development, at least in Mexico, is not It is regulated as such, so its creation is more feasible.

Shortcomings of the current programming

According to the documents to which El Economista had access, Sedena uses a similar system to group the information it collects called Genexus, however, said software has various flaws ranging from duplication of information to failures in data backup. .

In deliverable 2 of the project called “Diagnostic Report of the Current System” 12 findings were listed that represent risks in the management of databases.

Among them, it was mentioned that during the operation of the system “it happened on more than one occasion that a query caused the system to take more than a minute to respond. This behavior is known but Genexus does not provide facilities for programmers to optimize their queries or efficiently define the indexes that could help demanding queries to be executed easily”.

Another finding is that for the Genexus system there is no Sedena staff permanently dedicated to solving the problems it presents.

hector.molina@eleconomista.mx