Ethical and legal constraints for ARGOS system: Why and how to identify them?

There are several reasons to explore potential ethical and legal implications stemming from innovations in Critical Infrastructure (CI) protection. At a first sight, everyone understands that CI must be safeguarded, and that it might require some restrictive measures: you just cannot freely walk through and do whatever you want in a facility, which provides an electricity, potable water, or gas for a city populated with a million fellow citizens. On the other hand, does any infrastructure deserve a right to impose limitations on people’s freedom of move, or even break their privacy when they get any closer? These are questions that arise with deploying technical measures of CI physical security. ARGOS system is going to be such a technical measure. Development of such a technological platform does not take place in a vacuum.

ARGOS Workshop in Madrid

ARGOS project was presented to the Spanish Critical Infrastructure Operators last 12 June during a workshop in everis premises in Madrid. The objective of this workshop was to describe the different parts that will encompass the ARGOS solution (such as vibration sensors, wake-up cameras, data-fusion and data-mining modules…) and gather the necessities and concerns of the CI Operators regarding CI protection.

ARGOS Workshop in Athens

Τhe Center for Security Studies (KEMEA) in cooperation with EVERIS, the ARGOS project Coordinator, organized successfully on 20/3/2014 the first ARGOS  Workshop in Athens in order to identify and elaborate the needs and requirements of the security professionals and the operators of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) as regards the physical security of confined (installations) and extended (networks) infrastructures.

ARGOS Consortium Kick-off Meeting in Madrid

ARGOS consortium is composed of 13 partners from 7 different countries with a combination of technical and research skills, industrial presence and relevant current products. The project is coordinated by everis and Aratos Technologies, Athena GS3 Security Implementations, Center for Security Studies (Kemea), VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, HI-Iberia Engineering Group, Infitheon Technologies, the IT Laborotory of Research and Education in Athens, Mira Telecom, Thales Services and the Charles de Praga University also participate with the ARGOS consortium. In addition, the Port Authority of Gijón and the Demokritos National Center for Scientific Research have collaborated in the project, as end users of this type of security solution.

The ARGOS Consortium

The ARGOS Consortium covers the entire value chain and includes all the expertise required for the successful execution of the project. Partners are all well-established and experienced organisations with a wide range of capabilities, making the Consortium stronger and more self-sufficient.

ARGOS Disseminaton Plan

A Dissemination Plan is necessary to build awareness of a project results and maximize its commercial exploitation potential. A project cannot be considered to have had real impact if there is no dissemination of its results beyond the boundaries of the project itself. The objective of this Dissemination Plan is to lay down the foundations for effective external communication of the ARGOS solution and the potential benefits to interested stakeholders at an international level, focusing primarily in Europe.

During this document we are going to develop the dissemination strategy to be followed during the entire project making clear the objectives for the dissemination plan, the messages to be delivered, the target audience for each message and the list of activities to perform. To evaluate the effect and impact for each of the activities a set of success indicators or KPIs will be defined.

ARGOS Main Objectives

ARGOS will allow end-users the possibility to deploy the solution beyond the actual perimeter of the CI, extending the “security zone” beyond the critical perimeter and defining an early warning area that will provide the Critical Infrastructures with the capabilities to enhance their capacity of monitor, deter and respond to a potential threat. The inputs of this non-intrusive multimodal network of sensors will all be simultaneously evaluated and cross-checked in order to minimize false alarms, using data mining to account for correlations and interdependencies. Also the system will implement a “guided learning” methodology letting the operator teach the engine that an alarm is true or false, so it will “learn” this information and improve progressively its performance and the rate of false alarms.