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My scenario is like this. I work for a government agency that specialize in the Environment and Natural Resources. We want to make fool-proof functional system (software, hardware, people-ware, policy) that would:

prevent the reuse of a permit issued for transporting wildlife live species.

We have implemented a QR URL Code embedded in all permit to authenticate the validity of the local transport permit on every airports, checkpoints, sea ports in the my country so that black marketing of wildlife species (vulnerable and near-threatened) would be limited and also prevent invasive species from spreading.

An example of scenario would be:

A permit holder was granted a local transport permit to bring ten (10) lovebirds to point A to point B for 10 days. In reality the holder has 100 lovebirds at hand, and was planning to reuse the permit transport all lovebirds 10 pieces. at a time (meaning by batch).

(For as we know its really hard to distinguish healthy lovebirds for they look the same in all angles).

The evaluator will base the validity of the permit depending on the distance, mode of travel (air,sea,land). The system users that tasked to evaluate the wildlife will have the authority set the number days (usually 1 to 3 months upon the issuance of the permit.

There will be inspectors of wildlife on the Airport, Seaport and Trains, but what about the private vehicle. Although there are strategic road checkpoints scattered throughout the country. The road checkpoints isn't as thorough as the airport, seaport, or trains.

If I set the validity too low the client might complain. If I set too high the loop-hole can occur.

Is there any technology, methodology, or policy that is somehow related from what is my dilemma here? e.g. tracking system.

Christophe
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Sam Mamuric
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1 Answers1

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Tech is not the solution to everything. This is an example that needs to be addressed through some policy. Tech can only help enforce that policy.

In the context of moving physical goods around, information technology cannot prevent that the goods are moved without a valid permit. What tech can do:

  • create tamper-proof permits with public key cryptography
  • organize information on permits and inspections into a database

That's it. For example, this would allow an inspector to determine whether a permit is valid, and to detect whether a permit was previously seen in another inspection (i.e. whether a permit reuse was detected).

Additionally, it may be possible to use the database to try to suggest where inspections might be most useful, however such “predictive policing” approaches have dubious value and could reinforce bias that could be used by malicious actors to evade inspections.

Of course the only way to be sure is to inspect any transportation that might need a permit. This is usually not possible.

Another approach that might be feasible is bookkeeping of permits. Instead of (or in addition to) auditing the transportation, it might be possible to audit the locations to which the lovebirds are transported. E.g. if there's a permit to transport 10 lovebirds to B, and a permit to transport 6 lovebirds from B to C, there should be 4 lovebirds still at B – or a really good reason why not. This doesn't prevent illegal transports, but makes it more difficult to do them without detection. A central database of permits allows you to more easily calculate the expected number of lovebirds at a location.

Note that the suggestion in the comments of using a blockchain is not going to help here. A blockchain allows multiple distrusting parties to keep immutable records. But this is basically a majority vote: as soon as one participant is able to contribute > 50% of the blockchain capacity they could manipulate the records (though manipulation will be detectable by other participants). For the internal database of some agency, there's only one participant (the agency itself) so a blockchain is pointless.

amon
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