Information collection strategies to support strengthened safeguards

The IAEA Board of Governors approved the implementation of Part 1 of Strengthened Safeguards in June 1995. Since then, the collection and analysis of information beyond that provided by States parties and acquired by inspectors under NPT Safeguards Agreements has been an integral part of IAEA safeguards. The Agency has formally established internal structures and procedures to facilitate the effective use of open-source and other information not previously used in safeguards. Over this period the IAEA Division of Safeguards Information Technology (SGIT) has been building its collections of electronically held open source information. Some of these collections are quite nuclear-specific, such as material from the Monterey Institute in California, and nuclear news collections provided voluntarily by a number of Member States. Others are completely general news sources. Several of these collections contain many more reports than could possibly be reviewed by a human analyst. So a need has arisen for computerised search facilities to identify nuclear-relevant items from those collections. The Agency has more than one piece of software available to help searching and analysis of substantial collections of reports. Search 97 from Verity was chosen for this particular application because it is very straightforward to use, and it was expected that personnel from all over the Department of Safeguards would carry out these searches on a routine basis. The approach whereby special-purpose search mechanisms are designed for use by a large number of users, who are unfamiliar with the details of the search software, seems to be unusual if not unique to the Agency