Based on IRS CI's FY 2021 Annual Report, here are five top enforcement priorities that are likely to carry over into 2022: 1. To find children faster, they have created two online tools, Spotlight and Solis, for law enforcement agencies across the world, for free. You can have your biggest impact in the community where you live thats where you know the most about the environment, the opportunities, the dangers. endobj We have resource guides for researchers across the globe on all forms of trafficking for various stakeholders. We do all of this so every child can be safe, curious, and happy. Empowering law enforcement to collaborate beyond jurisdictions or national borders, is a key to success in identifying victims who are moved frequently, or are broadcast in P2P onthe dark web from a hidden location. Spotlight is a web-based application that helps law enforcement prioritize leads in their sex trafficking investigations. So when I came on, I got caught up to speed by reviewing that material, along with learning the product inside out by receiving, and then conducting, Spotlight demos and online trainings. The organization collaborates with law enforcement agencies, tech companies, and nonprofits. Streamlining the onboarding process for law enforcement An infographic detailing the reach that Spotlight has gained, since its national roll-out in February 2015. Copyright 2023 IBTimes LLC. These recent survey results confirm our initial hypothesis that Spotlight has indeed been an asset for law enforcement in earlier victim identification, collaboration and productivity. country every day, law enforcement cannot manually keep up with the volume of ads as they work to identify and track potential victims. The organization's co-leader identifies as: Already have a GuideStar Account? Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? All Rights Reserved. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. All of our technology partners are making crucial contributions to this fight. "When I asked if Spotlight was available to law enforcement in other countries, Kelbi said no, not yet, "But were constantly evaluating the landscape to understand where it can have impact internationally as well.". My goal was to not only design a workshop that increased adoption but to build a tool that added value for current users through an intuitive user experience and user interface - which would then translate to more victims identified in a shorter amount of time. It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. Most Popular Stories. 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. This combination of streamlining workflows and increasing successful victim identification is what has propelled Spotlight to its large user base. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. x["Yn Thank you for supporting the fight to end human trafficking! Julie holds a B.A. about GuideStar Pro. And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. Viral child sexual abuse material is removed from the internet to end the cycle of trauma. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Easy communication at scale, disposable "burner" phones, and simple photo-editing tools these are just some of the ways the digital, connected world was helping traffickers operate anonymously, one step ahead of the lawespecially those who traffic children for sex online. With over 150,000 ads posted online every day, we know that law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. Our tools are currently used by over 8,000 law enforcement officers in 37 countries, resulting in the identification of 10,000+ child sex trafficking victims and 847+ victims of child sexual abuse material. The success of Spotlight would not be possible without the countless hours that investigators spend looking for our kids; the technology partners who influenced and encouraged its development and our donors. Both products had been around longer than Spotlight and had a few hundred more users than us at the time. Activation of the tech industry helps eliminate abuse content from their platforms. In addition to a powerful team of experts, we work with the sharpest minds from tech, non-profit, government, and law enforcement to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, stand up to child traffickers, and uncover new kinds of abuse. The Law Enforcement Family. endstream She previously served as the VP of Marketing/Communications of (RED), where she helped establish the brand as one of the most successful cause marketing initiatives in history, delivering more than $160 million to fight HIV/AIDS across Africa. SOURCE: Self-reported; last updated 6/9/2021. Editor's Pick Leise Hook / For Spotlight PA Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. There are more than 150,000 escort ads posted every day in this country. It is the greatest tool we have in the fight against human trafficking., Special Agent, Wisconsin Human Trafficking Task Force. Armed with this data, we worked with our technology partners and law enforcement to understand how these existing digital footprints could assist law enforcement in faster victim identification. With only a 25% average response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Education and engagement with the public change risky and abusive behaviors. "Abusers had figured out how to use advanced technology to facilitate their exploitation of children," says Sarah Potts, the head of marketing and communications for Thorn, the California-based nonprofit that created Spotlight. What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, One of the most significant obstacles is the massive volume of these ads. Abused children are identified and removed from harm and their abusers are held accountable. $15/mo. We reached out to her for more information about Spotlight. Spotlight, a tool developed by Thorn, is a web-based platform that assists law enforcement in identifying sex trafficking victims faster. Monthly Yearly One time only. How can law enforcement sift through massive amounts of data to focus their time on the most vulnerable victims? BACKGROUND Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. Spotlight marketing collateral, based on what law enforcement needed to know. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Due to the sensitivity of the product itself, I will not be using this case study to highlight the product design or development of Spotlight, the tool. <> endobj Earlier in her career she worked for Motorolas mobile phone division and helped launch HELIO, a mobile virtual network operator. Spotlight's machine-learning models are trained and run on Amazon EC2 C5 instances. The solution uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send alerts to law enforcement agents. FOLLOW MORE IBT NEWS ON THE BELOW CHANNELS, IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you. I get results fast allowing me to to gather important evidence and information in minutes compared to hours. endobj According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorns website. endobj Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. Julie was raised in Lindsay, California, a small farming community in Californias Central Valley. Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? The rise of the internet has done for child sexual abusers the exact same thing it has done for everyone else - made it easier to share images, and build a community. $300/yr. endobj Supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. COVID-19 Fraud. "Fighting human trafficking starts where you live. Officers can set customized alerts and search Spotlights constantly growing database of ads to aid in their investigations. We piloted our workshop at the 2015 Atlanta ICAC Conference and received additional feedback on how to improve Spotlight Lab. Before presenting the first award of the night, "The Ranch" star Ashton Kutcher walked the red carpet in Dolce & Gabbana. "Our law enforcement partners say Spotlight helps officers identify child sex-trafficking ads much faster than the old paper-and-pencil methods," says Brooke Istook, director of strategy and operations at Thorn. 1 0 obj Expanded partnerships with law enforcement. We work with the sharpest minds from tech, non-profit, government and law enforcement to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, stand up to child traffickers and uncover new kinds of abuse . I joined a superuser with the Louisiana State Police on a human trafficking sting operation in New Orleans, to observe how they used Spotlight in the field. This process was relatively ad hoc, however, with no identified workflow to drive rapid acquisition and adoption. User research through interviews, personas, and journey mapping of proactive and reactive searches had already been done prior to my start date. Have you recently published a useful resource? Numbers are to date since the launch of our tool in 2014. Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Register. The app does this on a serverless Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture that includes Amazon Rekognition, a deep learningbased image and video analysis service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances. Spotlight does investigative work in minutes that can take hours sometimes to collect. So much so that we launched Spotlight nationwide in October 2014. Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Learn more about Amazon EC2 C5 Instances. I also conducted guerrilla usability testing to learn about the major pain points of the product itself. From there the software developed further to better analyze and track data that can lead to building strong cases against traffickers and finding the victims. 11 0 obj Registration is open for Dressember 2018 and fundraising has already started! Password. We work with the sharpest minds from tech, non-profit, government and law enforcement to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, stand up to child traffickers and uncover new kinds of abuse. For more information about the impact of Spotlight, check out the infographic below. Throughout this process, I worked collaboratively with Media Cause and Digital Reasoning to set timelines and execute. Spotlight is like a investigative partner in human trafficking investigations. From there, I created an information architecture for the content on the website, put together a website design inspiration board, sketched wireframes by hand and through an online tool - and then wrote the content itself. Powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Amazon EC2 C5 instances offer a memory-to-vCPU ratio that is ideal for demanding inference applications. Potts adds, "We built Spotlight because we wanted to use advanced technology to help law enforcement turn the tables and find these children faster.". Spotlight has been used in 21,044 cases identifying 12,328 adults, 5,791 children, and 6,553 traffickers in the past two years. "Spotlight was designed based on insights from our first survivor survey. 2 0 obj However, the following six districts We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. AWS Lambda functions orchestrate Amazon Simple Queueing Service (Amazon SQS) to queue new ads for processing by the app's analytics engine, Digital Reasoning Synthesys. 3 0 obj 4 0 obj Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, launched Spotlight nationwide in October 2014, Spotlight assisted in the identification of 1,980 children and over 2,186 traffickers. There are over 150,000 escort ads posted daily, and Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Spotlight, which is offered free of charge to law enforcement and allied organizations, uses Amazon Cognito to provide a secure user directory that can scale to millions of users. Spotlight helps officers identify child sex-trafficking ads much faster than the old paper-and-pencil methods., Brooke Istook, Director of Strategy and Operations, Thorn. Don't recognize this agency? I started by conducting a competitive and stakeholder analysis to help with the overall discovery of where we were with our current process. Here are samples of the Spotlight product website: home page, request access page, and request demo page. Problems of scale like this cry out for automated processes, but another big obstacle is the fact that escort ad data is anything but consistent: traffickers use code words, slang, and reused content to complicate detection by machines. While learning the ins and outs of Spotlight, and shipping features from our product backlog, I began to focus on ways to improve our on-boarding process for increased acquisition and adoption. 6 0 obj in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section. Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Get free shipping on all Thorne products, connect with health professionals and clients, and read Take 5 Daily to get the latest news in the health and technology industry. A 2012 Thorn survey of child sex-trafficking survivors found that 75 percent had been sold online, most of them through escort websites. We hate spam too, unless it's on a sandwich with some eggs. 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