It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. "With the flexibility and easy integration of AWS, we can experiment and prototype new products like Spotlight that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to develop. about GuideStar Pro. Amazon Rekognition, which uses deep learning to accurately identify objects, people, activities, and events in images and videos stored in Amazon S3, is at the heart of one of Spotlights most crucial capabilities. endstream There is a small group of people abusing our children, and we are a large community standing in strong opposition. Potts adds, "We built Spotlight because we wanted to use advanced technology to help law enforcement turn the tables and find these children faster.". Share it with us and well add it to the database! I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. Additionally, many new supervisors inevitably will speak with and encourage employees to ensure they take care of their . 3 0 obj Matt Damon wants clean water for all, Shailene Woodley was arrested protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, and Ashton Kutcher is the co-founder of a tech company fighting human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Leadership Spotlight: Leading with the Pen - The Handwritten Note. Earlier in her career she worked for Motorolas mobile phone division and helped launch HELIO, a mobile virtual network operator. Finally, we were awarded the 2015 Cloudera Social Impact Award, for the work we did on Spotlight. Sign in or create a new account. Spotlight is the #1 investigative tool I have utilized to find child victims and arrest their traffickers in countless cases. 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 through peer-to-peer platforms (P2P) on the dark web from a hidden location. All of our technology partners are making crucial contributions to this fight. <>/Metadata 508 0 R/ViewerPreferences 509 0 R>> stream With the approval of the Thorn CEO, I led the design of a Spotlight product website and managed our vendors, Media Cause and Digital Reasoning - who were in charge of graphic design and engineering development. Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Please check your inbox in order to proceed. This is me at a conference booth, preparing to hold several usability testing sessions with human trafficking investigators. Leadership Spotlight Compassion in Law Enforcement Compassion is characterized by a willingness to purposely assist others on an emotional level and to selflessly put the needs of others before. <> Email or Username. $300/yr. Lucas Moore is a writer in Los Angeles. 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. Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results. The National Policing Institute, formerly known as the National Police Foundation, is an independent non-profit, non-partisan institution based in Arlington, Virginia that has been dedicated to advancing policing through innovation and science for over half a century, and works to translate those findings to practice through technical assistance, training, and dissemination. All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines, surveyed underage sex trafficking victims. Helped officers identify over 10,000 child victims of sexual trafficking and children whose abuse was recorded and distributed. $10/mo. <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. When we surveyed underage sex trafficking victims, 3 out of 4 who entered the life in the past decade said they had been advertised online at some point in their trafficking situation. Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. Candid has made improvements to the race and ethnicity options. Officers who login weekly report a time savings of 60% in their human trafficking investigations. This tool will allow us to conduct faster, more precise investigations that will remove criminals from the street and, most importantly, recover victims. Help us get you more of the nonprofit information you need, including: An email has been sent to the address you provided. Technology can be used to enable slavery but it can also be used to disable slavery, and thats what were doing, Kutcher said to wrap up his comments. Facial analysis in Amazon Rekognition helps investigators find photos of the same person that have been edited to defeat less intelligent image-search engines. For this phase of the project, I used the data I already gathered from Spotlight users to create a journey for those seeking to learn more about Spotlight, request a demo, request access, and to log in. Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. Kelbi Ervin, Development Associate at Thorn, works with a team to develop partnerships and identify funding opportunities to sustain Thorn's work. Copyright 2023 IBTimes LLC. Password. Viral child sexual abuse material is removed from the internet to end the cycle of trauma. The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. Abused children are identified and removed from harm and their abusers are held accountable. "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. I started by conducting a competitive and stakeholder analysis to help with the overall discovery of where we were with our current process. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. Need the ability to download nonprofit data and more advanced search options? And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. 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. Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. Officers, directors, trustees, and key employees. "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. One of the most significant obstacles is the massive volume of these ads. Our tools take massive amounts of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Thorn developed Spotlight, an app that helps law enforcement close trafficking cases much faster than by using traditional manual methods. Spotlight's sophisticated machine-learning capabilities save time for overworked, under-resourced investigators by automatically flagging ads likely to represent at-risk children and keeping law enforcement agents from getting lost in a sea of online data. Our web-based tool is now used by over 5,000 officers in all 50 states and Canada. 2016-MU-BX-K005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Spotlight's machine-learning models analyze new escort ads in real time and use intelligent image analysis and natural-language processing (NLP) to flag those that match risk profiles developed in cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Our team built and launched Spotlight in 2014 to improve investigator workflow to find child victims faster. This was meant to identify areas in which we could make the tool more intuitive, to minimize obstacles to adoption. Per Kristin, "The genesis of Spotlight started after we conducted a sex trafficking Survivor Survey in 2012, seeking to learn directly from victims how technology was used throughout their trafficking situation. Learn more <> We'll keep it out of your inbox, promise. This organization is required to file an IRS Form 990 or 990-EZ. With just over 20% of users reporting, we are confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. stream 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. "We tested multiple facial-recognition services and found Amazon Rekognition was extremely accurate," says Kristin Boorse, the director of product management for Thorn. After the sting operation, we sat down with FVTC and the DOJ to put together the curriculum for Spotlight Lab. 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 software makes tracking down traffickers easier and faster for law enforcement, which can cut down on the amount of time it takes to find victims. Thorn also works to speed the identification of children featured in sexually abusive material. The organization collaborates with law enforcement agencies, tech companies, and nonprofits. There are more than 150,000 escort ads posted every day in this country. ", Spotlight was made to combat a difficult problem, and the data Spotlight handles is unsettling to say the least. <> We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. country every day, law enforcement cannot manually keep up with the volume of ads as they work to identify and track potential victims. $25/mo. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. 2016-2022 National Policing Institute -Privacy Policy-Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader, Spotlight A Tool to Improve Sex Trafficking Investigations, Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader. Raise your voice against slavery this December! 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. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Office. I was part of the team that was responsible for designing the UX/UI and rolling out the product Nationwide, along with our partners -Digital Reasoning- whose machine learning technology, Spotlight was built on. I also conducted guerrilla usability testing to learn about the major pain points of the product itself. 11 0 obj Thorn has worked tirelessly to improve three areas of child safety, finding abused children faster, deterring predators, and creating hostile online environments. 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. On AWS, we can also respond to feature requests from officers in weeks or daysnot a level of responsiveness public-sector agencies are used to seeing. Output - describing our activities and reach. This year, Dressember is proud to partner with Thorn, an organization that uses technology to combat child sex trafficking. Founded in 2012, Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Thorn is a team of issue experts, business leaders, and engineers who build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. "Day to day, we strive to balance hard work with care for ourselves and each other so that we have the resiliency we need to keep fighting," Kelbi writes, "At Thorn, we are invested in a team wellness plan where we carve out time to discuss how were feeling and how were approaching our work. We can use this tool to gather intelligence and plot trends prior to conducting an operation, during the operation we can allocate resources effectively and tighten our investigative vision to have the greatest immediate impact, and following this operation we can couple Spotlight with information gathered in interviews to develop a more complete picture of the scope of Human Trafficking in our area.. From what I gathered, Spotlight was by far the most intuitive and robust, providing a better user experience, despite having a ways to go itself. Thorn's Spotlight tool helps law enforcement more quickly identify sex trafficking victims who are advertised online. Human Trafficking Search (HTS) seeks to raise awareness and help prevent and eliminate human trafficking worldwide. I started by conducting a competitive and stakeholder analysis to help with the overall discovery of where we were with our current process. "It didn't make sense to build our own facial-recognition service when AWS already offers a best-in-breed solution like Amazon Rekognition. The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick. Supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. endobj result in increased adoption of Thorns tools, a reduction in time to stop abuse and an increase in risk for perpetrators. Thorn runs the countrys most extensive online deterrence program, communicating directly with people searching for CSAM, disrupting their sense of anonymity and encouraging them to seek help. Other Amount: Donate now Yes, accountability matters. "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.". 9 0 obj Sign In. Equipped more than 8,500 law enforcement officers across 2,000 law enforcement agencies in 35 countries with its tools, Tools speed investigation time by up to 65 percent, 2022 Skoll Foundation. Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? 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. Eventually, I reached out to them, and we agreed to partner and co-teach a Spotlight Lab workshop at major conferences across the Nation to drive awareness and adoption. Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. Activation of the tech industry helps eliminate abuse content from their platforms. Finally, we designed marketing collateral to drive further customer acquisition. The good news is, this can help investigators track down traffickers. Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Monthly Yearly One time only. Build relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. This website is funded through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. All rights reserved. It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. Spotlight is like a investigative partner in human trafficking investigations. 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. All rights reserved. A 2012 Thorn survey of child sex-trafficking survivors found that 75 percent had been sold online, most of them through escort websites. from UCLA and an M.B.A. from Northwestern. Our work has three pillars and one guiding vision. Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) founded in 1918, is a statewide nonprofit human services agency that addresses the need to provide new immigrants and refugees in Connecticut with services to help them become self-sufficient, integrated and contributing members of the community. 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. All Rights Reserved. $120/yr. Our products would not be successful without the partnership we receive from the law enforcement users in every state, at every level of government, and in 37 other countries who use our products, give us feedback, and work tirelessly to identify children. The internet has made it easier for children to be bought and sold online. and who do the programs serve? 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. Spotlight, on the other hand, is a complex piece of software that doesn't have any sales to help fund its production. in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section. Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress. To date, Spotlight has helped officers reduce investigative time by up to 65% and has helped identify 18,119 trafficking victims (including 5,791 children) and 6,553 traffickers. Click on the link in that email Our programs and products find child abuse victims faster, make online environments safer, and deter criminal behavior. 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. Learn more about Amazon EC2 C5 Instances. 10 0 obj Help Spotlight PA hold the powerful to account with a gift today. endstream An infographic detailing the reach that Spotlight has gained, since its national roll-out in February 2015. Initially, they had about 100 users from three U.S. states who were using Spotlight for their human-trafficking investigations. We are dedicated to ending child sex trafficking and eliminating child sexual abuse from the internet, and we wont stop until every child can simply be a kid. 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. 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. FOLLOW MORE IBT NEWS ON THE BELOW CHANNELS, IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you. I gathered additional information through phone call interviews with customers who were familiar with Spotlight and the other two products to get a sense of what features and design they liked. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Used by officers in all 50 states and Canada, our web-based tool has helped in identifying 17,092 child victims of human trafficking in the past four years. 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