It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. Learn more With only a 25% average response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. In the last five years, we have reached more than 2.6 million people globally through our child pornography deterrence program. Click on the link in that email This year, Dressember is proud to partner with Thorn, an organization that uses technology to combat child sex trafficking. Spotlights analytics pipeline begins with a third-party solution that ingests more than 100,000 new online escort ads each day, storing text and image data as objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. HTS creates a blog, publishes research, and hosts a global resource database on human trafficking and modern-day slavery. 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. Helped officers identify over 10,000 child victims of sexual trafficking and children whose abuse was recorded and distributed. Thorn has worked tirelessly to improve three areas of child safety, finding abused children faster, deterring predators, and creating hostile online environments. Register. Thorn developed Spotlight, an app that helps law enforcement close trafficking cases much faster than by using traditional manual methods. Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? FOLLOW MORE IBT NEWS ON THE BELOW CHANNELS, IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you. Thorn was founded in 2012 by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to combat online child abuse. Raise your voice against slavery this December! All Rights Reserved. Earlier in her career she worked for Motorolas mobile phone division and helped launch HELIO, a mobile virtual network operator. The organization collaborates with law enforcement agencies, tech companies, and nonprofits. Copyright 2023 IBTimes LLC. A leading assumption was that users wanted to learn by doing, so we used the outcomes from the New Orleans sting operation as a hands-on case study. The internet has become a widely used place for sex traffickers to advertise. 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. It's a hard question but an important one. We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. He likes Neo-noir films, running and cycling, classic American novels, small venue music shows, and burritos. "It didn't make sense to build our own facial-recognition service when AWS already offers a best-in-breed solution like Amazon Rekognition. Other Amount: Donate now Yes, accountability matters. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Commit to wearing a dress or tie every day in December. All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines, surveyed underage sex trafficking victims. 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. The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. We found that sixty-three percent of underage sex trafficking victims reported they had been bought or sold online. Here are samples of the Spotlight product website: home page, request access page, and request demo page. You can view our, Meet the 2019 Skoll Awardees for Social Entrepreneurship. I also conducted guerrilla usability testing to learn about the major pain points of the product itself. With just over 20% of users reporting, we are confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. 2016-MU-BX-K005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress. 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. <>/Metadata 508 0 R/ViewerPreferences 509 0 R>> 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. 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. In 2013, we published the first version of The Thorn Sound Practices Guide, which educates companies about proven practices, tools and resources that exist to identify, remove, report and prevent child sexual abuse material and abusive behavior on their platforms. 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. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. "Permitted Use" means any use of the Services by an Authorized User for the benefit of Customer solely for supporting his or her law enforcement, social services, academic or other similar professional role, including to detect criminal actions, identify missing/exploited victims, or measure statistical trends surrounding the adult services . Spotlight evolved from surveys completed by victims of trafficking that showed 63 percent of underage victims were bought or sold online at some point. 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. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. There are many things you can do right now to get started in your community to support local survivor organizations.". 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. 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. The organization's co-leader identifies as: Already have a GuideStar Account? 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. Stay up to date with our daily newsletter, testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee, evolved from surveys completed by victims of trafficking, Ashton Kutcher Blew A Kiss To John McCain. One aspect of law enforcement often discussed during an in-briefing or at a recruiting event is the idea that by joining the organization, you are being accepted into that agency's "family.". All rights reserved. All rights reserved. <> about GuideStar Pro. She shared, "Maintaining any technology product is always challenging because technology is constantly changing. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. Spotlight's machine-learning models are trained and run on Amazon EC2 C5 instances. xKk@aZp &@z(=6M5h6N0]|V^c DY: $ I~^_az{}n{wN2r0 G$?Df'QK(s[,3o@o Ecw]\Q sIIb4`W*4)zka0Xm?adhga$P0A*+F#JExueU\|%|Q(2TW,+ h[ QFSv`eDShjJ} x|c' $wGdX308@Ng/UTf 2 0 obj %PDF-1.7 Candid has made improvements to the race and ethnicity options. And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. 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. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. Before presenting the first award of the night, "The Ranch" star Ashton Kutcher walked the red carpet in Dolce & Gabbana. We couldnt recommend it more taking time away from what is hard helps us all sustain our efforts to achieve our goals. Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. <> Building is a core value that informs every strategy in our organization. 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.. 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. Our web-based tool is now used by over 5,000 officers in all 50 states and Canada. The objective of Spotlight is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of domestic sex trafficking investigations and increase the number of children who are identified and connected with help resources. With only a 25% response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Spotlight is a web-based application that helps law enforcement prioritize leads in their sex trafficking investigations. 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. Throughout this process, I worked collaboratively with Media Cause and Digital Reasoning to set timelines and execute. Our tool Spotlight accelerates law enforcements ability to identify victims of child sex trafficking. We believe that technology is a tool, one we can use for incredible good. Spotlight could never have been so successful without substantial investment and support from AWS, or the underlying technologies that Intel has created.. Somewhere in that pile of data are children who are bought and sold online for sex. This tool will allow us to conduct faster, more precise investigations that will remove criminals from the street and, most importantly, recover victims. Help Spotlight PA hold the powerful to account with a gift today. Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. This project was supported by Grant No. 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. 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. Thorn's Spotlight tool combines publicly available classified ad and online forum data with smart algorithms to help law enforcement identify an average of eight child sex trafficking victims every day. Similarly, The Tote Project, sells their bags, which helps them pay expenses. "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. I also created high-fidelity prototypes of key touchpoints on our site, whose content I validated through additional user feedback. This process was relatively ad hoc, however, with no identified workflow to drive rapid acquisition and adoption. 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. 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. BACKGROUND Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. Spotlight, a tool developed by Thorn, is a web-based platform that assists law enforcement in identifying sex trafficking victims faster. ", Spotlight was made to combat a difficult problem, and the data Spotlight handles is unsettling to say the least. Share it with us and well add it to the database! Build relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. 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. Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. <> 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. After the 2015 Atlanta ICAC Conference, we quickly realized that we needed a better on-boarding process that no longer relied solely on Google Sheets to manage requests. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. To request technical assistance, training, or other resources through this initiative, agency POCs shouldemail usor call 202-833-1460. This combination of streamlining workflows and increasing successful victim identification is what has propelled Spotlight to continue to grow its user base. Spotlight, on the other hand, is a complex piece of software that doesn't have any sales to help fund its production. We'll keep it out of your inbox, promise. The internet has made it easier for children to be bought and sold online. endstream Thorn Helps Law Enforcement Identify Child Sex-Trafficking Victims Faster on AWS Answering the Challenge Using AWS Spotlight is invaluable as a tool/resource. Spotlight is like a investigative partner in human trafficking investigations. about GuideStar Pro. Spotlight can connect contacts in minutes where it would take me weeks, if not months to do the same thing. "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. Sign In. In 2012, we learned that 75% of child sex trafficking victims were being bought and sold online. Julie was raised in Lindsay, California, a small farming community in Californias Central Valley. The Amazon Rekognition team has been very responsive in helping us address any challenges we encounter.". Officers can set customized alerts and search Spotlights constantly growing database of ads to aid in their investigations. According to our most recent user survey, Spotlight is helping find more child victims of human trafficking, faster. To build the world we believe in, we know we must: 1) Accelerate Victim Identification 2) Make Digital Environments Safer and 3) Deter Predatory Behavior. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section. Please check your inbox in order to proceed. A 2012 Thorn survey of child sex-trafficking survivors found that 75 percent had been sold online, most of them through escort websites. Page, and progress, it is helping find more child victims of sexual and! 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