", In a YouTube video describing Thorns use of technology to fight child pornography and sex trafficking, Thorn Co-founder Ashton Kutcher said, We have to stay on the front cutting edge of that technology, because the criminals, theyre on the front cutting edge., I asked Kelbi what challenges Spotlight faces in keeping at the front of the technological curve. An improved product and UX journey delivers a seamless onboarding and training process for our users and admin staff, Streamlining the onboarding process for law enforcement, Designing a user experience for human trafficking investigators to help them solve cases faster than ever. Numbers are to date since the launch of our tool in 2014. 9 0 obj We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. 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. A GuideStar Pro report containing the following information is available for this organization: This information is only available for subscribers and in Premium reports. I get results fast allowing me to to gather important evidence and information in minutes compared to hours., Spotlight is a force multiplier at every stage of the operation. Thanks to Spotlight I have returned victims to their families and put bad guys where they belong. 2023, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. Telehealth Startup Cerebral To Cut 15% Of Staff, PlayStation's New Game To Feature Shiba Inu As 'Savior' Of 'Humanity', China Aims To Reach 'World-Leading Levels' Of Tech By 2035: CCP. All rights reserved. <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> 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. Raise your voice against slavery this December! We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. endstream Spotlight, on the other hand, is a complex piece of software that doesn't have any sales to help fund its production. 8 0 obj Thorn Helps Law Enforcement Identify Child Sex-Trafficking Victims Faster on AWS Answering the Challenge Using AWS Before presenting the first award of the night, "The Ranch" star Ashton Kutcher walked the red carpet in Dolce & Gabbana. Spotlight is like a investigative partner in human trafficking investigations. <> And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. It is the greatest tool we have in the fight against human trafficking., Special Agent, Wisconsin Human Trafficking Task Force. Since 2016 alone, Spotlight has helped officers in the United States and Canada open more than 21,000 trafficking cases and identify about 18,000 victims, including more than 6,000 children. Our programs and products find child abuse victims faster, make online environments safer, and deter criminal behavior. Thorn's Spotlight tool helps law enforcement more quickly identify sex trafficking victims who are advertised online. 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. $120/yr. stream Share it with us and well add it to the database! Officers, directors, trustees, and key employees. With just over 20% of users reporting, we are confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. "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. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. To help investigators overcome these and other hurdles, Thorn collaborated with AWS and Digital Reasoning, a company specializing in cognitive-computing solutions, to build Spotlight. We believe that technology is a tool, one we can use for incredible good. One of the most significant obstacles is the massive volume of these ads. Thorn was founded in 2012 to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. All rights reserved. At Dressember, we release a line of dresses each year, but those products are sold. % I cant begin to tell you how appreciative myself and the victim's families are that we have people that support a worthy cause such as this. Register. 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 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. This website is funded through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? We do all of this so every child can be safe, curious, and happy. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. Somewhere in that pile of data are children who are bought and sold online for sex. COVID-19 Fraud. AWS support for Internet Explorer ends on 07/31/2022. What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, The solution uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send alerts to law enforcement agents. 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. ", Spotlight was made to combat a difficult problem, and the data Spotlight handles is unsettling to say the least. Kelbi writes, "We are philanthropically funded, which means that donations and grants like yours directly fund our products that we provide to law enforcement for free. 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. Nokia's New G22 Phone Allows You To Repair Broken Parts Yourself; A Knack For Storytelling: Should AI Take Over What Makes Us Human? 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. This was meant to identify areas in which we could make the tool more intuitive, to minimize obstacles to adoption. Click here to return to Amazon Web Services homepage, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances, Identified 18,000 victims, including over 6,000 children. $180/yr. Top 5 IRS CI Enforcement Priorities. Kutcher elaborate on the software during the hearing, Its a tool that can be used by law enforcement to prioritize their caseload. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. Potts adds, "We built Spotlight because we wanted to use advanced technology to help law enforcement turn the tables and find these children faster.". BACKGROUND Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. Spotlight Data How often is the information in Spotlight refreshed? SOURCE: Self-reported; last updated 6/9/2021. Research programs to better understand the role of technology in child sex trafficking. Email or Username. 5 0 obj Use of THOR is periodically audited for compliance with these Rules. 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.". Abused children are identified and removed from harm and their abusers are held accountable. 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. $15/mo. country every day, law enforcement cannot manually keep up with the volume of ads as they work to identify and track potential victims. 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. Have you recently published a useful resource? This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. We build products and tools, partnerships and communities, that support and accelerate the impact and intentions of many people who are dedicated to defending children from sexual abuse. to get more GuideStar Nonprofit Profile data today! 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. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. 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. 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. Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. All of our technology partners are making crucial contributions to this fight. "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. Thorn is a team of issue experts, business leaders, and engineers who build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Thorn also works to speed the identification of children featured in sexually abusive material. 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. After I completed this phase of research, I used the information to iterate on the workshop design, and improve the overall usability of Spotlight. 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. Spotlight's machine-learning models are trained and run on Amazon EC2 C5 instances. 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. 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. According to our most recent user survey, Spotlight is helping find more child victims of human trafficking, faster. Spotlight evolved from surveys completed by victims of trafficking that showed 63 percent of underage victims were bought or sold online at some point. All rights reserved. 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. 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. This combination of streamlining workflows and increasing successful victim identification is what has propelled Spotlight to its large user base. Our brand NoFiltr reaches youth directly with prevention and support messaging to help them better recognize online grooming. Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. HTS creates a blog, publishes research, and hosts a global resource database on human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Thank you for supporting the fight to end human trafficking! $120 $180 $300 Other Other. I also created high-fidelity prototypes of key touchpoints on our site, whose content I validated through additional user feedback. With only a 25% response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Initially, they had about 100 users from three U.S. states who were using Spotlight for their human-trafficking investigations. Both products had been around longer than Spotlight and had a few hundred more users than us at the time. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. "It didn't make sense to build our own facial-recognition service when AWS already offers a best-in-breed solution like Amazon Rekognition. How does this organization measure their results? Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress. 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. This year, Dressember is proud to partner with Thorn, an organization that uses technology to combat child sex trafficking. 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. However, the following six districts Sign in. Washington D.C. tax attorney Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains. This process was relatively ad hoc, however, with no identified workflow to drive rapid acquisition and adoption. An infographic detailing the reach that Spotlight has gained, since its national roll-out in February 2015. endobj There are many things you can do right now to get started in your community to support local survivor organizations.". Finally, we were awarded the 2015 Cloudera Social Impact Award, for the work we did on Spotlight. 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. 6 0 obj The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. To request technical assistance, training, or other resources through this initiative, agency POCs shouldemail usor call 202-833-1460. User research through interviews, personas, and journey mapping of proactive and reactive searches had already been done prior to my start date. 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. The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick. Supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. There is a small group of people abusing our children, and we are a large community standing in strong opposition. 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. is the CEO of Thorn and has helped grow the organization from inception in 2012. Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? The Transportation Industrys Human Trafficking Prevention Toolkit, The Educators Human Trafficking Awareness & Prevention Toolkit, Hospitality Industry and Human Trafficking Toolkit, Visibly Invisible Sex Workers and Sex Trafficking in the EU, Prison Labor: What Happened in the 5 States That Had The Exception Clause On the Ballot, Illuminating a Nexus: The Interplay Between Disaster Events and Exploitation, Preparing for the Known Unknown: Human Trafficking and Disaster Response, Forced to Scam: Cyber Slavery in South Asia, Avoiding Cascading Effects: Why Suspension of The Davis-Bacon Act May Allow Forced/Exploited Labor. Access is available for free to law enforcement agencies and can be requested at: htspotlight.com. The Law Enforcement Family. 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. Used by law enforcement in all 50 states and Canada, Spotlight has assisted in over 25,000 cases in 2019 alone and has helped to identify nearly 5,500 child sex trafficking victims and nearly 6,500 child sex traffickers. 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. 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. and who do the programs serve? Most locations in the United States are updated every six hours. 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. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorns website. stream The organization's co-leader identifies as: Already have a GuideStar Account? endobj This combination of streamlining workflows and increasing successful victim identification is what has propelled Spotlight to continue to grow its user base. Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. Journey map of users navigating htspotlight.com. Trafficking in human beings: protect women and children and focus on sexual exploitation, Desperate for Cash, Afghans Toil in Mines That Are Deadlier Than Ever, Forced to Beg: Tanzanias Trafficked Kids. Kutchers company Thorn developed software to combat this challenge. Spotlight is used by more than 6,000 law enforcement officers in all 50 Spotlight is a web-based application that helps law enforcement prioritize leads in their sex trafficking investigations. Here are samples of the Spotlight product website: home page, request access page, and request demo page. Neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse, this Web site (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided). <> $10/mo. stream Hi-fidelity prototypes of key touch points on the Spotlight website. 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. I started by conducting a competitive and stakeholder analysis to help with the overall discovery of where we were with our current process. It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. 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