Global Emancipation Network > Articles by: Sherrie Caltagirone

Author: Sherrie Caltagirone

Effective Counter-Trafficking Policy

Effective Counter-Trafficking Policy

In the digital age, human trafficking has evolved into a complex system that leverages the power of technology to build supply chains, create sophisticated communication techniques, and protect criminals from scrutiny, particularly online.  As such, website shutdowns are an important component of counter-trafficking operations.  However, they are just one step necessary in a coordinated, holistic approach that ultimately raises risk and cost to traffickers to unacceptable levels.  An intelligence-led disruption campaign may include a website shutdown, dozens of arrests, asset confiscation, banishment from transportation services, and more.  The key to this multi-pronged approach is that we allow the data to inform the response.  When the community works together, we can affect real demand reduction which will also reduce supply.  Global Emancipation Network has a unique view of the human trafficking challenge, and we’ve seen firsthand the force multiplier effect data- and technology-led programs have through government and law enforcement with many of our friends and partners.

Guiding Principles

We recommend the community fighting this battle move forward together with the following principles in mind:

  • Prioritize a victim-centered approach
  • Inform response with data
  • Protect individuals and organizations actively combatting trafficking
  • Ensure better outcomes with cooperation

Strengthening a Data Approach

Effective policy in the counter-trafficking space breaks down data silos and enables stakeholders to cooperate seamlessly with one another to identify victims and traffickers.  More specifically, the best policies:

  • Create and maintain a data-sharing architecture across jurisdictional boundaries which supports appropriate data privacy, compliance, and mandatory sharing requirements;
  • Enable intelligence, data analytics, predictive modeling, and survivor experiences to inform legislative efforts, resource allocation, and disruption activities; and
  • Empower and encourage individuals, NGOs, and online content platforms to aid and cooperate with law enforcement efforts without risk of liability.

Policy Recommendations

With these goals in mind, Global Emancipation Network commits to providing the underlying data and technology necessary to enable policymakers to create meaningful, effective counter-trafficking legislation that rescues and restores survivors of human trafficking.  Policymakers must:

  • Narrowly define what it means to have knowledge of or intent to host illicit material, including trafficking content;
  • Create and support funding for data-led, technology-driven anti-trafficking efforts including the research and development of tools and technologies that can be harnessed by the stakeholder community;
  • Enable counter-trafficking organizations to equip and support law and technology; and
  • Ensure congruency between local, state, national, and international legislation.

A steadfast dedication and relentless focus on the mission we all share are required to turn the table on traffickers. In future blog posts, we will further describe these goals and the vision Global Emancipation Network has for achieving these objectives.  We also welcome input from legislators and other counter-trafficking stakeholders as we form this coalition that empowers each of us to achieve our missions toward ending global human trafficking.

Read Here– Global Emancipation Network’s Letter to the US Senate on the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017

These Noble Nerds Fight Human Trafficking with Data, Blockchain Analytics

2 Oct 2017 – by R. Danes of SiliconAngle (Source) – See Video Interview

Law enforcement agencies across the globe concur that human trafficking — the capture, transfer, receipt or harboring of humans for various exploitative purposes — is widespread. Available statistics are wildly inconsistent, however; the International Labor Organization has estimated the global number of victims to be 20.9 million, while the Minderoo Foundation Pty Ltd’s Global Slavery Index puts the number at 45.8 million. Can big data and blockchain analytics bring greater clarity to the problem and help police catch perpetrators?

“There’s no reliable, repeatable way to count trafficking, so right now it’s mostly anecdotal,” said Sherrie Caltagirone(pictured), founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network. The non-governmental organization (or NGO) proactively combats human trafficking in 22 countries and 77 cities around the world. Government agencies, NGOs, law enforcement and academia typically do not work together to reach accurate numbers on trafficking, according to Caltagirone.

“Everyone silos their individual parts of the data,” she said.

Global Emancipation Network benefits from the Splunk4Good project — Splunk Inc.’s pledge to donate $100 million over a 10-year period in software, support and education to organizations working for positive social impact. The hope is that Splunk’s big data technology — typically used by enterprises to increase profits — will help Global Emancipation Network measure and fight trafficking crimes.

“With a data-led approach, hopefully we’ll get closer to a real, accurate number,” Caltagirone said.

She spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf2017 event in Washington D.C.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Sherrie Caltagirone in our Women in Tech feature.

Trafficking generates $150 billion in profits every year for the criminals who engage in it, according to ILO’s estimate. “After drug dealing, trafficking of humans is tied with arms dealing as the second-largest criminal industry in the world and is the fastest growing,” said Barry Koch, former assistant district attorney in New York County, in a Forbes article.

Traffickers disproportionately target the underprivileged. “People become very vulnerable if they don’t have a solid source of income or employment,” Caltagirone said. Traffickers use all kinds of gimmicks, such as fake employment ads, to entrap victims. They may then force them into prostitution or other exploitative labor.

Some percentage of the migrants currently flooding Europe from the Middle East and Africa are in fact victims of traffickers, Caltagirone stated. The criminals smuggle the victims across continents with the promise of refugee status and a better life in the West.

Hiding in plain site

While some may assume that the deep web is where all of the criminals hang out online, everyday sites on the open internet are actually rife with traffickers. Classified ads site Backpage.com is implicated in 73 percent of all child trafficking reports in the U.S., according to a Senate investigation. “There’s hundreds of websites like that,” Caltagirone said.

Traffickers are also finding and conning victims through social media sites like Facebook, WhatsApp and Kik Messenger, the anonymous chat site popular with sexual offenders.

Global Emancipation Network is going directly to these online trafficking hotbeds to catch criminals. “We extract all the data from the website that we can to pull out names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, things like that, and then begin to make correlations,” Caltagirone said.

Unlike many organization fighting trafficking, the Global Emancipation Network’s staff is quite tech savvy, according to Caltagirone. Many people she works with, including her husband, come from the cyber threat intelligence field. “They’ve learned that they can apply the exact same methods and techniques into our field,” she said. “It’s brilliant to see the ways in which they do that.”

Supposedly anonymous blockchain transactions may actually provide analysts and investigators with clues. “It’s not as anonymous as people think it is,” Caltagirone said. On Backpage.com, all of the ads are purchased with bitcoin, so cyber investigators have begun “trying to time the post to when the bitcoin was purchased and when the transactions happened,” she said. There are now companies specializing in this, such as Chainalysis, which Global Emancipation Network partners with.

“It’s really successful,” Caltagirone said.

Raising tech IQ

Global Emancipation Network works with attorneys general and law enforcement to improve their understanding of trafficking data. “Data’s useless unless we do something with it, so we build out these target packages in intelligence and give it to people who can do something with it,” Caltagirone said.

Improved access to accurate data may help these organizations reach more consistent conclusions. “They are running differentiated traffic operations all the time, and the jurisdictions, they overlap in many cases, especially when you’re talking about moving people, and they’re going from one state to another state,” she explained. “So you’ll have several jurisdictions, and you need to de-conflict your programs.”

Global Emancipation Network is reaching out and collaborating with other organizations that fight trafficking to raise their tech IQs. “These are, for the most part, not technically savvy people. And this is one of the good things about our nonprofit. … it is a staff of people that are very tech savvy, and we’re very patient in explaining it and making it easy and usable and consumable.”

Caltagirone’s career in anti-trafficking work began with an internship in college. “I really wanted to get closer and begin to measure my impact, so that’s why I started thinking about data,” she said.

Backpage.com has sparked a national debate over internet freedom and crime, which is bringing increased media attention to trafficking. “I would love to see the media start to ask questions, drill down into the data to be able to ask and answer those real questions,” Caltagirone said. “We’re hoping that Global Emancipation Network will do that for the media and for policymakers around the world.”

Global Emancipation Network is always looking for individuals to donate time and skills to fight trafficking. It is currently working to meet fundraising goals and is looking to hire a full-time developer and an intelligence analyst. For more information, visit Globalemancipation.ngo.

theCube Interview with Sherrie Caltagirone

26 September 2017 Washington, DC – SiliconAngle.com interviewed Global Emancipation Network Executive Director Sherrie Caltagirone in theCube at Splunk .conf 2017.  Learn More

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How big is the problem?

The trafficking numbers aren’t even numbers we can fathom.  20 million, 40 million, nobody knows what that means.  It’s really difficult to figure out the truth.  There is no reliable, repeatable method of counting trafficking.  It’s really just an estimate and it’s the best that we have right now.  With a data-led approach, we can hopefully get to an accurate number.

How do people become enslaved?

For example, the refugee crisis across Europe and the Middle East is a major player and a situation completely ripe for [human trafficking].  People who are refugees willing to be smuggled out of the country are at the mercy of their smugglers and it’s very easy for them to become trafficked.  Things like poverty and other marginalized populations like LGBTQ and homeless populations create situations for individuals to be exploited.

What forms does trafficking take?

It’s modern-day slavery, there are lots of different forms.  There is labor trafficking – such as working in a brick factory or forced onto a fishing boat for years.  Usually, they take away your passport if you’re from another country or threaten your family to keep you enslaved.  It’s slavery on a big scale.

How does data help solve the problem?

One of the benefits we have as an organization countering human trafficking is that we’re turning the tables on the traffickers.  They are using the internet much like private enterprises – they know that’s how they move their product, which sadly is human beings  They advertise for victims online and recruit victims online.  They use social media and apps like Facebook, Kik, WhatsApp.  Then they turn around and advertise openly selling their victims’ services through Backpage and the hundreds of other similar sites.  So, we’re constantly looking for those sites and data sources through automated and human intelligence.  We then look for patterns – who are the victims, who are the traffickers, what can we do about it?  The data is really what will inform policy and have effect real change.

Has Cryptocurrency Made Fighting Trafficking Harder?

No.  It hasn’t.  There has been a lot of research into blockchain analysis.  For instance, on Backpage ads are purchased with bitcoin and we can correlate new ads with deductions from wallets basically de-anonymizing.  For instance, we partner with Chainalysis.  It’s not as anonymous as people think.

How Much Are You Looking Internationally vs Domestically?

We collect from 22 countries, 77 individual cities.  Most of the sites are jurisdictionally specific – like Craigslist.  We harvest from the main world’s primary trafficking points.  We collect in 6 different languages.  The majority of our data is from the US only because it’s easy but our collection spans the globe.

What do you do with the data?

We love to exploit data.  For instance, linking bitcoin wallets to other online activity.  Linking a user handle to their Facebook or Flickr account.  We’re like reverse hackers because most of our volunteers have decades of experience hunting hackers and know the methods of detecting people trying to hide and then uncovering their operations.

Partner Ecosystem

We partner with attorneys general and law enforcement where we deliver intelligence packages on traffickers.  We partner with other non-profits.  We also can’t forget our tech partners and the amazing volunteers who help make the technology accessible to our customers.  We love to see the lightbulbs go off between the non-profit and the tech sector where we can help lead more non-profits to use data to improve their mission.

Fundraising Goals?

We want to raise funds to hire a full-time software engineer and an intelligence analyst.  You can donate to Global Emancipation Network here.  We’re also looking for people who can donate their time and skills.  We receive a lot of product donations from the technology sector and so we’re lucky we don’t need to spend money there.  But, we do need to hire two people.

What Was Your Founding Story?

It was a happy circumstance.  I’ve always done counter human trafficking starting at the Protection Project at Johns Hopkins University where I worked as a legislative analyst traveling the world helping countries draft legislation on human trafficking.  But, I wanted to get closer and start measuring my impact and where I started thinking about data.  Getting to data to measure our impact.  Then I started volunteering for a rescue operations organization where I liked having the closer impact and I felt like I could do something to have real impact.  The ideas around me about using data started percolating and the idea just formed.

Is the Media Coverage on Human Trafficking Adequate?

It’s really good that it’s coming to the forefront.  Five years when I told people there are still people enslaved and it didn’t end with the US civil war, they would stare at me slack-jawed.  Now, with films on the topic many have seen Taken with Liam Neeson which most people get their image of trafficking which illustrates one type of trafficking.  But, others like Aston Kutcher and his organization, Thorn,  that’s really fantastic.  He has been able to raise the spotlight.  There is currently a large debate in the US about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act centered around Backpage.  Where do we draw the line between freedom of speech but also catch the bad guys.  I would love to see the media ask hard questions and drill down into data.  We hope that the Global Emancipation Network will provide that view to the media and the policymakers around the world.

What Is Human Trafficking

What is Human Trafficking

Most people get their mental map of human trafficking from movies like ‘Taken,’ the Liam Neeson films. However, human trafficking is far more complex and multifaceted than is portrayed in the media. As I write this post, I am sitting in a rural suburb of a major city in the Pacific Northwest across the street for an arena with $500,000 horses. Yet I am painfully aware that human trafficking has a presence in the area.

What is human trafficking? The legal definition based on the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) is:

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs

This is a mouthful, however, to make this understandable let’s break this down: The current number of victims of human trafficking globally as of 2017 is over 40 million people. There are certain common misconceptions about human trafficking:

  • Human Trafficking occurs both across borders and within a country, not just cross-border.
  • Human Trafficking is used for multiple ranges of exploitative purposes, not just sexual exploitation.
  • Human Trafficking victimizes children, women, and men.
  • Human trafficking takes place with or without the involvement of organized crime groups.

Human trafficking is divided into four major categories, Labor, Sex, Medical and Other. These are all impacted by various socio-economic and cultural influences. Let’s break down each of these categories and review the impact of each:

NOTE: The following section includes numbers based on reported incidents and estimates. The actual impact may be greater.

Labor trafficking – 24.9 million victims

Labor trafficking worldwide used to be the predominant form of trafficking. Over the last 10 years, sex trafficking has become more prevalent. Labor trafficking involves the forced to work under threat or coercion. Labor trafficking includes such areas as domestic workers, construction site workers, in clandestine factories, on farms, and fishing boats.

  • 16 Million in the private economy (2 million 57.6% female and 6.8 million 42.4% male).
  • 1 million are in state-sponsored labor.
  • 8 million are enslaved as sex workers (3.8 million adults and 1.0 million children, the majority of victims (99 percent) were women and girls

Victims are forced to work by private individuals and groups or by state authorities. The products they made and the services they provided ended up in commercial channels. Forced labor produces some of the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and they have cleaned the buildings in which many of us live or work. Labor trafficking victims are 63% men and boys and 37% Women and children.

Sex trafficking – 4.8 million victims

Sex trafficking includes both prostitution and pornography affecting 3.8 million adults, and 1.0 million children (some estimates put this number at 2 million) are victims of commercial sexual exploitation in 2016. The majority of victims (96 5) were women and girls.

Other trafficking – 19.5 million victims

There are several other types of trafficking that do not fit into the labor or sex categories. Forced marriage affects 15.4 million people with 88% being women and girls. The percentage of children forced into marriage prior to the age of 15 is 44%

Trafficking in human organs is one of the least common forms of trafficking by does occur,

A separate category not included with labor trafficking is state-sponsored labor trafficking. There were an estimated 4.1 million people in state-imposed forced labor on average in 2016. These numbers include agricultural and economic ‘development’ projects and using military recruits for compulsory participation in public works, and forced prison labor.

Contributing Factors

There are many factors that feed human trafficking, regional conflicts, economic hardship, cultural acceptance. Human trafficking is not isolated from other patterns of such as refugee migrations. and trafficking in wildlife. Human trafficking is unlike other illegal commodities in that once a product is sold the smuggler needs to replace it. With human trafficking, the enslaved individual continues to used multiple times.

In future blogs, we will dig deeper into types of human trafficking and what the Global Emancipation Network (GEN) provides for legislation, law enforcement, and prosecuting organizations. We will share some of the stories of human trafficking and the impacts on its survivors. We will review the challenges of enforcement and prosecution in these cases.

Note: The number of victims of human trafficking is hard to pinpoint to exact figures. Different reports separate sex trafficking into a separate category while others lump it into sub-class of labor trafficking. Since there is no uniform census data and traffickers attempt to remain hidden, in some cases the numbers are derived from estimates based on sampling. To give context to the number of exploited, the United States census for 1860 showed 3,953,761 slaves just before the civil war.

Learn More About The Global Emancipation Network’s Approach to Counter Human Trafficking

References:

 

Global Emancipation Network and Splunk Partner

25 September 2017  The Global Emancipation Network and Splunk through Splunk4Good are proud to partner and together use the power of data analytics to end human trafficking.  Splunk announced a $100m philanthropic pledge for global research, social impact and educational initiatives.  The Global Emancipation Network is proud to be one of the first Splunk partners in this initiative to tackle the third greatest criminal enterprise in the world and a source of modern evil.  See our video below.  Learn More

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Anti-human trafficking group uses data to track criminals

By Selena Larson via CNN Money 17 August 2017 (source)

A word like “fresh” can be a signal that a young girl is being trafficked. Finding it in advertising could lead to saving someone’s life.

Human traffickers rely on the internet to advertise and maintain criminal enterprises. The Global Emancipation Network collects and analyzes the digital breadcrumbs they leave behind to help find victims and stop traffickers.

The organization uses data analytics to find, study, and make connections between people and the information they share online. With corporate partners including Microsoft, Splunk, and Recorded Future, the volunteer-run organization has created a searchable database and tool to find and analyze trafficking data.

“There has to be more that we can do to identify victims, rescue them, hope they don’t get revictimized. And then to stop and punish those traffickers,” said Sherrie Caltagirone, founder and executive director of GEN. “Right now, they operate with impunity online.”

Their external platform, called Minerva, is currently in beta, and the plan is to eventually provide it free to law enforcement and victim service providers. It includes image processing, data analytics, bitcoin analysis, and public records enrichment. Police will be able to use it to search for things like advertisements, phone numbers, or websites traffickers use.

Internally, GEN uses the data it collects to look for patterns human trafficking and study global trends. There are tens of millions of people trafficked each year, and according to the International Labour Organization, 21 million people are victims of forced labor worldwide. The UN estimates children make up about a third of global trafficking victims.

There are currently a handful of nonprofits that use data to track human trafficking, including Thorn and the Polaris Project. Caltagirone says GEN is unique because it collects data about all types of human trafficking from 22 countries and 80 jurisdictions.

Related: Hacker creates organization to unmask child predators

GEN scrapes data from a variety of sources, including Craigslist, Backpage, and dark web sites.

Splunk, a data analysis platform and supporter of the organization, donated its technology to GEN. It can index the scraped information and look for suspicious signals in the data by analyzing keywords, phone numbers, geographic data, or usernames. For instance, ads are deemed suspicious if they contain the same phone number but pop up in two different states.

GEN’s platform also studies the language used in advertising, including emoji or text embedded in images. One sign of an underage sex trafficking victim could be words like “lolita” and “fresh” in an advertisement. Studying language and data shared in ads also helps differentiate between posts from independent sex workers and those that are likely to be sex-trafficking victims.

Though her group analyzes all types of human trafficking, it is more difficult to spot labor trafficking than sex trafficking.

Andrew Lewman, vice president of OWL Cybersecurity, says human traffickers will frequently start on Facebook to advertise smuggling services, then switch to encrypted chat apps and use anonymity tools like Tor to protect communications and information.

“One way traffickers uses the internet and darknet is to buy, sell, or coordinate people,” Lewman said. Like any business, much of it relies on the web.

Lewman, who served on President Obama’s tech and trafficking task force, provides GEN with indexes of data. The firm scrapes 400 million pages every few months, he says, most coming from the dark web, and shares that data with GEN. The organization or law enforcement can then run their own queries on it, like searching for ads or usernames from an investigation.

“Some of the techniques we do we don’t advertise, because we don’t want traffickers to find out about it and stop doing the thing they’re doing that allows us to find them,” Caltagirone said.

minerva global emancipation network

Caltagirone, who has worked in anti-human trafficking her entire adult life, has spent hundreds of hours talking to law enforcement. She recently tested the platform with one U.S. District Attorney in an ongoing investigation of an escort review forum. The DA wanted a list of some users on the forum, what other sites they were on, what criminal activity they engaged in, and photos shared with their posts. Then law enforcement could cross-reference the usernames and phone numbers to other locations online.

The group has also studied whether or not site shutdowns — a traditional law enforcement technique that makes a website inaccessible — actually prevent bad behavior. Her organization studied web traffic data after Backpage closed its adult advertising section, and found that it doesn’t. Users simply went elsewhere.

Ultimately the platform will be free to law enforcement, funded entirely by donations. Many jurisdictions don’t have the budget to pay for technical tools, or have dedicated human trafficking units. Those are the clients Caltagirone wants to target first.

But beyond cash-strapped police departments, making the platform free is an ethical issue.

“Trafficking victims have already had their lives destroyed, and they’ve already had people make ungodly sums of money off their exploitation,” she said. “We say the buck, literally, stops here.”

CNNMoney (San Francisco)First published August 17, 2017: 3:33 PM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/17/technology/business/human-trafficking-data-global-emancipation-network/index.html

Using Big Data to Stop Human Trafficking with Microsoft Azure

Around the world, over 21 million adults and children are the victims of human trafficking. Of that, less than 50,000 are rescued. This devastating criminal industry must conduct business in the shadows, but even though the operations are not always easily identifiable in public, human trafficking networks develop patterns that can be tracked. Nonprofit organizations like the Global Emancipation Network identify these patterns to aid law enforcement with taking down human trafficking operations globally.

The Global Emancipation Network uses big data, collecting streams of information from law enforcement agencies, businesses, other nonprofit organizations, and ordinary people to identify patterns that are indicative of human trafficking operations.

It might surprise you to know that the Global Emancipation Network is a fairly new nonprofit, launching from its sister organization Orphan Secure in March of 2016. The organization is made up of around 25 part-time volunteers that all work remotely since the organization does not have a headquarters.

“Everything is entirely volunteer right now. Currently, we don’t even have an operating budget so any costs have been coming out of my own pocket,” Sherrie Caltagirone, the Executive Director of the Global Emancipation Network, explains.

“Everything is entirely volunteer right now. Currently, we don’t even have an operating budget so any costs have been coming out of my own pocket.”

With no operating budget and no headquarters, the Global Emancipation Network faced the daunting task of finding an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that would give them all the power of a high performance computing cluster and the built-in tools to manage and analyze the data, without the high cost.

“In 2014, we started talking about the kind of platform we needed and looking at the nonprofit offerings out there. Essentially, we needed to create an integrated platform to host large-scale data that would be a very scalable storage solution with machine learning tools,” Sherrie continues, “Fortunately, several of our volunteers work at Microsoft so we were able to hear about some of the products offered by Microsoft Philanthropy and heard about their newest offering for nonprofits, Microsoft Azure.”

In September 2016, Microsoft Philanthropy announced it would offer an annual $5,000 Azure credit to nonprofits around the world, making the powerful cloud computing infrastructure much more accessible to the nonprofits sector.

The Global Emancipation Network uses Azure to collect raw data from a multitude of data sources using APIs. The raw data is stored in a space known as the Azure blob to be processed by the intelligence tool Splunk, and the R toolset, which are built into Azure. These tools are used to identify patterns in the massive amounts of data the organization collects and output analytics and graphical representations of the data, which goes to help other nonprofits that are working to stop human trafficking, like Orphan Secure, and law enforcement agencies.

As their organization grows and establishes connections to more data sources the Global Emancipation Network will be able to easily scale up within Microsoft Azure.

“We would not have been able to do what we are doing today without Azure. With the amount of data we are collecting and processing, it would be very inefficient to mine manually.” Sherrie says, crediting their success to Microsoft Azure and to Microsoft Philanthropy for all the help and support they received getting started.

“We would not have been able to do what we are doing today without Azure. With the amount of data we are collecting and processing, it would be very inefficient to mine manually.”

Download the PDF: Using Microsoft Azure and Big Data to Combat Human Trafficking

For more information, contact the Global Emancipation Network!

Global Emancipation Network and Recorded Future Announce Partnership

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – May 25, 2016

Recorded Future and Global Emancipation Network today announced a technology partnership advancing novel applications of data science and natural language processing in the field of human rights.  The partnership provides Global Emancipation Network with access to comprehensive stores of open source and dark web data and allows for seamless API integration into Global Emancipation Network’s anti-human trafficking data analytics platform.  Recorded Future provides threat analysts and security operations teams with world-class, real-time threat intelligence and unrivaled insight into emerging global threats through their Web Intelligence Engine.  Global Emancipation Network, an international nonprofit, combats human trafficking by automating the processes by which victims of trafficking are identified and connecting them to law enforcement, rescue services, and rehabilitation service providers.  They are teaming up to push the boundaries of data analytics in social work and humanitarian crises.

Each year, over 20 million men, women, and children are trafficked around the world. Tragically, only about 45,000 of those victims are identified and recovered. This partnership allows for Global Emancipation Network to quickly and efficiently find victims whose services are being advertised online and to coordinate their rescue and rehabilitation through their network of victim service providers.  Manually, this process can take weeks or even months, during which time a trafficking victim is likely to have been resold and moved outside the geographic area.

“We’re very excited by the generous support of Recorded Future.  Integration with their complex data sources greatly enhances our ability to find victims of human trafficking and scale our life-saving work,” said founder and Executive Director of Global Emancipation Network, Sherrie Caltagirone.  “This partnership enables us to illustrate how data science can have a positive impact on the world of human rights and other nonprofit spaces.”

“We are honored to assist the Global Emancipation Network in their vital mission,” said Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Recorded Future. “To effectively combat this global problem at a massive scale requires automated intelligence analysis that reduces the time from identification and search to rescue.”

Recorded Future provides non-profits access to its product.

Recorded Future’s mission is to empower analysts with real-time threat intelligence, to defend their organizations against threats at the speed and scale of the Internet. With billions of indexed facts, and more added every day, its patented Web Intelligence Engine continuously analyzes the entire web to provide unmatched insight into emerging threats. Recorded Future helps protect four of the top five companies in the world, and over 12,000 IT security professionals use Recorded Future everyday.

For additional information about Global Emancipation Network, please visit www.globalemancipation.ngo.

For additional resources on Recorded Future, please visit www.recordedfuture.com.

PRESS CONTACTS

Sherrie Caltagirone
Executive Director
425.502.6930
sherrie@globalemancipation.ngo

Nagraj Seshadri
VP Marketing
Recorded Future
617.902.0350
nagraj@recordedfuture.com

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Global Emancipation Network, a registered 501(c)(3) charity, delivers cutting-edge data and technology to stakeholders across the globe, disrupting human trafficking networks, informing domestic and international policy, and supporting survivors of modern-day slavery.

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