Global Emancipation Network Tackles Human Trafficking Crisis with Splunk

12 Oct 2018 by Martin Banks of Diginomica (Source)

Splunk is putting its skills to good use with the Global Emancipation Network’s efforts to expose human traffickers and choke off their business

I am the first to acknowledge that it is really rather easy to sit in a hotel bar, a glass of decent Pinot Noir readily to hand, and think that something really ought to be done about human trafficking, and then let more immediate issues take priority.

It is also easy, when the numbers one deals with daily – Petabytes of data; billions of Dollars, Sterling or Euros in investments and spending; the atomic level, nanometre geometries of semiconductor devices – are all so mind-boggling that somewhere between 20 and 45 million seems rather trivial.

But that is the estimate of the number people being trafficked around the world for someone else’s financial gain during a year.

‘Doing something about it’ has become the lifelong cause of Sherrie Caltagirone, Executive Director of the Global Emancipation Network. But her version of ‘doing something’ steps away from the classic model of leading marches and organising media-led campaigns – good as they might be. Her strategy is to use technology to catch the traffickers, the same type of technology that the traffickers themselves employ to conduct their business.

That is why she one of the featured users at the recent Splunk .Conf18 conference, held in Orlando’s Disneyworld resort. Splunk is one of the Network’s main partners, along with Microsoft for its Azure cloud services, GitHub to secure is rather sensitive codebase and Dark Owl for it capabilities in penetrating the recesses of the Dark Web, amongst others in the vendor community.

Now she is looking for more, and different, partners, particularly across Europe where a goodly percentage of the trafficking takes place these days. The difference she is seeking can be found amongst the technology user community. For example the banks that fund and trade the money involved, and the businesses – especially the hotel, restaurant, entertainment, agriculture and cleaning services trades – that employ the trafficked individuals.

The vendors and niche service providers that service these markets are also partner targets, and are well placed to lend a hand, says Caltagirone:

I’d like to start pushing the fight further into the private space. That’s the financial sector, transportation, hotels, that sort of thing, the people who are making decisions to stop trafficking there. We need to give them the tools they need in order to do that. And we have a few tools in the pipeline right now to help do that.

These are available free of charge, and it will always be that way. This is a moral point for her. That being said, as all the tools are available in the cloud, the Network may move to offering them to interested third parties as a service, and because they expect the scale to get much larger, there could be a small charge to cover processing.

This is a big, global problem

So far, the tools developed to fight human trafficking have only been made available to law enforcement and similar government agencies, and really they only focus on domestic sex trafficking. The difference with the Network is that it is pitching squarely at global trafficking because it is a global business involving men, women, children, and both sex and labour trafficking, as well as the exploitation of refugees.

Caltagirone now wants to target the non-profit organisations, the ones at the forefront of victim services, such as the hotlines in the UK that aim to stop the traffic runs, as well as businesses in the private sector. The goal is to equip them to tackle trafficking at scale.

One of the key sources of help, of course, is access to data, so partners that can help in that direction can be very helpful. The number and variety of sources is growing, especially in the labour trafficking area, but she is looking for more, especially outside of the USA. It also means that the Network is already embedded into the Dark Web, working with partners with the expertise to identify components in the trafficking chains.

Some of the data is only available legally to certain segments of the Network’s user base, for example access to financial data is highly restricted and only available within a chain of custody. So it has to operate in different ways for different user groups.

This is then where both Microsoft and Splunk come into play. All the collected data is stored in Microsoft Azure, and from there it is pushed into Splunk where it analysed. This process, for example, helps identify the links between the different datasets that can demonstrate the `trading relationships’ between trafficking operations.

This can be particularly useful in helping to identify those leaders in the trafficking business that might try to hide behind a mask of business respectability.

This obviously then begs an important question: does this put the Network in a difficult position, legally? Caltagirone says:

So the way that we do it is that we are providing data to law enforcement in the form of a tip-off. So here’s the data, what you need to do is check this out. But they’re actually the one’s looking at the data on our platform themselves. They are looking at all original source data that’s accredited. There’s a provenance on it, so they can go out and independently verify everything on their own.”

There’s all sorts of liability questions that come into play so we are very careful with that. We have some fantastic pro bono legal support that helps us answer some of those sorts of questions. And we also talked to other organisations who have encountered legal issues and sort of tried to learn from their mistakes.

She admits this is an area that has some grey tinges to, especially where different countries have different laws or interpretations of laws. But as she observed, this really only comes into play when law enforcement is part of the equation.

What she is trying to do now is stretch this to prompt more businesses, where trafficking is part of the employment chain, to examine their own data more closely in order to identify where they are unwittingly contributing to the traffickers’ profits. Choking the trade is as good – arguably quicker and more effective – as using the labyrinthine fastidiousness of the legal process.

The Network takes particular care to make sure that a human is never able to modify the evidence. There is a clear chain of custody, and there’s data provenance that can be demonstrated. Legislative efforts are also being made to clarify what is admissible in court as evidence so that private organisations such as the Network can legally assist law enforcement, effectively act as an accepted `expert witness’. But it shows one of the issues – that law enforcement doesn’t have the resources or the technology available that they need to do this job well, and at scale.

GDPR as ‘good guy’

In this context Caltagirone sees GDPR – and it’s growing number of equivalents around the world – as a potential ally rather than a hindrance. The battle, then between privacy as a citizen and the overwhelming public interest to collect some of the data. One big question here is then `who owns the data’, the individual or the website that holds it? And if the data is about trafficking, is it the trafficker or the many traffickees? If the public interest can be established there is a case that the data can be collected. She notes:

I don’t think that a victim of human trafficking is going to sue for us collecting their information.

As for law enforcement organisations getting snooty about being helped in this way and defending their patch, she says the opposite is true. Because they are so under-resourced and under-staffed they realise they need help. In practice, the number of anti-trafficking units around the world is very small:

We have 15 to 20 different things to help them with their analyst workflow that we’re putting under one pane of glass and presenting free of charge.

One of the big areas of current and future development for the Network, and one where more vendor partners would be most welcome, is in online image analysis. Traffickers often advertise their `wares’ under the guises of `respectable’ employment agencies, and often show pictures of the individuals being trafficked. Out in the Dark Web it can be more explicit, particularly where women and children are trafficked into the sex trade.

It is now possible to ID individuals being trafficked and track their movement by comparing datasets from different sources. What then becomes important is the ability to gain access to private data sets that can enrich the data. That means tracking down phone numbers, addresses, and details of who owns what. This, she says, comes best through partnerships:

Partners can choose to share with other people who they are legally allowed to share with, and it’s completely restricted and secure. And instead of log files, we’re looking at trafficking advertisements, for example, and processing it that way. I think we are the only organisation using Splunk to organise and collect data on images at this point. So that’s a really key use case.

It works by using Splunk to examine and analyse the data stream. In the sex trafficking space, for every text out there’s an average of eight photos associated with it. So the images have a lot of weight. And they often embed text information in it that we need to extract. We are trying to bring it all under a single pane of glass. Previously, an analyst would have to go out to 10 different services to get the same information. Yeah, Splunk is really powerful at advocating and collecting data for us.

My take

It is easy to say that human trafficking has always been with us. Yes, ancient Rome and Athens were built on and by slaves. In later years, so was much of the UK and the USA. And while we can sit and say `it’ll never happen to me’ don’t believe it. for given the state of turmoil and upheaval going on in the world right now (which a sensible gambler would bet on it getting much worse) then being trafficked is a possibility for any and all of us.

So why not try and stop it, kill it stone dead? We do have the technology to choke off the trade, as well as ID the perpetrators. Maybe it IS the place for every IT vendor to offer something – be it product, technology or brainpower.

OK, so I’m off the soapbox now…..but it doesn’t change the way I feel.

 

Read more of Martin Bank’s work

 

The New Sheriff In Human Trafficking Is Wielding Big Data

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11 Oct 2018 – by Devin Thorpe of Forbes (Source)

Heather (not her real name) was working consensually at an escort service as a sex worker when she realized that a human trafficking ring was trying to trap her. “She was completely panicked,” says Sherrie Caltagirone, to whom Heather reached out.

Caltagirone leads the Global Emancipation Network, a young, nonprofit organization that utilizes data to identify both traffickers and victims. Their weapon is Minerva, named for the Roman goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, which puts the big data to work.

Studies about the number of people being trafficked today yield different results, ranging from 20 to 45 million, giving the estimates a margin of error greater than 100%. The trafficking problem is huge but so is the lack of good data. The Global Emancipation Network is out to fix that.

“Human traffickers are reliant on current technology to increase their revenue. But the same technology can be used against them,” Caltagirone says, explaining the fundamental premise of her work.

Using Minerva, Caltagirone was able to identify the individuals involved in the attempt to trap Heather in this trafficking ring. Leveraging the organization’s relationships, “we were able to rescue her from that situation and she was not trafficked.”

Headshot of Sherrie Caltagirone

Sherrie Caltagirone   CREDIT: GLOBAL EMANCIPATION NETWORK

The Global Emancipation Network has received help from Microsoft Philanthropies, which provides technological support that accelerates the effort. GEN has recruited Microsoft volunteers and utilized Microsoft Philanthropies’ grants and discounts over the past two years since GEN was founded. This is part of the Tech for Social Impact Team at Microsoft.

“The upstream impact GEN has had in the human trafficking sector is remarkable given their size,” says Justin Spelhaug, general manager for the Microsoft program. “It is inspiring to see how a relatively small organization saw an opportunity to put their talents to work and went all in, leaning on partners like Microsoft Philanthropies to provide the tools to fulfill their vision. GEN is just scratching the surface on the immense impact they can make in ending the human trafficking industry.”

Caltagirone says the long-running efforts to thwart trafficking needed an upgrade. “The strategies that we have been employing are completely ineffective,” she says.

She points to the recent FBI takeover and shuttering of Backpage as an example. The site was used for selling sex, including trafficking victims. Shutting it down was hailed as a victory. Caltagirone says we’re just playing “whack-a-mole.” The perpetrators, who were not arrested, will simply move their ilicit wares to other websites.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC, was created in 1984 by John and Revé Walsh. It is designated by Congress to serve as the national clearinghouse for information about missing and exploited children.

Staca Shehan, the executive director of the case analysis division of the NCMEC, notes that Microsoft introduced Caltagirone and GEN to the NCMEC in 2016. “Sherrie has traveled to NCMEC to provide training to our staff in-person and collect feedback based on our use of the tool,” Shehan says.

Shehan explains how the NCMEC uses Minerva. “Minerva helps NCMEC find information in large, hard to search data sets. Specifically, Minerva has helped NCMEC locate additional phone numbers in online advertisements and further analyze who that phone might be registered to, which can lead to possible current location for the child.  Time is critical in missing child cases and Minerva is one of the tools that support NCMEC’s efforts to generate leads quickly to support the child’s recovery.

Fighting human trafficking is different than address many other social problems. In other situations, even bad actors may have no malice, no intent to cause a problem. Rather, problems either arise through no human action, as in the spread of malaria or polio, or as byproducts of other activities, as in our near-universal use of fossil fuels with its impact on the climate. In contrast, with human trafficking, there are bad guys acting with malice.

This contrast leads to difficult results for those at risk of trafficking. In Heather’s case, trafficking was averted, but her life was devastated. The would-be traffickers told her full-time employer about her nontraditional side hustle and she lost her job. They told her landlord and she lost her apartment. Ending human trafficking and its related suffering will not be easy.

Minerva has now identified 989 individual victims and perpetrators and is tracking 22,000 more. The work of the Global Emancipation Network provides everyone in the anti-trafficking effort with a new tool that both protects those at risk and blocks, hinders and punishes the traffickers. There’s a new sheriff in town and she’s slinging big data.

 

Read more of Devin Thorpe’s work

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, DCSiliconAngle.com interviewed Global Emancipation Network Executive Director Sherrie Caltagirone in theCube at Splunk .conf 2017.  Learn More

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgiTfD5Pk_o” align=”center” title=”Sherrie Caltagirone, Global Emancipation Network” description=”Sherrie Caltagirone discussing Splunk and Countering Human Trafficking at the Global Emancipation Network” /]

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.

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.”

http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/17/technology/business/human-trafficking-data-global-emancipation-network/index.html

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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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