Before presenting the first award of the night, "The Ranch" star Ashton Kutcher walked the red carpet in Dolce & Gabbana. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. Spotlight can connect contacts in minutes where it would take me weeks, if not months to do the same thing. Please continue to fund this very important resource; it saves lives. $300/yr. Equipped more than 8,500 law enforcement officers across 2,000 law enforcement agencies in 35 countries with its tools, Tools speed investigation time by up to 65 percent, 2022 Skoll Foundation. Spotlight does investigative work in minutes that can take hours sometimes to collect. "When I asked if Spotlight was available to law enforcement in other countries, Kelbi said no, not yet, "But were constantly evaluating the landscape to understand where it can have impact internationally as well.". Somewhere in that pile of data are children who are bought and sold online for sex. endobj Technology can be used to enable slavery but it can also be used to disable slavery, and thats what were doing, Kutcher said to wrap up his comments. x Om7 ' 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. Building is a core value that informs every strategy in our organization. Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. "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. We choose to use it for good. Forgot your username or password? 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. Julie holds a B.A. A 2012 Thorn survey of child sex-trafficking survivors found that 75 percent had been sold online, most of them through escort websites. <> 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. 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. Try a low commitment monthly plan today. The solution uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send alerts to law enforcement agents. At Dressember, we release a line of dresses each year, but those products are sold. I joined a superuser with the Louisiana State Police on a human trafficking sting operation in New Orleans, to observe how they used Spotlight in the field. Spotlight Data How often is the information in Spotlight refreshed? 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. More From Thorn About the Spotlight Technology. <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> <> The success of Spotlight would not be possible without the countless hours that investigators spend looking for our kids; the technology partners who influenced and encouraged its development and our donors. The Tennessee Fusion Center may share information contained within THOR with other law . Access is available for free to law enforcement agencies and can be requested at: htspotlight.com. 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. is the CEO of Thorn and has helped grow the organization from inception in 2012. Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? "It didn't make sense to build our own facial-recognition service when AWS already offers a best-in-breed solution like Amazon Rekognition. "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. 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. We hate spam too, unless it's on a sandwich with some eggs. In Wednesdays hearing Kutcher discussed the wide use of the dark web by traffickers, and the difficulties law enforcement officials face in navigating the expanse of content. GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center. We recently asked human trafficking investigators and prosecutors how Spotlight has impacted their investigations within the last 12 months here are a few highlights: It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. endstream But Thorn stays positive in the midst of engaging directly with such data. Use of THOR in a manner outside the scope of these Rules is strictly prohibited. 7 0 obj According to our most recent user survey, Spotlight is helping find more child victims of human trafficking, faster. To design the curriculum for Spotlight Lab, I conducted preliminary research. Officers who login weekly report a time savings of 60% in their human trafficking investigations. And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. The internet has become a widely used place for sex traffickers to advertise. 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. Spotlight, a tool developed by Thorn, is a web-based platform that assists law enforcement in identifying sex trafficking victims faster. 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. When we surveyed underage sex trafficking victims, 3 out of 4 who entered the life in the past decade said they had been advertised online at some point in their trafficking situation. endobj 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. Kutchers company Thorn developed software to combat this challenge. We'll keep it out of your inbox, promise. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. We have resource guides for researchers across the globe on all forms of trafficking for various stakeholders. $180/yr. The app does this on a serverless Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture that includes Amazon Rekognition, a deep learningbased image and video analysis service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances. Spotlight evolved from surveys completed by victims of . Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. 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. I agree to the terms of use, privacy policy and agree to receive promotional emails, reminders and updates from Thorn She shared, "Maintaining any technology product is always challenging because technology is constantly changing. ", 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. Washington D.C. tax attorney Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains. Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? 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. Kutcher elaborate on the software during the hearing, Its a tool that can be used by law enforcement to prioritize their caseload. Initially, they had about 100 users from three U.S. states who were using Spotlight for their human-trafficking investigations. Additionally, many new supervisors inevitably will speak with and encourage employees to ensure they take care of their . 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. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. 4 0 obj from UCLA and an M.B.A. from Northwestern. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. 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. On Wednesday, Kutcher testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee along with the CEO and President of the organization Human Rights First, Elisa Massimino, to ask the United States Government for help fighting trafficking and sexual exploitation. All rights reserved. Hopeful that investigators could use technology to identify victims more quickly, we tested an early version of a potential tool among key agencies with promising results. Our tools are currently used by over 8,000 law enforcement officers in 37 countries, resulting in the identification of 10,000+ child sex trafficking victims and 847+ victims of child sexual abuse material. In the last five years, we have reached more than 2.6 million people globally through our child pornography deterrence program. Monthly Yearly One time only. I also created high-fidelity prototypes of key touchpoints on our site, whose content I validated through additional user feedback. Thorn has worked tirelessly to improve three areas of child safety, finding abused children faster, deterring predators, and creating hostile online environments. Education and engagement with the public change risky and abusive behaviors. Nokia's New G22 Phone Allows You To Repair Broken Parts Yourself; A Knack For Storytelling: Should AI Take Over What Makes Us Human? Spotlight could never have been so successful without substantial investment and support from AWS, or the underlying technologies that Intel has created.. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. Founded in 2012, Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. and who do the programs serve? It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. Abused children are identified and removed from harm and their abusers are held accountable. Problems of scale like this cry out for automated processes, but another big obstacle is the fact that escort ad data is anything but consistent: traffickers use code words, slang, and reused content to complicate detection by machines. x["Yn This was meant to identify areas in which we could make the tool more intuitive, to minimize obstacles to adoption. This project was supported by Grant No. Thorn was founded in 2012 to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. 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 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. As Thorn started work on a tool that could help investigators identify children being exploited, more than 150,000 new escort ads were being posted online every day in the United States. We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. ", Spotlight was made to combat a difficult problem, and the data Spotlight handles is unsettling to say the least. To date, Spotlight has helped officers reduce investigative time by up to 65% and has helped identify 18,119 trafficking victims (including 5,791 children) and 6,553 traffickers. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorn's website. Based on IRS CI's FY 2021 Annual Report, here are five top enforcement priorities that are likely to carry over into 2022: 1. How can law enforcement sift through massive amounts of data to focus their time on the most vulnerable victims? "We tested multiple facial-recognition services and found Amazon Rekognition was extremely accurate," says Kristin Boorse, the director of product management for Thorn. Learn more about 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 <> Supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Thorn developed Spotlight, an app that helps law enforcement close trafficking cases much faster than by using traditional manual methods. Lucas Moore is a writer in Los Angeles. 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. Other Amount: Donate now Yes, accountability matters. 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. A virtual team based in the U.S., Thorn employs 25 people. (Don't see an email in your inbox? You can view our, Meet the 2019 Skoll Awardees for Social Entrepreneurship. Finally, we designed marketing collateral to drive further customer acquisition. 2021 Dressember | Dressember is a 501 (C)(3) | design by anne agency + marrow design, Grant Partners, Dressember2018, human trafficking, modern day slavery, child advocacy, buisnesses ending slavery and trafficking, BEST, Danyella Wilder. Our team continues to monitor new and emerging trends that will help make sure our tool remains relevant for investigators to do their jobs efficiently and ultimately help the kids we serve. stream Human Trafficking Search (HTS) seeks to raise awareness and help prevent and eliminate human trafficking worldwide. 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. Sign in or create an account to view Form(s) 990 for 2020, 2019 and 2018. 2016-MU-BX-K005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Additionally, through my stakeholder analysis, I focused on Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) - a leading law enforcement education center - and the DOJ (both of whom I know, because I currently consult for them on human trafficking). Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? endobj <> This year, Dressember is proud to partner with Thorn, an organization that uses technology to combat child sex trafficking. stream endobj <> | Photos Copyright Kay Chernush, ArtWorks for Freedom. Sign In. Learn More Research programs to better understand the role of technology in child sex trafficking. To request technical assistance, training, or other resources through this initiative, agency POCs shouldemail usor call 202-833-1460. 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