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. This project was supported by Grant No. A virtual team based in the U.S., Thorn employs 25 people. Hi-fidelity prototypes of key touch points on the Spotlight website. Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. The Tennessee Fusion Center may share information contained within THOR with other law . Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Thank you for supporting the fight to end human trafficking! endobj endobj GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader Additionally, many new supervisors inevitably will speak with and encourage employees to ensure they take care of their . <> We have resource guides for researchers across the globe on all forms of trafficking for various stakeholders. With only a 25% response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Founded in 2012, Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. We believe that technology is a tool, one we can use for incredible good. The objective of Spotlight is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of domestic sex trafficking investigations and increase the number of children who are identified and connected with help resources. With 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. Sign in. Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. country every day, law enforcement cannot manually keep up with the volume of ads as they work to identify and track potential victims. This tool will allow us to conduct faster, more precise investigations that will remove criminals from the street and, most importantly, recover victims. <> Expanded partnerships with law enforcement. The good news is, this can help investigators track down traffickers. 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. 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. For more information about the impact of Spotlight, check out the infographic below. Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. Spotlight can connect contacts in minutes where it would take me weeks, if not months to do the same thing. Washington D.C. tax attorney Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains. We choose to use it for good. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorns website. 2 0 obj 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. Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress. <> Thorn developed Spotlight, an app that helps law enforcement close trafficking cases much faster than by using traditional manual methods. 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. endobj Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) founded in 1918, is a statewide nonprofit human services agency that addresses the need to provide new immigrants and refugees in Connecticut with services to help them become self-sufficient, integrated and contributing members of the community. 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. Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Reports from our users show that, with the help of Spotlight, law enforcement is identifying 9 kids per day on average and those who use Spotlight daily see over 60% in time savings. FOLLOW MORE IBT NEWS ON THE BELOW CHANNELS, IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you. ", 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. And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. COVID-19 Fraud. result in increased adoption of Thorns tools, a reduction in time to stop abuse and an increase in risk for perpetrators. From there, I created an information architecture for the content on the website, put together a website design inspiration board, sketched wireframes by hand and through an online tool - and then wrote the content itself. Kutcher elaborate on the software during the hearing, Its a tool that can be used by law enforcement to prioritize their caseload. 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. "Spotlight was designed based on insights from our first survivor survey. 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. 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. 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. Nothing makes my job more rewarding when a victim says "thank you" and tells me about her rebuilt life. Officer Wellness Spotlight: Police Chaplains - An Integral Part of Law Enforcement. How can people reading this help Thorn fight against child sex trafficking? 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. I gathered additional information through phone call interviews with customers who were familiar with Spotlight and the other two products to get a sense of what features and design they liked. One of the most significant obstacles is the massive volume of these ads. 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. Thorn was founded in 2012 to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. stream After I completed this phase of research, I used the information to iterate on the workshop design, and improve the overall usability of Spotlight. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Thorn runs the countrys most extensive online deterrence program, communicating directly with people searching for CSAM, disrupting their sense of anonymity and encouraging them to seek help. That's where Thorn comes in. Use of THOR in a manner outside the scope of these Rules is strictly prohibited. "With the flexibility and easy integration of AWS, we can experiment and prototype new products like Spotlight that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to develop. Helped officers identify over 10,000 child victims of sexual trafficking and children whose abuse was recorded and distributed. 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. 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. Our web-based tool is now used by over 5,000 officers in all 50 states and Canada. Outcome - describing the effects on people or issues. After the sting operation, we sat down with FVTC and the DOJ to put together the curriculum for Spotlight Lab. Output - describing our activities and reach. Officers can set customized alerts and search Spotlights constantly growing database of ads to aid in their investigations. 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 According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. Empowering law enforcement to collaborate beyond jurisdictions or national borders is a key to success in identifying victims who are moved frequently, or are broadcast through peer-to-peer platforms (P2P) on the dark web from a hidden location. Learn More Spotlight, on the other hand, is a complex piece of software that doesn't have any sales to help fund its production. Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. 4 0 obj Vietnam. Nokia's New G22 Phone Allows You To Repair Broken Parts Yourself; A Knack For Storytelling: Should AI Take Over What Makes Us Human? Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. 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. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. How can law enforcement sift through massive amounts of data to focus their time on the most vulnerable victims? 3 0 obj "It didn't make sense to build our own facial-recognition service when AWS already offers a best-in-breed solution like Amazon Rekognition. Thorn's Spotlight tool helps law enforcement more quickly identify sex trafficking victims who are advertised online. 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. The organization collaborates with law enforcement agencies, tech companies, and nonprofits. In 2012, we learned that 75% of child sex trafficking victims were being bought and sold online. Spotlight does investigative work in minutes that can take hours sometimes to collect. It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. Finally, we were awarded the 2015 Cloudera Social Impact Award, for the work we did on Spotlight. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Copyright 2023 IBTimes LLC. Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. Spotlight is the #1 investigative tool I have utilized to find child victims and arrest their traffickers in countless cases. endobj Thorn Helps Law Enforcement Identify Child Sex-Trafficking Victims Faster on AWS Answering the Challenge Using AWS Similarly, The Tote Project, sells their bags, which helps them pay expenses. Spotlight's sophisticated machine-learning capabilities save time for overworked, under-resourced investigators by automatically flagging ads likely to represent at-risk children and keeping law enforcement agents from getting lost in a sea of online data. The internet has become a widely used place for sex traffickers to advertise. Furthermore, by making sure users were engaged and properly trained, user surveys have shown that Spotlight has since been able to reduce the time it takes to investigate a human trafficking case by 43%, identified close to 2,000 children, and over 2,000 traffickers. Help Spotlight PA hold the powerful to account with a gift today. It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. Armed with this data, we worked with our technology partners and law enforcement to understand how these existing digital footprints could assist law enforcement in faster victim identification. 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). Building is a core value that informs every strategy in our organization. Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Learn more 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. x Om7 ' <> You can view our, Meet the 2019 Skoll Awardees for Social Entrepreneurship. 8 0 obj A GuideStar Pro report containing the following information is available for this organization: This information is only available for subscribers and in Premium reports. 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. I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. There is a small group of people abusing our children, and we are a large community standing in strong opposition. Raise your voice against slavery this December! 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. Email or Username. I also created high-fidelity prototypes of key touchpoints on our site, whose content I validated through additional user feedback. Click here to resend it.). 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. Thorn is a registered 501(c)(3) organizationEIN: 27-0943677, 2023 Thorn. $10/mo. Learn more about Spotlight. He likes Neo-noir films, running and cycling, classic American novels, small venue music shows, and burritos. To build the world we believe in, we know we must: 1) Accelerate Victim Identification 2) Make Digital Environments Safer and 3) Deter Predatory Behavior. This process was relatively ad hoc, however, with no identified workflow to drive rapid acquisition and adoption. Password. 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. Thorn was founded in 2012 by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to combat online child abuse. From there the software developed further to better analyze and track data that can lead to building strong cases against traffickers and finding the victims. We do all of this so every child can be safe, curious, and happy. It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. Spotlight is a web-based application that helps law enforcement prioritize leads in their sex trafficking investigations. 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. Be a part of the impact for our local and global partners by creating your campaign page today! According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. 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). Sign in or create an account to view Form(s) 990 for 2020, 2019 and 2018. 6 0 obj So much so that we launched Spotlight nationwide in October 2014. This website is funded through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Register now. Our product Safer is the first holistic solution for tech companies to detect, remove, and report child sexual abuse material at scale. Using this data the company worked with law enforcement to understand how such digital footprints could lead to the discovery of victims and their traffickers. endobj All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines, surveyed underage sex trafficking victims. A virtual team based in the U.S., Thorn employs 25 people. The insights we gained - was not only beneficial for the overall product development - but for the workshop design itself (I would continue to observe Spotlight usage at future sting operations, including Operation Cross Country, in which hundreds of juveniles were identified and pimps were arrested). Spotlight, a tool developed by Thorn, is a web-based platform that assists law enforcement in identifying sex trafficking victims faster. <> Spotlight is invaluable as a tool/resource. $120 $180 $300 Other Other. Activation of the tech industry helps eliminate abuse content from their platforms. Streamlining the onboarding process for law enforcement An infographic detailing the reach that Spotlight has gained, since its national roll-out in February 2015. To design the curriculum for Spotlight Lab, I conducted preliminary research. COVID-19 fraud schemes have been a top concern for IRS CI and other . 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. $15/mo. Leadership Spotlight: Leading with the Pen - The Handwritten Note. <> 2016-2022 National Policing Institute -Privacy Policy-Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader, Spotlight A Tool to Improve Sex Trafficking Investigations, Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader. Register. Top 5 IRS CI Enforcement Priorities. Our tool Spotlight accelerates law enforcements ability to identify victims of child sex trafficking. Our team built and launched Spotlight in 2014 to improve investigator workflow to find child victims faster. Forgot your username or password? stream By the end of my first year at Thorn, I had played a role in developing strategic partnerships with FVTC and the DOJ, designing a Spotlight Lab to effectively train potential and new users, and designing a Spotlight product website and a corresponding on-boarding process. 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