Combating Child Sex Trafficking Through Web Intelligence

Child sex trafficking is one of the most horrific crimes on planet Earth. According to victims’ advocates, most human trafficking is undetected and unreported. Exceptional crimes like the recent Boko Haram abductions only hint at the scope and growth of this global problem. Most of us only read about child sex trafficking in the news.

Orphan Secure works with non-profit organizations specializing in countering child sex trafficking. The team at Orphan Secure includes former and current federal and local law enforcement officers, US military special forces operators, and intelligence officers and analysts from global intelligence agencies.

While Recorded Future is proud to work with large and influential companies and government agencies, we recognize many important, underserved causes can also benefit from web intelligence. When Orphan Secure proposed a partnership, we jumped at the opportunity to support their mission.

How would an organization like Orphan Secure put web intelligence to work? We asked them to describe in a few words.

Orphan Secure uses Recorded Future for a variety of strategic and tactical intelligence operations and investigations to combat child sex trafficking. Initially we used Recorded Future to identify new incidents, developments and trends in child sex trafficking globally. As Orphan Secure analysts became more familiar with the system we expanded our use of the software to geographically visualize open source data on child sex trafficking and compare it against our data, which is derived from a wide range of proprietary collection methods – including the human trafficking mobile app Freedom!

These overlays (especially through use of the timeline filters) helped us identify geographical trends as well as intelligence gaps. More recently Orphan Secure has begun to use Recorded Future to assist in identifying open social network accounts that are being used to facilitate human trafficking activities.

As you can imagine, we’re very happy to see Orphan Secure using Recorded Future for this great cause. If you’d like to contact them or donate to their organization, please visit their website.