Artificial Intelligence Against Child Trafficking
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AI investigative tools will be used to help find missing children and combat the advanced technology used by abusers and traffickers.
Human traffickers and sexual predators often use high-end technology to encrypt and protect the details of their crimes, and even if they don’t law enforcement officials in smaller cities lack the budget and the access to the technological tools that would speed up the investigation and aid in the prosecution of the offenders.
According to Techxplore, Cellebrite is a company that provides digital tools that help law enforcement and private firms find and follow investigative leads, and it recently launched “Operation Find Them All” — an initiative in which the firm will donate its technology to nonprofit organizations that help find endangered children.
Kent Nielsen is a digital forensic investigator for Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office in Texas, and he said his department is currently using Cellebrite technology to process data gathered from cell phones, as well as its AI-driven software to analyze the data to find potential leads, claiming the system greatly helps them perform their work faster.
Nielsen explained that a single smartphone could contain over 250,000 images to process, and rather than having an investigator look through and sort the images, Cellebrite’s Pathfinder software can handle it while linking them to locations and other data from other smartphones or cases.
Matt Parker, co-founder of The Exodus Road (which fights human trafficking) said that one piece of Cellebrite technology could make an immense difference, and states that he hopes to bring this technology to other countries through “Operation Find Them All.”
Parker explains: “When you fight corruption globally, you have to have an overwhelming amount of evidence that is difficult to sweep under the rug. You have to make the case a slam dunk and I’m telling you, in all the experience I have had over the last 13 years… in hundreds of cases of human trafficking, when we leverage Cellebrite technology and we introduce that technology into the judicial process, the success level is significantly higher.”
