- Most problems in our world today are complex.
Good versus evil
is not as straightforward as I thought.
But what's interesting is this particular issue,
working on counter child exploitation
is one of those few cases that actually is pretty clear cut.
It's pretty universally held
that this is something we need to stop.
- We are looking for a needle in a haystack.
We're trying to find that child.
Or we're trying to help law enforcement
identify an offender.
So that he or she cannot continue to re-victimize children.
We don't have an army of staff.
To be honest we have to leverage technology
to make our jobs better.
- The work that we've done so far
has helped in hundreds of cases.
And I think that we can do more.
- The content that they have to look at on a daily basis,
it's as horrific as you can imagine.
And then some.
The work we do here is really hard.
But whatever I have to look at, or see, or view,
or hear, that is difficult.
All of that work is being done to help find a child.
And so it makes it completely worth it.
- NCMEC stands for the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children.
Our role is to be the centralized reporting location
for child sexual abuse material.
We have a team of analysts that sift through
tens of thousands of reports every week.
Their goal is to try and locate those children.
- As I'm coming across a report now
and looking at it,
I'm looking for clothing clues.
Things in the background.
Is there a water bottle
that I can figure out what brand it is?
And this is what I'm using to try to figure out
who is this person?
That has potentially traded or distributed
this image, and where are they located?
- Last year, NCMEC received 18 million reports
that included 60 million images and videos
of child sexual abuse.
They only have 25 analysts to go through all of them.
- When you think about the sheer volume
of information that's coming through,
our biggest fear was that something
was slipping through the cracks.
That there was information being reported
into our systems, that we weren't identifying
that could have helped to lead to that rescue
of that child.
And we knew that Palantir could deal
with big data.
- My name is Angela Mueler,
and I lead our work at Palantir
on counter child exploitation.
NCMEC receives over 60 thousand
cyber tip reports every single day.
So, there's no way that they can look
every single day at every single one
of those reports.
So the ultimate goal is to support NCMEC
in surfacing the most actionable intelligence
so they can get that to the hands of law enforcement
who could make arrests as quickly as possible
and rescue as many children as possible.
Often times same day.
- My name is Debbie Garner,
I lead the child exploitation
and computer crimes unit here at the Georgia
Bureau of Investigation.
A few years ago, NCMEC sent us a cyber tip,
that included images that had never been seen before
by NCMEC.
When we receive information like that,
we know that that is something
that we need to act on immediately,
because a child could be in danger.
We did some additional investigation,
which led us to a location where we thought the child lived.
- Something that's important to understand
is that these images are rarely produced in isolation.
They're produced as part of a set
that often gets grouped together as a series.
Whether it's a single photoshoot,
or a combination of images
taken at the same time or place.
So NCMEC is able to group those together
so that the analysis is richer.
Analysts are very good at interpreting this information,
but once the data scale grows beyond a certain size,
they can't remember every report they've ever seen.
Or perhaps they've not seen all the reports.
Through an algorithm we can find that connection
for them in an automatic way.
And suggest it to them, "Hey maybe you
"consider these two reports side by side,"
"we have reason to believe"
"that they have something in common."
Let's use technology,
let's use data analysis
to find those connections at scale.
Because a computer can scale to the millions
to the billions, even if a human doesn't have time
to look at that many reports in a lifetime.
- While we were there,
where we believed the child would be,
we received additional information from NCMEC.
They were able to provide us with GPS
coordinates of where the content was produced.
The coordinates matched our location.
And at that point we arrested the father.
- If we call law enforcement,
and we tell them that there's a hit
based on a Palantir alert within our system,
they drop everything and they work those cases.
It used to take days to weeks
when dealing with cyber tip line reports
and seeing offenders arrested.
Now with Palantir alerts,
we're talking hours
from the time we've received the information,
to when law enforcement has made an arrest.
As a result of one Palantir alert,
there have been over 500 arrests,
and 350 children rescued.
- One of Palantir's strongest features
is that security was built from the beginning.
It wasn't something that we realized needed
to be a feature after we started building our software.
And so, that guides you in a certain way.
Because this data is so sensitive,
it's important that the software that we build
is very respectful of the privacy
and civil liberty limitations of the information
that's in the systems.
Doing the right thing for these kids
is not just rescuing them.
It's rescuing them the right way.
- So technology is always evolving.
And normally the offenders
are the first ones to adopt these new technologies.
But the work that we've done with Palantir
to improve our systems and processes
has changed the game.
- We need to build platforms
that aren't wed to a certain way of fighting the crime.
Data can be messy, data can change.
And your software needs to be able to incorporate that
if you're going to solve
not just today's problems or the problems
of tomorrow, and the problems 20 years from now.
Technology is not a means in and of itself.
It's a means to an end.
And the end is some real world outcome
that is real, that is tangible,
that isn't just lines of code.
It's something that changes someone's life.
- Thanks for watching our video.
We hope you enjoyed it.
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