I’m ringing about my father.
He’s 87 and he’s just gone about a quarter of an hour ago,
gone wandering.
He suffers with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Globally, eight million children go missing every year.
The people we’re looking for may end up in really bad situations,
such as human trafficking, prostitution.
Trace Labs is bringing together the hacker community
to collect information to help locate missing persons.
Our community is ready to respond literally in seconds.
[Super_Users]
[The Hackers Finding Missing People]
The type of people that we are looking for are missing persons.
These are people that law enforcement
have asked the public’s assistance to find.
I came up with the idea several years ago.
I’ve been in search and rescue for over a decade now.
While I search for a lot of people,
there’s a lot of people that I don’t search for.
Of course, I always wondered,
“If I’m not searching for them, who is?”
And the answer, unfortunately, to that was
sometimes no one is.
In the law enforcement community,
it’s not going to be a crime,
so it's not going to be the highest priority.
So that really weighed upon me.
The idea of improving the industry,
improving that process, is very exciting.
So how do you do that?
We call them “Capture the Flag” contests,
CTFs for short.
They also sometimes call them “hackathons.”
So we’ve taken the theoretical
and put it into a non-theoretical effort,
a real-world exercise that is going to directly benefit the friends
and family and even the actual missing person.
I have a father that is missing since 1988 on Father's Day.
One night, my best friend called me and said,
“Did you hear about Trace Lab?
They look for a missing person.
It’s hackers.”
I said, “What?”
So I wrote an email to Robert Sell.
I said, “Can you help me?”
And he said, “Yes.”
So then I start off with what I’ve got.
And I want to search for the name,
and then I want to find other things based off of that.
So maybe I want to find a username.
A username is going to be fantastic.
It’s now going to allow you to spider out and find more information.
So that might give you an email address,
that might give you their Instagram account,
that might give you their Facebook account.
That’s then going to give you all sorts of information
about that missing person, such as:
Who are their friends? Where do they work?
What hobbies do they have?
That's important intelligence that we want to collect.
We’ve tried to categorize it so that contestants from any level
in their experience with open-source intelligence can participate.
If you’re a brand-new team, no problem.
You can come in and you can submit a lot of low-scoring points,
such as perhaps the employment of the individual of the subject,
perhaps their Facebook page.
Or if you’re an experienced team
and you want to come in and spend a little bit more time
and score fewer but higher-scoring points,
you can do that.
And that would be things like “Dark Web” category
or “Day Last Seen” category
or even “Advanced Subject Info” category,
which would be sending us links to pictures where they have
unique identifiers, maybe a tattoo, a piercing, an injury.
So those unique identifiers are very important to law enforcement.
We don’t know what contestants will find.
There’s no known answer.
A lot of law enforcement
are not necessarily trained in open-source intelligence,
so there is a gap there as far as even how we’re communicating.
We had to build our reputation,
build that level of trust with law enforcement.
And that's what we've been doing over the last three years.
Yeah, hackers generally have a bad perception in the press
because the press likes to use that stereotypical, you know, hoodies
or a Guy Fawkes mask of Anonymous.
When we use the word “hackers,” it’s not a negative thing at all.
Hackers are people that think differently,
that think outside of the box,
that are not limited by staying within the lines.
When I had the opportunity to participate in search and rescue,
the smile that I see on the parents’ face when we come back with the kids,
that’s the thing that I remember.
That’s then evolved into this scaled-up version,
where now we have hundreds of people, sometimes thousands of people.
It’s really an amazing feeling for me.
Having done search and rescue for over a decade,
and had that experience with being, you know,
arm in arm with people that are fully focused on
the mission of finding a person that don’t want to go home unless they do.
Now, we have thousands of people in the Trace Labs community
that I’m sharing that same emotional event with, right?
And you can feel it.
Even though we’re online,
even though it's virtual,
you can feel the emotion
and the attachment to these people that we’re all looking for.