- [Interviewer] What do you think happened?
(sighs)
- [Nathalie] I have a father that is missing since 1988
on Father's Day.
- [Narrator] Every year,
hundreds of thousands of people go missing.
People like Nathalie's father.
- [Nathalie] The police told us the only thing we can do
is report him missing.
I was so upset.
- [Narrator] There aren't enough resources
for the police to find everyone,
so people like Nathalie are left
to search for their missing people on their own.
But now a group called Trace Labs brings together hackers
from around the world to use their skills
to find real missing people.
They've turned it into a game,
where participants find clues in exchange for points,
and it's working to help find them.
(mysterious music)
(phone rings)
- [Nathalie] One night my best friend called me and said,
hey Natalie, did you heard about Trace Labs?
They look for missing person, it's hackers.
I said, what?
So, I wrote a email to Robert Sell.
I said can you help me?
And he said yes.
- [Rob] I think because I'm in search and rescue,
I get to see things that most people don't.
I get to see all the people that go missing,
and as I was paying attention to that,
I noticed that there's a lot of people that go missing
that we never look for.
I always wondered who is looking for those people
if I'm not?
And sometimes it's nobody.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] The person behind Trace Labs is Rob Sell.
He's a tracker for search and rescue,
and a computer security professional.
- [Rob] Trace Labs became really a blending
of those two passions.
- [Narrator] As a tracker,
Rob looks for little clues and details
that paint a bigger picture
about a person's direction of travel, their speed,
or state of mind.
Trace Labs takes the same approach to online searching,
finding little details about a person's online activity
can add up and help lead investigators
to their current location.
- [Rob] We're addressing all those people that go missing
that nobody's looking for right now.
(sirens scream)
(intense music)
- [Narrator] Rob started Trace Labs
as a way to educate people
and get them involved in the process
of open-source intelligence gathering, or OSINT.
- [Rob] When you go to a typical conference,
a security conference,
there's so many different things you can do,
you can learn how to hack a car,
how to hack a voting machine,
whatever you wanna do is there,
yet that effort is wasted in a way,
because it's not used for anything else.
What we do is we take all that effort
and we put it into something
that's actually gonna benefit society.
Good morning, how you doin'?
- [Student] Good how are you?
- Not bad, Rob Sell, nice to meet you Chris.
- [Narrator] Rob organizes events
like this Capture the Flag game,
where participants use OSINT techniques
to collect data that could be used
to help find missing people.
- [Rob] So open-source intelligence,
it's information that you would find online on the subject.
- [Narrator] As participants gather useful information,
they're awarded points towards winning prizes.
Even seemingly trivial data can be important
in tracking someone down.
- [Rob] Quite often,
we'll see a person will get put into human trafficking,
so we'll look for their picture,
because usually we can see their tattoo
or some sort of sign on their body
where we can identify them.
Contestants that come in will say, wait a minute,
are these real missing people?
And you can see their mind change, where it's like, wow,
we're actually changing people's lives.
- [Narrator] For this event, Rob has brought together
numerous hackers and security professionals,
all working to find whatever data they can
about these missing people.
- [Rob] We collect information on those missing persons,
and then give that to law enforcement
to help them to locate those missing persons.
- [Narrator] Nathalie's father is listed
among several other missing people
the contestants are looking for.
He's been missing for over 30 years.
- [Rob] So, those are gonna be tough,
and you may get very little information on them
at the end of the day,
but I think any little bit that we get
that we can submit to law enforcement could help.
So, when you think of your digital footprint
being out there, there's a concern there sometimes,
but in this case,
we're using it to actually locate those people,
so the more we have of you, digitally,
the better off we are in some ways, right?
- People are actually helping out
while they're having fun, right?
- [Rob] Yes.
- Although it's a serious issue--
- Right. - It's a great initiative.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] In the years since Rob started Trace Labs,
they've provided law enforcement
with data on dozens of cases,
even information about the current whereabouts of people.
- [Rob] What these people here are doing today
is really helping law enforcement to locate those people,
and that's something the families can really appreciate.
(mysterious music)
- [Narrator] After two days,
the team finds no new information on Nathalie's father.
But groups like Trace Labs
mean you don't have to search on your own.
He's still listed, and contestants are still looking
for any data they can find.
Sharing that burden for even a day or two
can make all the difference in the world.
- [Rob] We've gamified something very serious,
which on the face of it doesn't sound good,
but it was the only way for us to achieve our objective
of crowd-sourcing hundreds of people,
and bringing them in for that focused effort
to locate that child or elderly person
or whoever it might be.
Anywhere I can push that envelope
and allow us to do better, I feel pretty good about that.
So, hopefully this inspires people to do that.
- [Nathalie] Just to know that Trace Labs, stranger,
they would do research for my father, I was touched.
I don't think I'm gonna stop looking for him.
I will never stop.
(light music)
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