Working PIby Jordan Smith, Hyperion Investigative Consulting
Modern-day slavery insidiously infects every country in the world, adapting to use new technologies as it persists through cultural progress and change. The internet, for all of the many amazing things it has made possible, has also been used by traffickers to recruit victims, conduct transactions, and organize sex and labor trafficking at a speed and scale never seen before.
To counter this, The Exodus Road (TER), an international non-profit focused on combating human trafficking, is embracing new technological solutions to identify victims and traffickers, locate them, and identify trafficker networks. One of the core techniques it’s deploying is open-source intelligence (OSINT). As part of TER’s cyber investigations team, I use OSINT daily to build cases.
While OSINT has existed for decades, it rose to prominence as a recognized form of intelligence collection when the U.S. intelligence community added it to its definition of intelligence sources after the Cold War. Today, OSINT includes the examination, monitoring, collection and preservation of a wide range of data sources.
Those sources include websites, social media platforms, public government data, professional and academic publications, deep web sources (not to be confused with the “Dark Web”), mapping sites and more. The field has grown to be a crucial tool in anti-trafficking efforts, used for gathering and analyzing information that is openly available but requires skill to locate, verify and employ effectively.
OSINT in Human Trafficking Investigations
While OSINT is a powerful tool for anti-trafficking investigators, it is also used by traffickers to hunt for victims. This is why TER not only deploys OSINT investigations against traffickers but has also built an innovative and engaging program to teach young people and parents about the techniques employed by online predators.
TER’s U.S. OSINT investigators have deployed OSINT investigations in a variety of ways. We started by supporting law enforcement and TER international investigator requests for assistance in identifying potential victims. Traffickers often force those they are exploiting to provide fake information about themselves to buyers, just in case the customers are undercover investigators or informants. Fortunately, with very few pieces of information, OSINT analysts can often find out who someone really is, which allows law enforcement to make informed decisions about combating the criminal organization.
For example, identifying a child who was illegally smuggled into the United States can help law enforcement understand hot spots of initial trafficking recruitment, potential smuggling routes and involved parties.
These same techniques can be used to identify traffickers. A few pieces of information, like a phone number or a social media page, allow OSINT investigators to begin uncovering their real identities, which allows law enforcement to build a better case. This is a crucial first step.
Using OSINT, investigators build comprehensive profiles about individual traffickers, their victims, and their connections or co-conspirators. In some cases, this helps identify larger trafficking organizations. TER has found that many of these criminal organizations rely heavily on social media, forums, and other public and semi-public web resources to organize, recruit and communicate with each other. Their activities can leave a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, allowing us to discover an organization’s entire operation from very few pieces of information.
In one case TER worked on, a single phone number and Facebook page allowed us to identify a multinational recruiting effort designed to attract victims to Thailand and the Philippines under the guise of offering legitimate employment. Traffickers would then take away their freedom and force them into perpetrating pig butchering schemes—a type of long-term, virtual investment fraud that exploits victims’ emotional and financial vulnerabilities— against others.
These comprehensive profiles result in charts like this one at https://theexodusroad.com/what-is-osint, as well as detailed reports, which we provide to law enforcement to help them better understand the scale, scope, details and evidence of a trafficking organization.
(story continues)
OSINT Ethics
The kinds of information that can be gained through OSINT investigations vary from country to country based on privacy laws. However, even in stricter countries, the amount of information that might be out there about an individual or a business can cause privacy concerns. The easy response might be “don’t do anything wrong, and then you have nothing to worry about.” However, that’s an oversimplification.
Like all tools, the way OSINT is used is critical. Just as a chef knife is essential in the kitchen, used to prepare meals that nourish and bring joy to families, OSINT can also be used for good—such as aiding organizations like The Exodus Road to gather intelligence which leads to the disruption of human trafficking networks and freedom for survivors.
A knife in the kitchen is a tool of creation and care. But in the wrong hands, a knife can be a weapon used to cause harm. Similarly, when used maliciously, OSINT can lead to invasions of privacy, the spread of misinformation, or even the targeting and exploitation of individuals.
This is why TER’s team, and the vast majority of OSINT investigators, abide by a rigorous code of ethics. I am a certified fraud examiner, which means I have conduct and ethics standards that I must adhere to during my investigations. I ensure that people who report to me adhere to these standards as well.
Similarly, at The Exodus Road, everything we do is governed by our values. We have a board-assigned Ethics Committee that applies these values to all areas of our program work, ensuring that the organization holds itself accountable to the highest standards of operational integrity. While not legally required, our cyber investigative team also endeavors to adhere to the Berkeley Protocol, a standard developed by the Human Rights Center of the Berkeley School of Law and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
OSINT Targeting
Should people worry about OSINT being used against them? The short answer is yes, but not in any kind of urgent way. Being aware and careful about what personal information you post on the internet is similar to locking your doors at night, putting on your seatbelt or installing an antivirus program. These are precautionary measures we all should take as best practices, just in case we’re targeted.
A rule of thumb for most people is this: Do not post anything online that you wouldn’t want a stranger to know about you. This will go a long way to preserving privacy.
OSINT Training and Emerging Technology
To ensure adherence to ethical standards, specialized training is essential for effective OSINT investigations. These trainings teach the skills necessary to conduct a successful ethical investigation without needlessly violating the privacy of others. This helps ensure that investigators’ work provides maximum value and impact as we turn our cases over to law enforcement. Law enforcement can only use what we give them if it was acquired in a way that would stand up to the scrutiny of a defense attorney, judge and jury, which means it must be “above board” and court-admissible.
Because the internet is a constantly shifting landscape, one-time training is insufficient. TER holds monthly training sessions to stay on top of emerging technologies, the new methods of investigation they can provide, and the new methods of obfuscation and crime they provide criminals. Two examples of this are blockchain technology’s intersection with OSINT and artificial intelligence (AI)—specifically natural language processing and large language models—and its role with OSINT.
While blockchain technology has provided new and innovative ways to transfer funds, ensure transparent supply chains, and tokenize real-world assets, it has also been exploited to perpetrate the pig butchering scams referenced earlier, among other criminal acts. Learning how to track these kinds of transactions is critical to OSINT investigations of human trafficking.
AI also presents new implications for trafficking and OSINT. Traffickers can now use very convincing, idiomatically correct language to recruit people from different countries who speak different languages. It’s only a matter of time before traffickers and other criminals begin to combine AI and blockchain to further obfuscate their transactions and finances.
However, AI also has broad and powerful potential for OSINT investigations. To capitalize on this, TER is currently building an investigative tool that uses AI and OSINT capacities to identify potential trafficking victims and help us focus our investigations.
Get Involved
Investigators of all kinds rely heavily on OSINT information, and human trafficking investigations are no different. This is why The Exodus Road has dedicated resources to OSINT investigations and works to stay current on new ethical and technological developments in this field.
If you would like to ensure that our investigators can continue their expert investigations using OSINT, please consider joining our Freedom Collective community. Monthly donations provide critical technology and training to help us use the internet for good, finding the exploited in the digital world and helping to bring them real freedom.
Reprinted with permission from The Exodus Road.
About the Author
Jordan Smith is the founder and Chief Investigator of Hyperion Investigative Consulting and a certified fraud examiner. He also serves as director of global intelligence and strategic technology at The Exodus Road, a non-profit focused on combating human trafficking. Jordan’s work integrates open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques to disrupt trafficking networks and support international law enforcement in their fight against human exploitation.
We’re always listening. Send your story submission/idea to the Editor: kendra@orep.org.
