The myths and misconceptions of child protection

Jessica Smith
It’s not going to be the stranger and it’s going to jump out from a corner or somebody who is going to stalk your child at a park over and over and over again.

Jeff Phillips
Welcome to NeedleStack, the podcast for professional online research. I’m Jeff Phillips, your host.

Shannon Ragan
And I’m Shannon Ragan. A quick warning for today’s episode, we will be discussing topics our audience may find troubling, so discretion is advised. The topic at hand is child protection, the realities and myths, and the critical role that OSINT plays.

Jeff Phillips
And joining us today for this very important and interesting discussion is Jessica Smith. Jessica is a special investigations lead with the National Child Protection Task Force. She’s also the founder of ClickSafe Intelligence. And last but not least, she has a day job where she’s a cybersecurity analyst with a major retailer.

Jessica Smith
Hi everybody. Thanks for having me here.

Shannon Ragan
Hi Jessica. Thank you so much for being on. We definitely want to talk about your work with the National Child Protection Task Force, but we just want to know your OSINT professionalism. Can you tell us a little bit about how you use OSINT in your day job for this major retailer?

Jessica Smith
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been with my current company for about ten years now, and I have had the honor and privilege of being able to use OSINT in a variety of different capacities. I’ll be perfectly honest, when I started with the company, I had no idea that I was going to end up in all of the different roles that I have and that OSINT was actually going to be applicable in all of those different spaces. So it’s been a really cool experience growing my skills and stretching myself and pushing myself to figure out, okay, how can I apply this skill set to this new topic area? But I started in corporate security, doing a lot of physical security intelligence. So think protest activity or natural disasters when we have to identify if employees are safe or if some sort of an event is going to get out of hand and potentially impact our assets, be that our employees or physical locations, things like that. I also moved over to do some more organizational risk intelligence and that was focused more on reputational issues. So think mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and our job was essentially to vet all of those potential partners or companies or entities that could potentially be umbrellaed underneath our brand and make sure they didn’t pose any sort of risk to the brand that is so important to the company that I work for.

Jessica Smith
So it was going from looking for a particular person to looking for a particular business or particular forums or news articles or different things like that. So it was a very distinct brain shift in figuring out how to find new sources of information, especially when you’re traditionally trying to filter out news articles and things like that. When you’re looking for particular subject information. And now I focus the majority of my time on fraud and scams and traditional cyber threat intelligence. So that’s looking at both dark web and open web. I’d never really dealt with dark web before, at least not in a corporate setting. So figuring out how that was applicable to all of the work that we were doing and how to stretch and grow those skills, as well as dealing with the buying and selling of illicit goods or accounts or products. Again, you’re hunting for something completely different than a person or a business now, and you’re doing it in two very distinct spaces between the dark and the open web. So that’s kind of the gamut of my career thus far within OSINT and I guess a little bit of closed intelligence as well, I suppose.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah. The world of OSINT is endlessly wide, it seems, and you’ve covered a lot of it. You said you were using some Dark Web and investigations. This is like more cybersecurity focused, correct. In your role, or is it general threats?

Jessica Smith
No, it is going to be more cyber. Okay.

Shannon Ragan
What other open sources are you using or types of investigations are you conducting?

Jessica Smith
So within my day job right now, because we’re looking for anything related to a scam or fraud activity or a cyber threat is going to have a personal component to it. Right. The goal is going to always be to identify the actor behind that threat. So it’s a lot of the same subject identification. There is a lot more anonymity here in this space, I would say, than in any of the other spaces that I have worked in previously. Maybe not necessarily child exploitation, of course, but when you’re looking for physical security threats, a lot of times that is very out in the open because those events are public and they have to market them to be able to draw people in as participants. Same with business documents, right? If we are trying to acquire a business, that business is going to be out there. They are going to have their marketing tactics, they’re going to be in the news, they’re going to have their business registration. When we’re looking for a threat actor or a criminal subject of any kind, one of the most important pieces of their identity is going to be to conceal that identity.

Jessica Smith
So leveraging all of those different pivoting techniques to be able to get from a username or an IP address to eventually working our way back to a real identity so that we can work with law enforcement to execute some sort of charges or arrest warrant, that’s ultimately going to be the goal in those types of things. So even though we say that it’s cybersecurity or cyber threat focused, a lot of the times it is just true subject identification work.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah. Interesting.

Jeff Phillips
It’s really interesting. I remember you had said you didn’t know when you start off with OSINT in the public sector that there would be so much opportunity to use it in the private sector. And you’ve gone through the gamut even on the private sector side.

Jessica Smith
Yeah, absolutely. And same with the public side too. You just end up in different places that you never kind of expect yourself to be. And it’s a fun business because it takes you on a lot of different adventures, for better or for worse.

Jeff Phillips
Yeah, well, let’s switch a little bit. Not maybe as fun of a topic, but super important. How long have you been volunteering with the NCPTF?

Jessica Smith
So I have been with the National Child Protection Task Force since about June of 2020. It seems like so much longer at this point because we have just gotten so deep into the weed with cases and with the people and stuff. It’s amazing how much of a bond you create with the people that you do this work with. I feel like I’ve known them forever and I feel like I’ve been doing the work forever, but yeah, it’s really only been about two and a half years now.

Jeff Phillips
Well, what can you share with us? What’s a typical investigation entail for you?

Jessica Smith
So NCPTF does a variety of different types of investigations. The majority of them are going to be focused on missing and exploited children and that is going to encompass a lot of different things. We’ll do everything from a very standard missing child case where child is supposed to come home after school. They don’t mom and dad report them missing and law enforcement realizes something doesn’t quite feel right here and they will call us up and say, can you help us try to find this child? We will dive into social media, we will dive into geolocation of other social media posts around the area, all sorts of different things to help try to bring that child home and reunite them with their family. We also deal with human trafficking investigations where children are involved or vulnerable individuals as well. Sometimes they are adults. And that is going to be everything from, again, trying to identify where a victim might potentially be, but also trying to identify where a trafficker might be as well, or what a real identity to a trafficker who we suspect is with that child or that vulnerable adult. But we don’t know who they are.

Jessica Smith
So we need to be able to figure out how to get, I would say like legal and legitimate tabs on them, whether it’s like tracking their license plate or putting out a be on the lookout of bolo for law enforcement, we need to know who exactly we’re going after. We only maybe have them by a handle or a username or a nickname within the trafficking community. Something else that we’ll do is the geolocation of child sexual abuse material. And these cases are, I would say, less of what we do, but they take up a significant amount of resources and time because they are so important and they are really complex. So this will be something where a law enforcement agency contacts us and says, we have this string of images that were produced by some sort of whether it’s an entity or multiple entities who are abusing a child that’s visible in this image or this video. Here are the sanitized stills or the Sanitized images from the video. Can you help us figure out where this video or where these images were produced? And so a lot of times we get maybe a piece of information that says we suspect that this is happening in Europe, or we suspect that this was produced in the United States and that’s usually all we get in terms of a location.

Jessica Smith
So we treat that as a starting point. But we also need to make sure because we’ve had plenty of cases where they say we think it’s in Europe and it ends up being produced in South America. But we have to employ all of these different geolocation OSINT type of skills, whether it’s using Sunkelk to look at the way that the shadows are hitting on the pavements based on the time of year and the light. And where the sun is to there’s a piece of tiny piece of a vehicle in the photo and we have to figure out what the vacant model of that photo is or there’s a particular flower or plant in the image and we figure out what plant that is and then narrow down. Oh, this plant only grows in this particular section of the United States. And based on that and the sun shadows and this, that and the other, we believe this took place in XYZ state. And then try to get even closer and closer and closer to finding an exact location of where that imagery was produced. And if we’re able to take it all the way to the finish line, we’re able then to find or put an identity to the person who produced it.

Jessica Smith
And usually at that point we’re using social media to connect the victim that’s featured in that photo to some known person within their life, be it a family member or an associate relative, something.

Shannon Ragan
Like yeah, very, very important work, very charged. Know, the topic of child exploitation in the United States, I think especially is kind of notorious at this point for conspiracy or just even know misunderstood stats and things like that or focus areas and things of that nature. Could you talk a little bit about what maybe some of the core myths and misconceptions are about child exploitation and how those myths could affect investigating real life cases?

Jessica Smith
Absolutely. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to child exploitation in all forms and that can encompass human trafficking as well. And I think one of the biggest myths is kind of, for lack of a better word, the glorified nature of the way that exploitation or trafficking can happen. When we think of this, especially when we think of sex trafficking sex trafficking? We associate it with the image of a child or an individual being chained to a pipe in a cellar or a basement or being thrown into the back of a van and whisked off to the airport and sold to somebody overseas and things like that. And while, yes, that can happen, there have historically been cases of that happening. And this concept of the kidnapping for sex trafficking that does, unfortunately happen in a lot of other countries outside of the United States. Here in the US. That’s not how trafficking occurs. It’s not how labor trafficking occurs. It’s not how sex trafficking occurs. It’s definitely not how the trafficking of children occurs. And I think one of the most important things that I can share with people is, as an OSINTer, it’s our job to gather information, but it’s more important for us to analyze that information in an effective way that helps move a case along or to reach a conclusion or whatever the goal of that is.

Jessica Smith
And it doesn’t behoove us to look for the answer that is the most fantastic or the most ridiculous or the most mind blowing. It’s most important for us to be good consumers of that information that we’re finding, to ask questions, to poke holes in our own biases, and to validate that information from as many different angles as we possibly can. And that’s something that people really need to do with the issue of child exploitation and human trafficking as well. Just because we have movies out there like Taken or Sound of Freedom that show this kind of fantastical depiction of what trafficking can look like. Or we have movies like Room. Despite that being kind of based on a true story where somebody is kidnapped, held hostage and exploited for years and years and years, the majority of the times that it’s happening, it’s done kind of right under our noses. And these kids, they go to school with the teachers that we know, but they go play baseball after school, they go take piano lessons, they go take swimming lessons. They play with our kids in the cul de sac. And it’s really, really easy for us to overlook those things because we’re only drawing on the information from these movies and these depictions and things that we’re being surrounded with because they leave an impact on us.

Jessica Smith
Right. But being a good consumer of this information means opening yourself up to it and making sure that you’re paying attention to everything around you. You’re validating your sources. You’re asking the tough questions, even if they don’t align with what we think and we want to believe as reality internally.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah, we’ve touched on the topic a few times in the show of Needlestack, and every time I come back to it, it’s always like there’s misplaced paranoia. Like there’s enough to be to drive you nuts and keep you up at night. But the way that it is sensationalized or that is made headlines in some ways is distracting from the epidemic in your neighborhoods and in your schools and youth groups and things like that. The last places you want to suspect that would be predatory in that way. So maybe we can switch over to that in terms of myths or misconceptions of who is targeted or who is doing the targeting as it relates to researching these cases.

Jessica Smith
Great questions. So let’s start with who is being targeted. The reality is there’s not a really pretty way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. If you’re a child, you have a target on your back one way or another. And that is just simply because the nature of what encompasses a child, right? They don’t have as many experiences as adults do. They don’t have necessarily the developmental faculties to be able to know when something is right or when something is wrong. And we raise our children to be good stewards and to listen to adults, right? And adults exploit this. They exploit the fact that we say, now when your teacher tells you something, you have to listen to them. When your coach tells you something, you have to listen to them. Taking that a step further though, while girls still disproportionately of all ages are targeted at a greater rate than boys, we are seeing an incredible climb in the number of young boys. And this can be anywhere from seven, eight years old up until 18 and even sometimes into young adults. They are being exploited from a much different perspective than we typically have been exposed to in terms of sexual exploitation.

Jessica Smith
So when we talk about something like sextortion, where I’m an abuser, I contact a child, convince them to send me nude images or videos of themselves, and then I say, now that I have this, you’re going to continue? To send me more content or I’m going to share all of this content with your social media followers, your friends, your parents, your school. You’re going to get in so much trouble. That is a sexual driven thing, right? It’s power, it’s control, it’s done for self gratification. What we’re seeing now with the boys is they’re being targeted for financial gain. And so this has no sexual component whatsoever. But these sextortionists, who oftentimes are the same individuals, who are enacting very traditional cybercrimes like phishing attempts or fraud and gift card games and things like that, they are going after these young boys under the ruse of being a young girl. Hey, do you want to exchange pictures? Once they have some sort of an illicit picture from that male victim, it’s the same type of blackmail. But in this case, instead of asking for more content, they’re asking for bitcoin and they’re asking for a wire transfer, like a peer to peer payment.

Jessica Smith
They’re asking for gift cards and it’s all financially motivated. And we are as a society, we train and we educate our young girls. Like you can’t talk to strangers online, you can’t send naked pictures to people. We haven’t done a good job of educating our young men and boys around this. And now we are in this frantic phase of trying to play catch up and let them know that this is happening and say you’re being targeted at just as a high of rate as the girls are now. And those numbers just keep going up and up and up. So that answers the question of who is being targeted as far as who’s doing the targeting. And this is something that I know that people have very, very strong feelings about because it’s scary, right? We want to put a name and a face to a predator like this monster in the shadows, the boogeyman who is coming after our children. But statistically speaking, when you look at the stats across the board and this is data that’s going back decades and it’s reliant on victim testimony, it’s reliant on arrest and conviction rates, it’s reliant on self reports from predators themselves, disproportionately.

Jessica Smith
It’s heterosexual white males who are the majority of the targeters of children. You of course are going to have women in there and you of course are going to have individuals who are non binary. You’re going to have members of the LGBTQ community. But when we look at the numbers as a whole, women are disproportionately much lower than men. And then same goes for LGBTQIA. We disproportionately see white men offending against children a lot higher than any other race as well. So again, I know that makes people very uncomfortable but it’s truly just like the facts as they exist in reality. And again, being a good consumer of research, I try to make sure when I’m doing any of my ClickSafe research that I’m truly just looking at something from a username perspective. And that’s I guess the beauty of the dark web is I don’t get any of that additional information unless they self identify whether they’re male or female or their race or anything like that. Generally speaking, they keep as much of that identifying information anonymous as they possibly can. So that allows for some really objective research. But there is for better, worse, a lot of information out there on kind of who the general predator is.

Jessica Smith
And then one further thing just to highlight super quick is more often than not the offenders know their victims. It’s not going to be the stranger and it’s going to jump out from a corner or somebody who is going to stalk your child at a park over and over and over again those things do happen. But we see stepfathers, grandparents, uncles, fathers, coaches, neighbors, those are the people usually that are going to end up offending against your children because there’s a comfort there because they can groom the parents as easily as they can groom the child and develop that sense of trust you mentioned.

Jeff Phillips
So I’d like to ask about it just because you were talking about you were doing research for ClickSafe. So ClickSafe is a nonprofit that you founded. How does that play into these cases or into the work you do on a volunteer basis?

Jessica Smith
Great question. So in working with NCPTF, we deal a lot with the cases of grooming. We will help with the predator identification cases. And anytime you have a missing child where there’s a potential grooming component, it brings that anxiety to a whole new level, right, for everybody involved, even us as the investigators, despite us trying to stay objective. And I just got to a point where I was like, I need to do more on the preventative side here, especially because we spend so much time in the dark web and in these predatory forums when we are looking for a missing child when we’re trying to identify a predator for these NCPTF cases. So I kind of thought, well, I’m in here anyway and this is a complete treasure trove of information. I mean, you have forums that are years old that have 50,000 plus posts from hundreds of different users. And I said, maybe I can use my analyst brain and take this and start finding some patterns and some trends within all of these posts to be able to create some more preventative education that is really evidence and intelligence driven versus reliant on law enforcement experience of working child exploitation cases.

Jessica Smith
Not that that is problematic or inappropriate. I wanted to create something that could go hand in hand and help support that from a different angle. So when I’m doing a lot of these research projects for ClickSafe, I’m doing a lot of the, I would say, I guess predator profiling, if you will, because we’ll hone in on a particular individual. We’ll watch how their linguistics and their posts change over time and so wrong or indifferent, I kind of have this predatory list of really concerning individuals that I’m always keeping an eye on, mostly just because of the information that they share with us. But when it comes to working cases, it then becomes really easy to go. You know what, I feel like I remember somebody saying something about this particular username or this particular methodology in terms of grooming. I’m going to go back to that and see if I can dig in further and figure out what they’re saying or is it beneficial to our investigation. And on a couple of different occasions now, we’ve been able to find different nooks and crannies of where kind of predatory conversations or websites or CCM sharing is taking place based on some of this research that I’m doing within ClickSafe because I’m in there constantly just reading the posts.

Jessica Smith
Whereas when we’re doing the investigations, mostly we’re focused on a singular individual singular username, whatever tiny piece of breadcrumb that we possibly can. And so I’m able to kind of pull these things together in a way that every once in a while does help us move our investigations along. But I would say for the most part it is using kind of OSINT and analytics in a different way because we’re focused on the linguistics and that’s all for prevention. And then with NCPTF, I get to do the reactive side of things and do all of the subject identification and all of that fun stuff.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah, good pairing.

Jeff Phillips
So essentially you’re able to provide the tips here or the preventative, because unfortunately, you’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth, right, from the predators themselves, how they’re going to share things, tricks they may have or approaches they may have. Okay, wow.

Jessica Smith
Exactly.

Shannon Ragan
Yeah. I was curious. There was something that you shared recently. Forgive me, I don’t recall if it was from ClickSafe or NCPTF, but on an investigation of Roblox in terms of how children are being groomed or solicited for this more financially driven exploitation, could you talk just a little bit about that report and kind of thinking outside of the box of where children are being targeted because of where they are online?

Jessica Smith
Yeah, absolutely. So I did this over the summer with ClickSafe. I have five interns this summer, and my intern, I let all of them kind of choose their research project. And we talked through methodology and things, and he’s like, I really want to focus on gaming. And I was so excited about this because gaming is kind of one of the newer places where we just don’t know as much about exploitation. We know that it’s happening, but there’s not as much literature and there’s not as much news articles, for better or worse, out there about how it happens on a gaming platform and how it can differ between gaming platforms and some just have a chat feature, some just have, like, voice talk feature. There’s a ton of different Idiosyncrasies here. And so we decided to we wanted to do all of them, but we decided to focus on Roblox. And I said, why don’t we do this from kind of an immersive experience perspective? Let’s set you up with a couple of different accounts. You’re going to go just play the game like a kid would. So he was not allowed to initiate any interactions with anybody.

Jessica Smith
If people spoke to him, he had to record it, document it. He documented every single moment that he played. And I told him, if somebody spoke to you, you have to move the conversation in a very organic way. Don’t try to shift it one way or another. It’s like not leading the conversation anywhere. And what we were able to find out, and I’m actually very happy with the results of this. There wasn’t as much solicitation, if you will, for inappropriate behavior, for any conversations that he felt would have led to any sort of exploitative behavior, which was really good. Again, we know it happens, but over 500 hours of gameplay, or whenever it was, he didn’t necessarily experience that. What he did experience, though, was the abundance of condo games that are shared on the Roblox Discord servers. And for those of anybody who doesn’t know, a condo game is basically a user generated game within Roblox because it’s all user generated content that very overtly goes against the terms of service. So more often than not, these are incredibly sexually charged games in terms of theme and content. They can be extremely violent. And the individuals, the creators of these condo games will kind of almost have competitions to see how long they can get their condo game to stay up because more often than not, they are removed by Roblox within about 24 hours.

Jessica Smith
So sometimes Roblox can get to them as brick as just a couple of hours after they go live. And I think my intern said that people talk about the one that was up for, like, 48 hours was legendary because Roblox didn’t find it for 48 hours. And what this told us was, and this is something that we know to be true across kind of the exploitative landscape is predators will move children from forum to forum or platform to platform. And so if you do have children who are playing discord or excuse me, playing discord on discord or Twitter or some of these other platforms where these condo game links can be shared, it would be very easy for them to find them and then make their way into these very inappropriate these games that the content is not age appropriate for them and where a lot of exploitative behavior can take place. But just simply navigating through Roblox as a user, and we left all of the settings wide open, it was actually a pretty decent experience. Every once in a while, the intern would encounter a game where he’s like, I don’t know if this fits the age ratings, but then usually within 24 hours, that game would be adjusted and it would go up a higher bracket.

Jessica Smith
So I was really pleased to see that Roblox is doing an incredible job in terms of moderating their content as fast as they possibly can. It’s a small company, so they can’t move as fast as the users who are generating the content can. But if we were to have put all of the privacy settings in place for these interim personas, he likely would have not had any sort of inappropriate interactions whatsoever and more than likely would not have had any sort of exploitative interactions. The majority of the problematic activity happened more within those Discord servers than it did within Roblox. Yeah.

Shannon Ragan
For the uninitiated audience. Could you explain briefly what Discord is?

Jessica Smith
Yes, absolutely. Gosh, I’m so just discord is very similar to Telegram, slight similarities to Slack, but it’s. Basically just like a way for you to connect with people within different servers on Slack, it’d be a channel in Telegram, it would be a channel around different topics that you guys have in common. So you can share pictures, you can share links, you can share and just have conversations with individuals who are, I guess like minded, if you will. And sometimes the servers are like, I don’t know, fans of true crime and then other servers are roblox and then other servers are condo game driven servers. So yes, it’s basically just a way for you to connect with people, hang out, have conversations, chat, talk, share ideas and different things. If you want to add anything, please feel free.

Jeff Phillips
That’s the key part, right? The fact that you go beyond text, right, and you’re adding, like you said, there’s voice, there’s video, shared things. So it’s good and bad. From the topic we’re talking about today.

Shannon Ragan
Well, across all these platforms, you live in this stuff day in, day out in every way that you can online. What kind of toll does that take on your mental health or the people that you work with and how do you guys deal with that sort of thing?

Jessica Smith
This is a good question. I really wish people would spend more time talking about this because really there’s in any form of OSINT, not just child exploitation, you can have kind of that secondary trauma of doing these investigations. And I know some of my roughest times have actually been when I’ve been monitoring and doing OSINT work around processed activity and it’s something that you don’t necessarily expect that is going to hit you as hard as it does. And sometimes you don’t realize the ripple effects or the ramifications until days, weeks or months later. But within the exploitation community, thankfully, like I said, everybody who I work with, be it in ClickSafe or NCPTF, you become this family and for better or worse, you get very comfortable telling people what they need to hear. And so there would be times we’d be in investigation and you can tell that somebody is just really struggling with whether it’s the particular victim, the particular subject, whatever it is, and you say, okay, you’re done, you’re in time out. And it’s not a nasty thing, it’s not a malicious thing. It’s that we recognize that this one is really hard for you.

Jessica Smith
We’re giving you grace just to remove yourself, to step away. Like we’ll shoulder this one and then you’ve got my back next time when it’s really hard for me. So we make sure that we’re watching out for each other just as much as we’re watching out for ourselves. But we also make sure that you haven’t taken a vacation in a while, get out of here, go spend time. Or it’s 01:00 in the morning, we’re all going to shut our computers down for the night and we’re going to go to bed and nobody’s allowed to log back on until 09:00 a.m. The next day. Something that I’ve started doing with my interns is actually having them create like a self care plan and it sounds really hokey. They can do it however they want, they can literally write it out in just a word list. You can put it into a PowerPoint, you can make it artistic or creative but it’s like you need to come up with five coping strategies for how you are going to kind of recharge if you start to struggle with this. So it can be anything from I’m only going to allow myself to research for a half an hour and then I have to take a ten minute break or I’m going to make sure that anytime I research I journal before bed so I’m not just going to sleep with this.

Jessica Smith
Something that I do here in my office is change up my workspace. So like I have my day job workspace in a different part of my office than my ClickSafe workspace or my NCF workspace. Whenever I’m doing a deep dive into research I will do things like unplug my air freshener. I don’t let myself listen to music when I’m doing research. I can do it when I write up the records but not when I’m in it. Doing the research because you want to minimize those associations that your brain creates. The last thing you want to do is on a fall Saturday you spend 6 hours researching something with your pumpkin spice expression of Berlin forever. And now every time you smell that you think of this horrific thing that you saw when you were doing your research. So anything that we can do to a take care of one another and I think that helps because you are taking it away from the other person to have to say I need to tag out. Which is really hard to do when we’re talking about child exploitation. Nobody wants to wave the white flag so saying look you’re good, we’ve got this, go take a break.

Jessica Smith
I think it makes it easier for that other person to say yes, you’re right, I’m out. And then doing whatever we can to thoughtfully think about how we’re taking care of ourselves ahead of time with the self care plans. And then for me personally, minimizing those negative associations is really important. It’s amazing how quick your brain makes them and it’s amazing how much really nasty stuff sneaks up on you in these investigations. You’re chugging along thinking that oh it’s fine, I’m just trying to identify this subject and then all of a sudden you find a bunch of snuff fantasy stories that your subject has written and you now have to read through these and you’re scarred for life sort of a thing, right?

Jeff Phillips
If any of our listeners were interested in volunteering for whether it was the National Child Protection Task Force or if you’re taking that on I know you’re doing interns at ClickSafe. I mean, are there certain skills that you look for in the organizations or time commitments? What can you tell us for anyone that might be interested in volunteering?

Jessica Smith
Yeah, sure. So volunteers are really integral for NCPTF at this point. There’s only a handful of paid staff that are working for the organization. So the majority of our OSINT and our cases are run by volunteers who are always looking for really invested volunteers who are willing to not only jump in and just get their hands dirty, but to stay engaged. And that’s the hardest thing, right? When you’re a volunteer, you don’t necessarily have the same level of expectations that you do when you’re working a nine to five or even contract work, right? So it becomes really easy to say, oh, I’m going to sit this case out because I have this going on, and then one case becomes three, and then three cases become six months, and before you know it, you haven’t logged in or jumped in on a case in a very long time. So in terms of skill sets, though, we do not do any internal training at NCPTF because we just simply don’t have the resources or the bandwidth at this point. So we need all of our investigative volunteers to come being pretty comfortable and versed in doing OSINT.

Jessica Smith
You need to have done it in some sort of professional capacity, be it currently or at a previous job. We do get a lot of volunteers who come to us saying, like, I did a Trace Labs event, but we need to see that there was a little bit more depth and rigor to the skill set. And not just because we don’t necessarily think that you’re going to be good enough, but because with structured environments come policies, come standard operating procedures, come expectations about how you are documenting your findings, how you’re structuring your operational security, different things like that. And so that’s why we have that element built in. You have to have some sort of professional experience doing OSINT, be it with law enforcement or private sector or anything like that. So OSINT is really key, but we also look for people who have skills in other areas of intelligence, being human, sigant, geo, like, anything like that, because we understand and appreciate and believe that all of those different entities play a role in being able to execute and work these cases as well. But the biggest thing is coming to us really secure and ready to go, like, nope, I have these skills.

Jessica Smith
I’ve been using them for X number of years. I know how to do a subject identification case. I know how to structure intel findings and not being afraid to jump in and then remaining engaged as well. We typically do volunteer calls once a year. The last time we did one, we got so many willing volunteers that it took us a year to even just get through processing all of them because the vetting process is so in depth. So I’m not sure if we’re going to do another volunteer call this January or not, but we always announce it across all of our social media. So LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, keep your eyes open if you are interested in that and for ClickSafe. I’m just not quite ready to take on volunteers yet. But again, keep your eyes on my socials as well. Unless you’re a grant writer, then call me immediately.

Shannon Ragan
We’ll definitely leave that in.

Jessica Smith
Thank you.

Shannon Ragan
I did want to jump back real quick to something you were talking about earlier that you mentioned SunCalc. I was curious, are there any other tools that are in your go to list that you’d like our audience to know about?

Jessica Smith
Absolutely. Gosh. Do we want to talk paid or do we want to talk unpaid maybe? Yeah, for sure. So I would say the tools that I use without fail through every single investigation where there is a subject involved is going to be Epios. That tool is just getting better and better and better with regard to the information that they are pulling in. And because most of the cases that we work do have a law enforcement component to them, be it through. My employer or through NCPTF being able to pull just like a Google ID from EPOS based on a Gmail or another email that is registered to a Google account for somebody makes it so easy for law enforcement because all we have to do is say, here’s their Google ID, and they can go request and serve legal process on getting all of the information associated with that account. The second tool that I use a lot, which I’m sure a bunch of people are going to roll their eyes at this, but here we are for 2 seconds. So I use true people search all the time and the reason I like to do this is because I use it as kind of like a validation mechanism for the other people search tools out there.

Jessica Smith
I find that true people search tends to be the most accurate, especially with regard to how recent addresses and things are. I also like to compare it to results from places like TLO. Yeah.

Jeff Phillips
Thank you, Jessica, for joining us today and chatting with us and thank you for everything you do on the volunteer front. We hope to have you back again in the future to see how ClickSafe is doing as you continue to expand it.

Jessica Smith
Thank you so much for having me, you guys. I really, really appreciate it. This was awesome.

Jeff Phillips
And thanks to the audience for listening. If you liked what you heard, you can view transcripts and other episode info on our website, authentic8.com/needlestack. That’s authentic with the number eight .com slash needlestack. Be sure to let us know your thoughts on Twitter @needlestackpod and to like and subscribe wherever you’re listening today. We’ll see you next time.