Justice can often take time!

If you follow IST Research and the work we do you probably know we have a passion for combining technology, tools, data and tradecraft for the benefit of vulnerable populations around the world. Today, the article below made its way to me.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-or/pr/nationwide-sting-operation-targets-illegal-asian-brothels-six-indicted-racketeering

This is sweet, sweet justice for the IST Research team. From 2014 - 2017 we were members of a research team that worked on DARPA's Memex Program where we developed domain specific search technology and pointed our technology development at the problem of human trafficking. As our researchers and software engineers worked to create technologies, a team of analysts conducted tireless investigations of data we began to discover. We often used these human investigations as the motivation for what we wanted the technology to be able to do. My colleagues, Curtis Goodman, Leah Meyer, and Danielle Smalls stumbled into a network that we called Bata International, and we became very familiar with a gentleman named Weixuan Zhou. Some of the results of the investigation can be seen below!

On Dec 13, 2016, I sent the full investigation on to my friend Rob, who is a special agent at the FBI. I often shared with Rob findings from our research that we thought their investigative power could run to ground. The hard part of doing this work and sending them in as tips is that you just never know what happens once the FBI opens an investigation. Rob's response to me was, "I will get this into the right hands." It looks like he definitely did.

If you are interested in seeing the full research, just shoot me a note and I would be happy to pass it along to you.