
Hackathon to Stop Online Child Sexual Exploitation (Aug 23, San Francisco) - ThornStaff
www.WeAreThorn.org needs your help to stay one step ahead of child sex trafficking and child pornography criminals and to identify&#x2F;rescue victims of these crimes.<p>On Saturday August 23rd, www.WeAreThorn.org is organizing a Hackathon in San Francisco where participants will be asked to join the fight against child sexual exploitation and take on challenges including; analyzing large data sets to identify patterns and linkages to help identify potential trafficking victims and&#x2F;or perpetrators, extracting data from images and creating an ability to sort&#x2F;access this data, working on programs within Tor networks, and more.<p>Thorn&#x27;s partners include SVAngel, Google, Microsoft, UStream, Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook and more. Read more and sign up for the Hackathon at - http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wearethorn.org&#x2F;thorn-hackathon&#x2F;?utm_source=Hacker%20News&amp;utm_medium=Submission&amp;utm_campaign=Thorn%20Hackathon
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lifeisstillgood
I did a (tiny) amount of work / discussion with one of our smallest police
forces years ago (I wish I had been able to carry on they had needs that could
be met fairly simply but with a big wow factor)

Anyway I would be careful with any analysis of images - this is the vilest
stuff humanity does, and you can't hand round a corpus at a hackathon and say
"come up with an idea".

What those two points basically mean is I would go find some experts from the
police / NGO communities (it seems you are working with NMEC?) If it's still
similar to my (ancient) experiences then there will be plenty of low hanging
fruit that is not available to most police forces as OSS or as easy-to-use.

This is one area where the freewheelin nature of hackathons might be better
tamed.

(I could not quite understand from your page if you had planned something like
this (teams will be asked to ...)

Tl;dr - hackathons seem too freewheeling and impermanent for such an important
subject - it might be better long term if you worked with police / NGOs to
become "product managers" for the teams. And focused on teams with longer term
"availability" than a hackathon.

But good luck - my tiny out of date knowledge says there is a lot of really
obvious and easy coding that police forces are either missing or paying
through the nose for, and you could make some serious headway.

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hubridnoxx
We've been building visualizations and machine learning based tools with Thorn
for the past few months.

Really excited about the hackathon-- feel free to shoot any questions our way
at zelliottm@gmail.com or nate@formation8.com with the subject Thorn
Hackathon!

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WhiteDog
[https://www.facebook.com/swrg.gyana?fref=ts](https://www.facebook.com/swrg.gyana?fref=ts)

I am sure that this man is doing sexual abuse for children, but I can not
prove that. Please help me!

~~~
WhiteDog
I hope that some who has hacking skills can help me. Please!

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mpcadosch
Best of luck Nate, Mike, Zach & team! We wish we could've attended.

Sincerely,

Your favorite developers :)

