Galway-headquartered data intelligence company Siren has signed a deal with an anti-trafficking organisation that will see its technology used in the global fight against modern slavery.
The Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) will use the company's investigative intelligence platform to try to identify traffickers and reduce human trafficking. The platform is being provided free of charge as part of Siren's Data for Good initiative.
It will enable the organisation to overlap data from multiple sources to find links, conduct investigations more quickly on a wider scale and define anomalies that will help it conduct more efficient investigations.
In its focus on child sexual abuse material, the anti-trafficking group monitors more than 193,000 dark websites, discovering between 5,000 and 10,000 new sites per month. Using Siren’s platform it can streamline the investigations and avoid creating a backlog.
Huge step forward
Larry Cameron, chief information security officer at the group, said it would be a huge step forward in fighting against human trafficking.
“We are changing the way we work as we don’t want to keep on exporting data sets. We want all of our data on one platform, we also want to have the data automatically updated and consistently enriched,” he said. “This enables our taskforce of 140 people to investigate more effectively.
“Siren allows us to expedite the process of identifying traffickers and ending trafficking operations. For us, Siren is a massive step forward in the fight against human trafficking.”
Siren chief executive John Randles said the company was proud to work with the ATII on disrupting the operations, economics and anonymity of human trafficking.
“Our technology will inhibit the ability of traffickers to inflict harm on vulnerable groups. We will work alongside ATII and provide support in the fight against modern slavery,” he said.
Figures from the International Labour Organisation estimate that there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally and that forced labour and human trafficking is a $150 billion industry worldwide.
