 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf, 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here inside theCUBE for Splunk.conf, their 10th year conference. We've been here seven years. I'm John Furrier, you're the host. Our next guest is Sherry Kaltwick-Jaroni, founder and executive director of the Global Emancipation Network, a cutting edge company and organization connecting different groups together to fight that battle, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics, we're in a digital world. Sherry, thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming in. Thank you so much for having me. So, love your mission. This is really close to my heart in terms of what you're doing because with digital technologies, there's a unification theme here at Splunk. Unifying data sets, you hear on the keynotes. You guys got a shout out on the keynote. Congratulations. We did, thank you. Unifying data can help fight cybersecurity, fight the bad guys, but also there's other areas where unification, this is what you're doing. Take a minute to explain the Global Emancipation Network. Yeah, thank you. So what we do is we are a data analytics and intelligence nonprofit dedicated to countering all forms of human trafficking, whether it's labor trafficking, sex trafficking, or any of the subtypes, men, women, and children all over the world. So when you think about that, what that really means is that we interact with thousands of stakeholders across law enforcement, government, nonprofits, academia, and then the private sector as well. And all of those essentially act as data silos for human trafficking data. And when you think about that, is trafficking as a data problem or you tackle it as a data problem? What that really means is that you have to have a technology and data-led solution in order to solve the problem. So that's really our mission here, is to bring together all of those stakeholders, give them easy access to tools that can help improve their counterpostery. And where are you guys based and how big is the organization and what's the status? Give a quick plug for where you guys are at and what the current focus is. Perfect. So I am based in San Luis Obispo, California. We have just started a brand new trafficking investigations hub out at Cal Poly there. They're a fantastic organization whose motto is learn by doing. And so we are taking the trafficking problem and the tangential other issues. So like we mentioned, cyber crime, wildlife trafficking, drugs trafficking. All of this sort of has a criminal convergence around it and applying technology and particularly Splunk to that. Yeah, and I just want to make a note. I think it's important to mention Cal Poly is doing some cutting edge work. Allison Robinson, Bill Britton runs the program over there. They got a great organization. They're doing a lot of data oriented from media analysis data. Big focus there. Cal Poly, quite a big organization. They are and they're doing some wonderful things. AWS just started an innovation hub called the DX Hub there that we are a part of. Really trying to tackle these really meaty problems here that are very data centric and technology centric and Cal Poly is the best place to do that. Great, let's get into some of the details. One of the things around the news, obviously you're seeing Mark Zuckerberg doing the tour, Capitol Hill, DC, Georgetown, free speech. They Facebook has been kind of blamed for breaking democracy. At the same time, it's a platform there. They don't consider themselves as an editorial outlet. My personal opinion, they are, but they hide behind that platform. So bad things have happened. Good things can happen. So you're seeing technology kind of being pigeonholed as bad, tech for bad. There's also a tech for good. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, publicly said, technology is neutral. We humans can shape it. Okay, so you guys are looking at it from shaping it for good. How are you doing it? What are some of the things that are going on technically and from a business standpoint that is shaping and unifying the data? I mean, it's absolutely certain that technology has facilitated human trafficking and other ills throughout the world. It's a way that people bring their product, in this case, it's sadly human beings, to the market to reach buyers, right? And technology absolutely facilitates that. But as you mentioned, we can use that against them. So actually here at COMF, we are bringing together for our first time the partnership that we do with Splunk for Good, Accenture, and Global Emancipation Network to help automatically classify and score risky businesses, content, ads, and individuals there, to help not only with mitigating risk and liability for the private sector, whether it's social media giants or if it's transportation, hospitality, you name it, but also help ease the burden of content moderators. And that's the other side of it. So when you live in this space day in and day out, you really exact a mental toll here. It's really damaging to the individual who sits and reads this material and views photos over and over again. So using technology is a way to automate some of those investigations and the identification of that content could be helpful in a variety of ways. In a way, it's a whole nother adversary formula to try to identify. One of the things that Splunk, and as we've been here at Splunk Conference, they've been about data from day one. Logged data and then grew from there in this platform. It's a data problem. And so one of the things that we're seeing here is diverse data, getting at more data makes AI smarter, makes things more so. But that's hard. Diverse data might be in different data sets or silos, different groups, sharing data is important. So getting that diverse data, how difficult is it for you guys because the bad guys can hide. They're hiding from Craigslist to social platforms, you name it, they're everywhere. How do you get the data? What's the cutting edge, ingestion? Where are the shadows? Where are the blind spots? How do you guys look at that because it's only getting bigger? Absolutely. So we do it through a variety of different ways. We absolutely see gathering and aggregating and machining data, the most central thing to what we do at Global Emancipation Network. So we have a coalition really of organizations that we host their scrapers and crawlers on and we run it through our ingestion pipeline. And we are partnered with Microsoft and AWS to store that data, but everything goes through Splunk as well. So what is that data really? It's data on the open web, it's on the deep web. We have partners as well who look at the dark web too. So Recorded Future, who's here at COMF, Deep Owl as well. So there's lots of different things on that. Now honestly, the data that's available on the internet is easy for us to get to. It's easy enough to create a scraper and crawler to even create an authenticated scraper behind a paywall, right? The harder thing is those privately held data sets that are in all of those silos that are in a million different data formats with all kinds of different fields and whatnot. So that is where it's a little bit more of a manual lift. We're always looking at new technologies to machine PDFs and that sort of thing as well. You know, one of the things that I love about this business we're on the waiver on is we're in digital media businesses that we're in pursuit of the truth. Trust, truth is a big part of what we do. You can talk to people, get the data. You guys are doing something really compelling. You're classifying evil. Okay, this is the topic of your shop track here. Classifying evil, combating human trafficking with the power of data analytics. This is actually super important. Could you share why, for people that aren't following like the inside the ropes of this problem, why is it such a big problem to classify evil and like why isn't it so easy to do? What's the big story? What should people know about this challenge? Well, human trafficking is actually the second most profitable crime in the world. It's the fastest growing crime. So our best estimates are that there's somewhere between 20 million and 45 million people currently enslaved around the world. That's a population the size of Spain. That's nothing that an individual or even a small army of investigators can handle. And when you think about the content that each of those produce or the traffickers are producing in order to advertise the services of those, you know, it's way beyond the ability of any one organization or even like I said an army of them to manage. And so what we need to do then is to be able to find the signal in the noise here. And there is a lot of noise. Even if you're looking at sex trafficking particularly, there's consensual sex work or, you know, there's other things that are a little bit more in that arena, but we want to find that that is actually engaging in human trafficking. The talk that you mentioned that we're doing is actually a fantastic use case. This is what we did with Splunk for Good and Accenture. We were actually looking at doing a deep dive into the illicit massage industry in the U.S. And there are likely over 10,000 illicit massage businesses in the U.S. And those are really those businesses, massages and spas that are actually just a front for being a brothel essentially. And it generates, you know, $2 billion a year. We're talking about a major industry here. And in that is a very large component of human trafficking. There's a very clear pipeline between Korea, China, down to New York and then being placed there. So what we ended up needing to do then, and again we were going across data silos here, looking at state owned data, whether it was license applications, arrest filings, legal cases, that sort of thing, down into the textual advertisements. So doing NLP work with weighted lexicons and really ascending a risk store to individual massage businesses, to massage therapists, business owners, and then again to that content. So looking again, how can we create a classifier to identify evil? It's interesting, you know, I think about what you're talking about. This is a business. This is a business model. This is business continuity. This is a supply chain. This is a bona fide, underground, or overt business process. Yeah, absolutely, and you're right on that too, that it is actually overt because at this point traffickers actually operate with impunity for the most part. So actually framing it that way as a market economy, whether it's shadowy and a little bit more in the black market or completely out in the open, it really helps us frame our identification, how we can manage disruptions, who need to be the stakeholders at the table for us in order to have a wider impact rather than just whack-a-mole. You know, I was just talking about Sonya, one of our producers around inclusiveness, and you know, this is so obviously a human passion issue. Why don't we just solve it? I mean, why doesn't something like the elite class or the world organization, just Davos, and people just say, are they staring at this problem? Why don't they just say, hey, this is evil, let's just get rid of it? What's the- Well, we're working on it, John, but the good thing is, and you're absolutely right, that there are a number of organizations who are actually working on it. So not just us, there's some other amazing nonprofits, but the tech sector is actually starting to come to the table as well. Whether it's Splunk, it's Microsoft, it's AWS, it's Intel, IBM, Accenture, people are really waking up to how damaging this actually is. The impact that it has on GDP, the ways that we're particularly needing to protect vulnerable populations, LGBTQ youth, children in foster care, indigenous populations, refugees, conflict zones. So you're absolutely right. I think given the right tools and technology and the awareness that needs to happen on the global stage, we will be able to significantly shrink this problem. It's classic arbitrage. If I'm a bad guy, you take advantage of the systematic problems of what's in place. So the current situation sounds like siloed groups, somewhat funded, not mega-funded. This group over here, disconnect between communications. So you guys are, from what I can tell, pulling everyone together, is going to create a control plane of data to share information, kind of get a more holistic view of everything. Yeah, that's exactly it. Trying to do it at scale, at that. So I mentioned that first, we were looking at the illicit massage sector. We're moving over to the social media to look again at the recruitment side and content. The financial sector is really the common thread that runs through all of it. So being able to identify, taking it back to a general use case here from cybersecurity, just indicators as well, indicators of compromise, but in our case, these are just words and lexicons, dollar values, things like that, down to behavioral analytics and patterns of behavior, whether people are moving, operating as call centers, network-like behavior. Things that are really indicative of trafficking and making sure that all of those silos understand that, are sharing the data that they can that's not overly sensitive and making sure that we work together. Sherry, you mentioned AWS. Teresa Carlson, I know she's super passionate out there. She's the leader, Cal Poly, we mentioned that. Splunk, you mentioned, how is Splunk involved? Are they the core technology behind this? Are they powering? They are, yes. Splunk was actually with us from very day one. We sat at a meeting actually at Microsoft and we were really just whiteboarding. What does this look like? How can we bring Splunk to bear on this problem? And so Splunk for good, we're part of their pledge, the $10 million pledge over 10 years. And it's been amazing. So after we ingest all of our data, whether no matter what the data source is, whatever it looks like, and we deal with the ugliest and most unstructured data ever. And Splunk is really the only tool that we've been, that we looked at that was able to deal with that. So everything goes through Splunk. From there, we're doing a series of external API calls that can really help us enrich that data, add correlations, whether it's geospatial data, network analysis, cryptocurrency analysis, public records, lookups, a variety of things. But Splunk is at the heart. So I got to ask you, obviously, as this new architecture comes into play for attacking this big problem that you guys are doing, as someone who's not involved in that area, I get like, wow, spooked out by that. I'm like, wow, this is really bad. How can people help? What can people do either in their daily lives, whether it's how they handle their data, observations, donations, involvement, how do people get involved? What do you guys see as some areas that could be collaborating with? What do you guys need? How do people get involved? Yeah, one that's big for me is I would love to be able to send an interview like this or go about my daily life and know that what I am wearing or the things that I'm interacting with, my phone, my computer, weren't built from the hands of slave labor. And at this point, I really can't. So one thing that everybody can do is demand of the people that they are purchasing from that they're doing so in a socially viable and responsible way. So looking at supply chain management as well and auditing specifically for human trafficking. We have sort of the certified fair trade, certified organic seals. We need something like that for human trafficking and that's something that we, the people can demand. You know, I think you're on a right track with it. I see a big business model wave where consumer purchasing power can be shifted to people who make the investments in those areas. I think it's a big opportunity. It's kind of a new e-commerce data-driven, social impact-oriented economy. Yep, and you can see more and more investment firms are becoming more interested in making socially responsible investments. And we just heard Splunk announced their $100 million social innovation fund as well. And I'm sure that human trafficking is going to be part of that awareness. Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that's inspirational to me personally is that you're starting to see power and money come into helping these causes. My friend Scott Tune, he just started a venture capital firm called Valo Ventures in Palo Alto. And they're for-profit social impact investors. So they see a business model shift where people are getting behind these new things. I think your work is awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the shout-out on the keynote. Appreciate it. The global emancipation network. Check them out. They're in San Luis, Bispo, California. Get involved. This is theCUBE with bringing you the signal from the noise here at .com. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break.