IT Milk: entry

I found a calling today for a possible future career. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children sent two representatives to speak to our Security and Risk Analysis class. They gave a lengthy presentation about what they do to find these missing and abducted children and how they use various technologies to assist them.

I was so intrigued by the NMCD’s work because I have a 10-month-old daughter and I cannot imagine the terrible grief that would overcome me if she went missing much less abducted. I put myself in the shoes of the victims’ parents, and I came to the conclusion that this is something that our country needs as much as we need the military to defend us from foreign attack.

I have a unique set of skills and experiences in information technology to join the NMCD in their noble fight against child abduction and child pornography. I plan on applying there for an internship this coming summer and we will see how that goes. With that said, here is a brief summary of today’s presentation by the National Missing Children’s Division.

Since its conception in 1984 by Congress, the National Missing Children’s Division has been battling the persistent problems of child abduction and missing children. This has been a problem since the beginning of civilization, and it will continue to be a problem until we figure out a foolproof method to safeguard our children from the environment. Now, with the great advances of technology the NMCD has more resources than ever to assist in their search and rescue efforts for missing children, which is the focus and relevancy of the presentation today.

The guest speakers from the NMCD provided some shocking statistics about this issue of missing children. About 850,000 children go missing ever year, which equals out to 2,000 per day. Nearly a quarter of that figure are victims of family abductions, while only 115 are victims are the stereotypical kidnapping we see in movies. Now, here’s how the NMCD plays into these figures.

I’ve always noticed the posters that the National Missing Children’s Division posts up on high-traffic locations like Wal-Mart. But I never paid much attention to them because I doubted their efficacy. According to the guest speakers, it turns out that 1/6 of the children placed on those posters are recovered as a result of the successful photo distribution network that the NMCD has built up over the years. These photos of missing children are distributed over a vast number of channels, including television, weekly shows, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Meanwhile, the organization receives over 800 calls each day with leads for the missing children.

The NMCD is relevant to what we are learning in Security and Risk Analysis because of the common techniques that they use to locate the missing children. The internet is a prime resource for the NMCD. Social networking sites like MySpace cooperate with this organization to track down the location of the IP addresses of the possible profiles of the missing children. One story involves a missing child named Dalton Lucas who was abducted by his mother when he was 7 years old. Now, six years later, the NMCD has a lead for this child because of his profile on MySpace which traces him to a home in Ohio.

Also, Google offers resources and assistance to the teams at NMCD to help locate and find information about missing children. Youtube has jumped on the boat and publishes videos of missing children as part of the effort.

A major factor of the NMCD’s current strategy is their Cyber Tipline at www.cybertipline.com. This is an easier an quicker alternative to a toll-free hotline where people can submit leads to the NMCD. The team assigned to the Cyber Tipline handles an average of 3,000 reports per week.

As noted above, the National Missing Children’s Division heavily uses information technology, and this dependency on technology will become more prevalent as older methods become outmoded. SRA and IST students from Penn State University would be great candidates for employment at this organization because of their familiarity with a wide variety of technologies, critical thinking for problem solving, and well-honed project management skills.