Big Ideas

  • "The Future of Human Rights on web3: A Vision for a Survivor-Centered Internet" (2022)

    By Anjana Rajan and Frederick Reynolds

    As new technologies become prevalent in our society and economy, they become both a medium in which human trafficking happens and a means to restore freedom to survivors. Therefore, the architecture of web3 is an urgent human rights imperative because it will dictate who will hold social, political, and economic power in the near future, and who will not. Using our multidisciplinary expertise on human trafficking and applied cryptography, we outline a vision for web3 that will empower and protect vulnerable communities while holding perpetrators of abuse and crimes accountable.

    This paper proposes three web3-native design principles: ownership with consent, speaking truth to power, and privacy with accountability. The concepts in this paper were featured by ACAMS and Betaworks Studios.

  • “Countering QAnon: Understanding the Role of Human Trafficking in the Disinformation-Extremist Nexus” (2021)

    By Anjana Rajan, Catherine Chen, Caren Benjamin, Mollie Saltskog, Jason Blazakis, Zach Schwitzky, Leela McClintock

    The Polaris MDM Intelligence Unit is a data-driven security program to defend our organization from mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) threats caused by violent extremist groups. Through a strategic partnership between Polaris, The Soufan Group, and Limbik, we built AI/ML models to predict when conspiracy theories about human trafficking would go viral and built proactive strategies to protect our democracy and national security.

    This paper outlines our technical methodology and presciently describes the evolution of these threats. This paper was quoted during a congressional hearing about the January 6th insurrection, cited by the State Department in their annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and published by The Department of Homeland Security digital library.

  • "Combating Domestic Terrorism: Understanding White Supremacy, Misogyny, Gun Violence and Cryptography" (2020)

    By Anjana Rajan

    In order to thwart mass gun violence caused by white supremacy extremists, witnesses must take action. An FBI study on active shooters shows that there were on average three distinct witnesses who observed concerning behaviors about the suspect prior to their attack. Unfortunately, nearly 60 percent of witnesses did not report their concerns to the police, resulting in many missed opportunities to save lives. This low reporting rate can be solved through the use of cryptographic information escrows. Witnesses can report concerning behaviors into an escrow and their report remains locked until a credible threshold of risk is met. This system motivates witnesses to report suspicious behavior while protecting the civil liberties of the accused.

    This project was funded and published by The Aspen Institute and was featured by the Mechanical Design for Social Good initiative.

  • “Callisto: A Cryptographic Approach to Detecting Serial Perpetrators of Sexual Misconduct” (2018)

    By Anjana Rajan, Lucy Qin, Dan Boneh, Tancréde Lepoint, David Archer, Mayank Varia

    Callisto is a social enterprise that builds tech to combat sexual assault. We built a cryptographic information escrow that detects serial perpetrators of sexual assault and connects matched victims to legal counsel to pursue justice together. With Callisto, survivors were 6x more likely to report their assault, reported 3x faster, and 15% of survivors were matched with another victim of the same perpetrator.

    This paper describes Callisto’s product architecture and cryptographic design. It was published by the ACM Journal and won the prize for Best Note at the ACM COMPASS conference. It was also featured as a keynote at the Enigma conference. Callisto was funded by Greylock Partners, Y Combinator, and won the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

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