Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Reunited.

Let's start at the end.  A missing child was reunited with their family. Thanks to strangers on the Internet.

twitter thread for good

Let's unroll this so it makes more sense. The NCPTF is the National Child Protection Task Force. The National Child Protection Task Force, a registered 501c3, was founded to provide law enforcement access to investigative expertise and resources that are unavailable or under-funded in most law enforcement organizations. Trace Labs is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to accelerate the family reunification of missing persons while training members in the trade craft of open source intelligence (OSINT).

NCPTF held their annual conference this year. During the conference, there was a live event to work on real cases using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques. The event was co-run with Trace Labs. The goal is to find, verify, and turn over relevant discoveries to law enforcement to aid in finding missing kids. 

In this case, it worked out. Here's the original tweet

There are thousands more missing, see Missing Kids.

As an aside, I attended and spoke at this conference.