My 2nd time judging with some interesting changes, while also raising funds for Operation Safe Escape

So it’s time for another Tracelabs Missing Persons Search Party again! I’m sure you already know it’s something I’ve taken part in before, both judging and as a contestant a few times (follow the links if you need a refresher) and I love the good work it does in finding real missing people and hopefully stopping them from coming into harm.

This particular one was raising money for a charity close to my heart, Operation Safe Escape. In their own words:

Operation Safe Escape is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, founded in 2016 with a single goal: to make sure that every person impacted by domestic violence has the resources, information, and confidence that they need to leave their abuser and stay safe once they do.

Operation Safe Escape (2022)

It really is a fantastic charity that does some amazing work, and with the current trend in increased misogyny, needed more than ever. Domestic violence must stop.

Judgy, judgy, not very judgy tbh.

So what was it like the 2nd time round? Interesting.

I was mainly tasked with judging the Skopenow team. I then also picked up git fetch –all missing_people team but took another team later called Three Men One Team (No Stress). I loved the names of the last two – high props indeed! Skopenow is a great product and was great to see them give something back to the community. I got ready in my black hoody with my rainbow mechanical keyboard – lets go!

As before, the judges had their own section of Discord and we were briefed an hour earlier than we started. I’m not sure if it was based on some of the stuff that happened at the last DEFCON search party, but things were tightening up for sure.

First things first, we were told that although we’re called judges we should see ourselves as coaches and we’re there to help teams provide valuable OSINT, if the help is needed.

We were also told to question points before awarding them. For example the process was much harsher around appeal flyers. Often you see whole groups with the missing person’s face on saying “have you seen them”. Tbh although a way to score points, the reasoning is that this information is already known by law enforcement, as are news findings, so we should reject both. They should be used by teams to pivot to new finding instead.

Another change was around speculative information for the last seen category would now be rejected. For teams to pick up the points for last seen info they must have enough evidence to prove without speculation that this is definitely when they were last seen.

Another change to consider was that a family tie was not necessarily a point score if they had no connection to the missing persons case. To be honest, this makes sense. If a missing person has many cousins (I have 16, for example), but they only talk to 3 of them, then there are only 3 valuable connections here that can help with the case. By providing points for family and friends that aren’t meaningful to the investigation we make the job of law enforcement harder, and also the job of the volunteers writing the reports harder too. Instead of providing better avenues to explore, we just increase the variables for little gain in terms of actually finding the person. Therefore, distant family, friend of family or friend of friend would not be accepted unless a real meaningful link to the missing person could be found.

The search continues

All subjects this time were missing middle aged men. Different races and most had gone missing relatively recently. At least one was found to be depressed, one suspected to be drowned. I think we forget sometimes that on top of all the hatred in the world we also are seeing a rather large problem with regards to suicide in middle aged men. It seems the world is cracking at the seams at times. All the missing people had been missing from 11 days to the longest missing at 132 days, so fairly recent.

Teams were respectful and great to work with. Some I gave some pointers to. For example, one team kept submitting information as 10pts category instead of 50pts or 100pts they could get so I suggested resubmission where possible to coach them towards getting the score they deserved.

There were some duplicate submissions towards the end, but not the frenzy we experienced last time. This is good. After all, we’re hear to find missing people. The points is not really what it’s about.

Nonetheless some great funds made to help Operation Safe Escape and a lot of valuable OSINT intel to help find the missing people! Great work Trace Labs!