Summer has arrived in northern Virginia, and in May CINA joined George Mason University in congratulating our 2024 graduates.
Graduation marked the end of a busy spring semester for CINA, capped off by our first annual Cyber-Enabled Human Crime (CEHC) Workshop, April 29-30. CINA partnered with The Knoble, a non-profit based in Chattanooga, TN, that brings together the financial services sector, government, and civil society to counter human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, elder financial abuse, and other forms of exploitation. Many thanks to the Knoble’s Executive Director David Worland, Founder and Board Chair Ian Mitchell, and Director of Program Delivery Emma Campbell for all their work to make this joint event a success.
Members of CINA’s academic consortium, including keynote speaker Dr. Cassandra Cross of Queensland University of Technology, provided insights from their research and facilitated working sessions between industry and law enforcement subject matter experts. CINA’s partners in DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Cross Border Financial Crime Center (CBFCC) lent invaluable support for the event, including welcoming remarks from HSI Executive Associate Director Katrina Berger, expert facilitation by CBFCC Acting Deputy Assistant Director Steven Schrank, and robust participation from HSI, DHS, and other relevant agencies.
The workshop resulted in three new lines of effort for the Knoble and CINA this year: (1) a national awareness campaign project to assemble and leverage best practices in countering human crime; (2) a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) amendment template project to make data provided by financial institution more useful for law enforcement; and (3) and a cross-industry tabletop exercise on “sextortion” which will map the act in order to identify opportunities for prevention, disruption, and law enforcement.
This fall, look out for more joint events between CINA and the Knoble to engage industry and law enforcement, including a special guest in CINA’s Distinguished Speaker Series and a targeted Request for Proposals (RFP) for researchers to support the lines of effort developed at this year’s workshop. We’ve already started planning to make the CEHC Workshop an annual event.
In other news, I would like to thank established and new members of CINA’s consortium for your robust response to CINA’s Winter 2024 RFP, which resulted in many more worthy proposals than we were ultimately able to propose to our DHS partners for funding. To those who were successful this year, we look forward to working with you through the DHS approval process; to those who were not, we encourage you to apply again either for our special RFP this fall or our annual RFP this winter (typically in December or January). Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter for notifications about CINA RFPs and other news and events.
With that, I’ll wish a relaxing and productive summer to CINA’s partners at George Mason University and our national consortium, at DHS and the Homeland Security Enterprise, and our new friends in civil society and industry. See you in the fall!