NetProfiler

This section explains domain-specific vocabulary pertaining to Homeland Security and investigative work as a whole. I included this section because this page uses a lot of jargon that people outside of these domains may not be exposed to.

Term list:

DoHS: Stands for Department of Homeland Security (a branch of the United States Government)

HSI: Stands for Homeland Security Investigations. This is a branch of the DoHS specifically dedicated to investigating and profiling criminal activity, much like ICE is tasked with handling customs enforcement and immigration law.

CSAM: Child Sexual Abuse Material informally referred to as “child pornography” refers to any explicit materials or media that depict individuals under the age of 18. Child sexual abuse material is the preferred term in federal statutes, as referring to CSAM as “pornography” implies consent of an “actor” in the production of these materials. The term CSAM makes it clear that children are victims, not participants in these egregious images and videos.

ROA: Stands for Report of Action. These are internal documents used to store information about suspicious activity obtained by analysts and field agents. They are a crucial tool for sharing organized breakdowns of suspected activity between different local HSI offices. ROAs are used by investigators and forensic analysts for all types of crimes, but the Fort Myers branch of HSI concentrates most of their investigative work on drug trafficking, human trafficking, escort services and child sexual abuse material.

NetProfiler is an app used to create, edit and curate ROAs for the
the Fort Myers branch of HSI. This project was also built as a companion app for NetSpider, a webspider program that automatically finds and logs websites with suspected illicit activity to an output file, built by a previous team of FGCU students. It offers native support for importing spreadsheets and text files as well output files from NetSpider.

1. Ease-of-Use for HSI employees

Our supervisor, Clint Thompson stressed the importance of making the app usable for HSI employees of varying levels of technical savviness.

2. Native Import for NetSpider logs

The seamless integration with NetSpider was a huge part of getting the project greenlit, as it would allow for the entire information gathering and report creation process to automated. Giving the department more time to identify and apprehend dangerous criminals.