Saving kids, fighting crime, making their values pay — minus red tape
A group of child-exploitation investigators have turned their passion into a sought-after company, reports David Fisher
For the people behind Pathfinder Labs, there came a point when they wanted to save the world on their terms.
For decades, Colm Gannon, Peter Pilley and others in the company worked directly for taxpayers fighting some of the world’s greatest challenges.
Company staff have experience in cases of national security, industrial espionage and digital forensics.
But its real expertise is online child abuse investigations — not an obvious starting point for a move to the private sector.
The range of skills in-house might make plenty of money in other areas, but Pathfinder Labs’ investigative, legal and technical talents can disrupt online sexual exploitation of children on an international scale.
And in the private sector, they’ve found a freedom that wasn’t to be found working in government agencies. “Dealing with government and governments, there’s a lot of red tape and procedural stuff that needs to be done,” says Gannon, founder of Pathfinder Labs. “A couple of us thought we would love to cut through the red tape.”
And so they did, taking knowledge developed through enforcement, investigation and prosecution and investing it in a private company able to sell their skills to the world.
Not only that, but that experience and skills are transferable to fields beyond online child exploitation, including many more profitable areas.
“We’re not in it for the money,” Gannon says. “We operate as a company but we try to do things as a zero-profit. We [earn enough to] keep the lights on and deliver a capability that makes things safer online.”
And there’s no shortage of demand. “When you look at the problem of child exploitation, it is a growing problem.”
Shifting to the private sector allowed those on the team to stay in a field they find rewarding without a framework that felt increasingly constrictive.
Now, they provide training, build software or design investigative systems here and overseas “without having to seek permission to travel overseas or to develop tools”.
It’s the type of move that Luminous Consulting employment coach Lucy Sanderson-gammon describes as “values-driven career decisions”, with the benefit of offering a greater connection with core values and “a more meaningful life”.
It’s a bold leap, she says, because a search for greater meaning can risk accumulated salary and status, which “flies in the face of accepted norms of what career success looks like”.
“Developmentally, there does come a point in people’s lives where they are looking for more meaning in their work. They want to feel they are making a contribution.”
New Zealand has three government departments with units focused on combating online child sexual exploitation: Police, Customs and the Department of Internal Affairs, where Gannon and Pilley worked.
Gannon spent 20 years in law enforcement before the shift to private-sector work specialising in cases involving online child exploitation.
The roll call of cases on which Gannon, Pilley and others working for the company have been involved features significant national and international investigations.
Those cases include the successful prosecution of Aaron Joseph Hutton, who through his online identity “Kiwipedo” tried to buy a child online to sexually abuse. While court suppression orders protect details and tradecraft, Gannon says a key factor in uncovering Hutton’s identity was the development of software and techniques that stripped away his online anonymity.
Another high-profile case was Operation Blackwrist, which drew in Pathfinder Labs’ criminal law expert barrister Sam Ashwell, then working as a prosecutor in Australia.
Gannon and Pilley, who also worked on it in New Zealand, received a commendation from the Australian Federal Police for their work, which led to the rescue of dozens of children and was still securing prosecutions across the world three years on.
Also while at DIA, Pilley and one other Pathfinder Labs team member worked in Britain on the case of Matthew Falder, who used the dark web to coerce and manipulate people into carrying out sexual violence against children. He was jailed for decades and described by
Britain’s National Crime Agency as “one of the most prolific and depraved offenders . . . ever encountered”.
The scale and variety of cases have led to the Pathfinder Labs team developing a broad range of specific skills. They contract to local and offshore investigative agencies providing training, consulting on how to conduct investigations and building bespoke software to help investigate or manage cases.
Detailing exactly what Pathfinder Labs does, and with who, is complicated. Gannon says it has a number of nondisclosure agreements with agencies in a range of countries.
He says those working in the field know success lies in international collaboration and there is funding available to assist developing nations to build an investigative and social response.
In those cases, Pathfinder Labs finds work in designing an agency’s response, then seeking funding from international agencies to build that response. It includes developing open-source software — such as a case-management tool being developed for a client in India — that can then be shared with other agencies and countries.
The company has also worked on cases helping remove sexual content placed online without a person’s consent.
A reflection of Pathfinder Labs’ role was its recent invitation to speak at the Interpol Specialist Group conference in Lyon, France, to government, nongovernment organisations and privatesector groups about combating online child sexual abuse.
Pathfinder Labs was asked to showcase its technology in a closed session to protect techniques from becoming known to offenders.
Chief executive Bree Atkinson, who attended with Ashwell and Pilley, says “our team members have a history of getting incredible results from often dire investigative situations”.
Sanderson-gammon of Luminous Consulting said views on what work meant were changing rapidly, more so since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Navigating that changing world of work and making more informed work choices requires people to really think about what is important to them. It essentially requires people to redefine what career success looks like for them and, inevitably, that will include doing work that is meaningful and that enables them to live the kind of life they want to be living.
“What constitutes meaningful work is different for everyone, and it is a person’s core values that really holds the key to that.”
"We operate as a company but we try to do things as a zeroprofit. We [earn enough to] keep the lights on and deliver a capability that makes things safer online." Colm Gannon, founder