Sentinel Foundation Founder & CEO Glenn Devitt Shares the Fight to Rescue Exploited Children

RCB President Chuck Redden with Glenn Devitt, Rotarians Josh Jones, Mitch Reid and the Sentinel team

This week the Rotary Club of Birmingham welcomed guest speaker Glenn Devitt, Sentinel Foundation Founder & CEO.

Devitt shared Sentinel’s work to end the exploitation of underage children around the world utilizing a team of highly skilled personnel, advanced technology, and law enforcement support. Their efforts target elusive child traffickers that use highly skilled methods to find and exploit their victims. Devitt discussed his background in military intelligence and how the attacks of September 11, 2001 inspired him to enlist. He shared that after years of covert operations, he sought to bring light and attention to the reality of child trafficking. Devitt described the challenges faced by his team during missions including the collapse of Afghanistan. He explained how their diversified backgrounds and skills complement one another to create an effective, specialized force. Devitt explained that rescuing children is rewarding, but the larger goal involves tackling the networks and systems that perpetuate exploitation.

“You can’t rescue your way out of this, you have to bring awareness to the cause,” Devitt said. “It takes time to do an intelligence operation, to map the network, to really make the impact where you take down the whole operation. That is the sustaining impact that we look for.”

Devitt also discussed the Black Box Project that he founded to uncover patterns in service member suicides and how lessons may be utilized to help prevent suicide in teens, first responders and other groups at risk.

About Glenn Devitt
Glenn Devitt is a veteran with 11 years Enlisted experience in the United States Army with a background in Infantry, Human Intelligence, Counterintelligence, Open-Source Intelligence, Digital Forensics and Machine Learning. During his military career he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan and was assigned to a Special Mission Unit.

In 2016, Glenn started his own company, Delitor Inc that would go on to train and advise classified agencies around the world on how target nefarious individuals through innovative ways to exploit data.

In 2017, after fighting child crimes digitally, Glenn knew that he wanted to take the fight to the ones harming children around the world and founded the Sentinel Foundation. The Sentinel Foundation is a 501c3, that is comprised of former Special Mission Unit Operators, Intelligence Agents and Special Skills Experts. To date the Sentinel Foundation has conducted 20+ operations and rescued numerous children around the world, to include the Afghanistan collapse and Ukraine war.

During the Pandemic of 2020, Glenn was forced to take a break from undercover operations and created the Black Box project at Stop Soldier Suicide. The Black Project is the process of conducting digital forensics on soldier's cell phones that have killed themselves. The project aims to identify patterns and trends in their last year of life, for the hope to one day prevent or predict online suicidal behaviors via Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.