When Tom Hampson talks about the fight against child exploitation, he speaks with experience. For decades, he was on the front line of uncovering predators and the systems that protect them. He led probes for a stateside investigative agency into child pornography and prostitution. He has tracked abusive priests in Illinois after setting up his own investigations business and was instrumental in the drafting of initial legislation in Illinois to minimise the trauma experienced by children during sexual exploitation inquiries.
Today, with the help of i2 Analyst’s Notebook, Hampson is compiling a dossier that captures years of painstaking investigations into the global network around Jeffrey Epstein.
Hampson is founder of the Truth Alliance Foundation, a small, donor‑funded organisation focused on identifying child predators and helping institutions protect children more effectively. His conclusion after years of work is that law enforcement on its own will never be able to keep up.
He points to the scale of the problem. In the United States, he notes, “at least 10 per cent of students graduating high school have been victims of educator sexual abuse at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade.” In a notorious online case, an underground site called boylover.net had around 70,000 members trading child abuse material and information about victims. Only 184 of those members were ever prosecuted.
“That’s a losing proposition,” says Hampson. “You can’t catch them fast enough, and when you do, you don’t keep them locked up long enough. The problem is so vast that it’s going to require a lot more people to be involved in it. So, that’s what I was trying to do, to come up for a solution for that.”
Hampson’s investigative methods were formed long before modern software existed. As a young intelligence analyst working with the US Air Force and NSA (National Security Agency) in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he was trained in link analysis using “paper, pencil and patience”.
The simple core principle underpinning investigations was that “you are known by the company you keep”. Analysts would identify an entity, a person, company, organisation, then painstakingly map every connection outward, redrawing charts repeatedly as new information came in. Over time, networks began to emerge; who spoke to whom, who moved money where and who sat at the centre.
It was powerful, but painfully slow.
When Hampson first encountered i2 Analyst’s Notebook in the mid‑1990s while running his own investigative agency, he immediately recognised it as a way to automate what he had been doing since he was 19.
“It automated what I’d been doing manually,” he recalls. “As the information grew, it gave me a way to see the network clearly instead of losing it in stacks of paper.”
The turning point came in 1997, when the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contacted him with an urgent request: document the relationship between the Chinese government and money flowing into US political campaigns, particularly those connected with President Bill Clinton. He was given 10 days.
Without the right tools, that timeline would have been impossible. With Analyst’s Notebook, Hampson was able to ingest and structure hundreds of entities, including shell companies, donors, intermediaries and state‑linked firms, and map the flows between them. The final i2 chart showed, in a single visual, how money originating in the People’s Republic of China ended up in US campaign coffers.
“It documented it,” he says. “Nobody could say, ‘This is just somebody’s opinion.’ It was right there, on the i2 chart.”
The graphic was used as evidence before the Senate and published in newspapers around the world. It was a vivid demonstration of how visual link analysis could turn scattered facts into something undeniable.
Today, Hampson is applying the same methodology and software to one of the most controversial subjects of our time: the Epstein network.
The late, disgraced financier, he argues, was not just a sex offender but an “information mercenary” who traded access and secrets on behalf of clients in business and government. That activity, Hampson believes, involved or touched “virtually every major government in the world,” many of which, he says, knew exactly what was happening and did nothing.
Hampson views Epstein as a particularly revealing example of predatory behaviour operating across multiple dimensions. Epstein, he says, was not a paedophile in the clinical sense, but an opportunist. “Paedophiles are never just paedophiles,” Hampson explains. “They’re whole people involved in many different things.” Epstein understood this, and leveraged those overlapping identities - financial, political, social - to manipulate and exploit both victims and powerful adults alike.
Hampson works almost entirely from open‑source information, such as court documents, media reports, public filings, corporate records, leaked material and historical archives. Over the years, he has accumulated around four million documents on his own systems. On their own, they are just fragments, but with i2, they become a picture, he says.
His goal is to document the entire Epstein network: the individuals, the corporations, the financial channels, the modelling agencies that sourced girls, the banks that processed transactions, the governments and services that looked the other way.
“What I want to do is be able to document, prove the case that I make, and manage the information in a way that I can identify evidentiary weaknesses and absolutely document all the involvement of these different organisations,” he explains. This is where i2 Analyst’s Notebook becomes indispensable, says Hampson.
Hampson is careful to say that Analyst’s Notebook has not changed how he thinks; rather, it has changed what’s possible at scale.
“I learned this way of thinking as a teenager in intelligence,” he says. “What i2 does now is incredibly increase the speed with which I can put information into an organised system that I can pull out and explain to anybody at a moment’s notice and show them what I’m talking about.”
With i2, says Hampson, he can:
Crucially, the software allows him to surface “indicators that tell a huge story”. Visualised can be a sudden, wholesale change in a company’s board of directors, a run of suspicious financial transactions, or a pattern of shared intermediaries between politically exposed persons and a known trafficker. On their own, each detail is interesting, but on an i2 chart, they become part of a larger narrative.
Hampson is candid about why visualisation matters: human beings simply can’t hold very complex networks in their heads.
“If I talk about four or five nodes of corruption, anyone can keep that in mind,” he says. “But once you start talking about these massive tentacles of corruption, unless you show a visual, people aren’t going to be able to take that in. It has no meaning. If you can look at it on paper and see some vast spider web of corruption, people are going to say, ‘Maybe we need to do something about this.’”
His plan is to use the visual depictions, meticulously built from open sources and organised in i2 Analyst’s Notebook, to brief legislators and congressional staff, and to support his public writing with charts that make his claims harder to dismiss.
“Originally, I’ll be showing it to people in the legislature and in Congress,” he says. “This is what you’re ignoring.”
Hampson is under no illusions about the power imbalance he faces. He believes that governments and major agencies already have analytical tools that “would blow [his] mind,” and that in some cases they chose not to act on what they knew.
For him, that’s precisely why it matters that tools like i2 Analyst’s Notebook are not limited to government and law enforcement alone but are also accessible to established NGOs and investigative organisations operating in the public interest. He sees these organisations as critical actors in uncovering abuse networks and in holding institutions and governments accountable for how exploitation is enabled, concealed, or monetised. By equipping them with serious analytical platforms, they can collaborate with journalists, advocates, and affected communities to expose exploitation and the institutional failures that allow it to persist.
“Right now, cases like Epstein are being viewed as perverts going after little kids,” he says. “They don’t see the bigger context. When you see that it’s the corruption that drives the business, then you have to go after the corruption.”
In that effort, i2 is not simply a visual aid. It is the scaffolding on which Hampson is building an argument: that if you follow the links far enough, and map them clearly enough, it becomes impossible to say we didn’t know.
i2 is committed to empowering investigative teams without exclusivity. If you work with an organisation operating in the public interest and think i2 could add value to your investigations, get in touch today.
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