Counterterrorism internet surveillance is being retargeted at sex workers
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Quit worrying about sex workers and porno. It's those well-organized religious conspiracies with their claim to moral authority that are the real problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boy-scouts-america-have...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Brooklyn...
[4] https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/22-haredi-sex-offenders-ar...
For comparison the John Jay report found about 11,000 sexual abuse allegations against catholic priests over a 50+ year period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_Report. There are estimated to be about 12,500 victims in the Boy Scouts in total: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12000-boy-scout-members-victims-se....
That is not to say religious organizations should be off the hook for failing to deal with the pedophiles in their ranks. But estimates suggest 1-5% of the male population is pedophiles. The evidence suggests that abuse is actually a cross-cutting problem. It arises whenever you put adults in proximity to children. Why focus only on the religious organizations?
There are 37,302 diocesan and religious-order priests in the United States vs 3,500,000 full and 500,000 part time teachers in the US + even more support staff.
You can look into the past demographics, but it looks like there is dramatically more victims per priest per year than per teacher per year.
The expectation is higher in the first case, but then chances that it's your particular kid would be 1/group size. So I guess it would be more accurate to have 5 kids in the first group to make it 1% vs .95%. That's still not any better is it?
Do you rather have your kid to have big N% chance of being abused, or small n%. At a micro level, you might get more control, but at the macro level, the results in aggregate are what matter.
It's obvious there's problems with either rate you'd choose for either task.
We have varying degrees of exposure / vulnerability within the populations. Neither one really directly leads to a "risk per unit of exposure of child" or "risk of a given person being an offender".
But it seems like you have some pretty motivated reasoning going on: it sure looks like religious organizations have not done well, and are relatively likely to be much worse per unit of youth exposure.
An important fact that gets overlooked is that religious organizations are one of the few aspects of civil society that put children in contact with adults. Really the only secular organizations that do so at a large scale are daycares, schools, and sports. It makes no sense to assert, as OP did, that churches are especially full of pedophiles, without offering a comparison against the other environments where children are exposed to adults.
Religious organizations have a) smaller number of personnel, b) fewer youth contacts in total, c) lower hours of contact per average youth than your comparison organizations. We can debate about the importance of each of these in the denominator, but they're all signifiers.
Worse, you're trying to compare numbers for schools that include student-on-student sexual violence (the vast majority of cases) to complaints against staff and clergy for churches.
The core complaint isn’t that the Church has more perpetrators, but rather that by protecting the perpetrators they increased the number of victims per perpetrator.
Example from the day before yesterday: "5 school employees arrested for alleged failure to report student's sexual assault"
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/5-school-employees-arrest...
Bonus one from a couple months ago: "Knoch Primary School principal charged with failing to report alleged sexual abuse"
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/knoch-primary-school...
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellingham/school-a...
If teachers are willing to cover up for random child molesters in the community what do you think they'd do for one of their own?
Hang them out to dry, as should be evident by your failure to find examples.
Teachers failing to report student on student violence isn’t actively protecting perpetrators the way the church was reported as doing. Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up. It’s a very different situation.
From a few months ago: Oversight failures allow sexually abusive teachers to quietly move from school to school
"It's called passing the trash," said Morgan Stewart, an attorney representing students who have accused teachers of sexual abuse at Redlands Unified District schools. "They'd give them recommendations, they'd give them approvals. You've got this culture that just allows it to happen again and again."
Failing to report reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse is a crime, yet federal officials and experts told CBS they believe school administrators often do not contact authorities for fear of damaging the reputation of a teacher or the school. And teachers told CBS they observed a culture that discouraged reporting suspicions of misconduct in their schools.
TLDR: This practice is repeated in schools across the United States, risking harm to millions of children, according to experts and federal officials. On average, one offender passes through three different school districts before being stopped, and can abuse as many as 73 children in their lifetime, according to a 2010 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual...
Nationwide fingerprint checks really should be mandatory here.
The abusers in the church were part of the power structure. That same power structure systematically covered up and protected the abusers. Same thing for the scouts.
This happened at my kid’s (not religious at all) school: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch...
It’s obviously easier to uncover this when dealing with large national or supra-national organizations like the Catholic Church or Boy Scouts than tens of thousands of individual school districts.
Focus should not be exclusively on religious organizations. But focus should be disproportionately on them because of their track record of using moral superiority to explain away and stop abusers.
I agree with this. Human trafficking is a nice way of saying slavery. Human traffickers are some of the worst criminals on earth and I'm very happy that the counterintelligence techniques we've developed are used against them.
> The attempt to merge computerized counterinsurgency techniques with right-wing evangelism has left some Skull Games participants uncomfortable. One experienced attendee of the January 2023 Skull Games was taken aback by an abundance of prayer circles and paucity of formal training.
However, this is cultish stuff. It seems to me that Tiegs' statement above is cover for what seems to be a religio-political organization with overarching goals. It co-opts the good intentions of decent human beings who oppose slavery and sexual abuse into a situation that seems pretty exploitative on its own. Despicable.
... which is why it's so valuable to some people to expand the definition of "human trafficking" beyond ACTUAL human trafficking.
Right at the moment, if you hear the phrase "human trafficking" in some random place, especially used by somebody who's asking for money, power, or support of whatever kind, there seems to be about a 95 percent chance it's being used to refer to something that is NOT human trafficking as understood by normal people.
In many ways it's a repeat with different packaging of the "all homosexuals are pedophiles" from a generation or two ago, sometimes from the same people and interest-groups.
Losing weed as a source of easy convictions is leading to new opportunities.
> Tiegs argued that “100 percent” of sex work is human trafficking
He's completely upfront about conflating all sex work with human trafficking. I genuinely don't understand how you could read this and not get that the point of the "trafficking" rhetoric is shifting the definition to encompass what's not generally considered human trafficking.
That's probably because actual child sex slavery is relatively hard to find.
Can you quote that part of the article? They make reference to looking for kids and browsing escort listings, but they're obviously looking for people on the younger side and even the article contains this bit:
> When asked about Skull Games’s position on arresting victims, Tiegs emphasized that “arresting is different from prosecuting” and argued, “Sometimes they do need to make the arrest, because of the health and welfare of that person. She needs to get clean, maybe she’s high. … Very rarely, in my opinion, is it right to charge and prosecute a girl.”
I don't see the word 'adult' at all in the article unless my ctrl+F isn't working, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that their "ACTION" is doxxing adults.
That's an admission that they don't know the target's age. Which we knew anyway; they can't know it until after they do the doxx.
Even if they go for the ones who both have pictures and look young, there are more 18-and-19-year-olds out there than 16-and-17-year-olds, so their "random" sample will be mostly adults. And of course nobody is going to post a picture of a CHILD-child, since that's obviously a huge red flag that will get them caught.
> "but, using some of these tools, you’re able to identify her mugshot."
Children don't tend to have mugshots that often. And, by the way, if they have one, that means the system has arrested them in the past and obviously failed to get anywhere.
> "Finding a target’s high school diploma or sonogram imagery nets 15 points,"
Children don't tend to have high school diplomas almost ever.
I have no idea what the sonogram thing is about.
> "while finding the same tattoo on multiple women would earn a whopping 300"
I will admit that that does sound pretty off, so I won't claim it as going after the "self-employed". However, it does count as going after adults, since it's hard for a minor to get a tattoo at all.
> "In a July Skull Games webinar, one participant noted that they had been able to use PimEyes to find a sex worker’s driver’s license posted to the web."
The longer you have your license, the more time there is for a picture of it to get posted.
In fact, all of the stuff they say they're using tends to accumulate over time. You are far more likely to find any of that stuff on an adult than on a teenaged minor, and you'll pretty much never find any of it on a child as the term is normally understood.
As for arrests, first, they've already been doxxed, by people most of them would really prefer not know who they are, before the question of arrest comes into it. Second, "the group has no information about how many have resulted in prosecutions or indictments of actual traffickers". So they're handing this stuff over to cops and at best just hoping they won't prosecute any of the people they consider to be victims. That's, um, irresponsibly optimistic.
That's what they start with, but a picture is a pretty good way to figure out if someone is likely to bee underage and they also do significant investigation before turning this over to the police.
> And of course nobody is going to post a picture of a CHILD-child, since that's obviously a huge red flag that will get them caught.
This idea that people never post obvious criminal activity online is kinda silly when we're discussing people getting outed by... posting obvious criminal activity online. You can say it shouldn't be criminal, but there are democratic means to change that and actual locations where prostitution is actually legal, like that county in Nevada.
Nobody in the article seems to dispute that they catch actual child sex slaves, though. The main complaint is the unsubstantiated idea that they're catching mostly adults, but no evidence of this is presented. Instead, you're reading a lot of things between a lot of lines to infer that and claiming these inferences are obvious when they're not.
> Children don't tend to have high school diplomas almost ever. > it's hard for a minor to get a tattoo at all.
Better, but hardly proof. And you can still be trafficked when not a child if you're being held against your will. It's not like adult sex slaves are faring any better or like they don't exist and deserve sympathy.
> The longer you have your license, the more time there is for a picture of it to get posted.
I got mine at 16, posting it is something you're more likely to do when young and dumb.
> So they're handing this stuff over to cops and at best just hoping they won't prosecute any of the people they consider to be victims. That's, um, irresponsibly optimistic.
The DAs have standards about this, they're not going to randomly prosecute someone forced into slavery and the cops are the best people to actually deal with this since it's their literal job in society.
Also I have to note that your solution here is to ignore people being forced into literal slavery because you disagree with a democratically created law and want it changed by fiat instead of trying to actually fix it.
I get that there's a sort of trolley problem, but one might think that maybe they could do something legal or change the law instead of demanding that people ignore child sex slaves being sold online because they might get caught breaking a law they, and you, disagree with.
I used to work with multiple ex-vice detectives. They had some seriously harrowing stories about the shit they routinely found on motel raids.
If you think actual child sex slavery is "relatively hard to find," come visit Georgia. It's only been made hard to find because of FOSTA-SESTA; such services used to be advertised in plain English on Backpage.
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/atlanta/news/pr...
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/31-arrested-in-georgia-as-p...
> https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/atlanta/news/pr...
48 of the 71 individuals identified (and having their names published online) are female adult sex workers. No claims are being made that any were victimized.
10 are crimes related to children, of those, 7 are "enticement", which may be LE setups. Certainly, no one being trafficked into motel rooms here.
We don't have details on the "11 juveniles recovered", but they are more like a 17y at risk of homelessness than what one would traditionally imagine to be "child sex slavery". It's also unclear if they are being helped by this recovery, or if you'll find their name appear on the arrest list for prostitution by next year's "human trafficking operation".
> https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/31-arrested-in-georgia-as-p...
What this article actually describes are people arrested for possession of CSAM. No claim is made that any victim was found during any motel raids. There is this:
> Seven of those arrested in Georgia traveled for the purpose of meeting and having sex with a minor.
But the phrasing makes it pretty reasonable to assume they were meetings setup by law enforcement.
Even if it WERE being advertised openly, there'd still be less of it around than plain old adult prostitution. And as you point out it's NOT being advertised openly. So it is in fact relatively hard to find.
Therefore these guys go for the low-hanging fruit, because as far as they're concerned all prostitution is human trafficking (one of them says exactly that in the article). In their propaganda, it's in their interest to talk as if they were going after children in bondage... except, of course, when they give a count of their cases. That number is going to include everybody.
It's also not clear what they think the solution is here, ignore a child being prostituted online because they might not be a sex slave to a cartel? Sure, advertising under certain emojis or whatever may not be "statistically significant" according to some report in terms of whether someone is trafficked, but if there's a child prostitute, maybe it's not a bad thing if someone helps the police go make sure she's not literally a child sex slave?