Rescue Forensics (YC W15) Helps Law Enforcement Find Victims of Sex Trafficking
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This private company is building a mass surveillance database to track people. They're scraping and archiving what used to be considered anonymous postings. Their current goal is to go after sex trafficking, but they could easily expand into spying on people for any reason.
They're not the government, so I think they have a strong right to do this, but don't let cause of "the children" confuse the issue. This is a new kind of spying, unlike anything that has existed in the history of American society.
Just imagine how much crime we could stop if local police had full access email, phone, and social networking data. There's no question that we could save thousands of children per year. You would have to be a monster or a terrorist not to consent to having your data searched.
Edit: I don't mean that Russia could literally use this company's product. I meant the principle.
If someone said they had software that analyzed these same sites but provided no reason or impetus, a lot more eyebrows would be raised. When you say it's to protect children, there's an (expected) emotional response that makes this sort of thing easier to digest.
Personally I agree, but only on the basis that they appear to be only archiving publicly accessible information and the old mantra of "what you post online, stays online".
Just imagine how much crime we could stop if local police had full access email, phone, and social networking data.
Or if everyone's lives were already controlled to the extent that they're essentially living in jail already... that seems like the ultimate result of a gradual increase in pervasive surveillance: people will become so used to, unable to oppose, and scared at the possibility of even thoughtcrime that they'll have no choice but to complacently conform, not unlike Orwell's 1984.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to call this "a new kind of spying" all of the data they're using is publicly available. I don't think it's a realistic view for the future that we'll be able to put things we don't want people to know about on public forums and trust that no one's going to build the tools to piece it together. That sounds like a really unsustainable security through obscurity situation to me.
Actual spies devote substantial resources to analyzing publicly available information.[1] I'm not really sure how I feel about all of this as a moral or political issue, but I do think it's fair say that it's "a new kind of spying".
Put another way -- the FBI has long had the ability to follow you around as you drove around town on publicly accessible roads. But the ability to track millions of people on public roads via cell phone triangulation is unprecedented.
Just because something is possible and legal doesn't make it moral. The situation you describe as "unsustainable" is what many would call a reasonable expectation of privacy.
It's not anonymous when people put their phone number in the ad for commercial purposes.
If the police had that access, wouldn't the criminals avoid the insecure communication medium?
Images can be cross referenced against other ads to detect hidden relationships.
Evidence artifacts can be collected and introduced during criminal proceedings.
Rescue Forensics collects millions of records for anti-trafficking investigations and prosecution.
Search by phone number, text, or images, and filter by location, age, and date ranges.
Hidden phone numbers are unmasked so human traffickers can’t hide their victims online.
Intelligence from across the world can be searched in one central location.
Images can be cross-referenced against the rest of the web to find profiles and social media accounts.
Our intuitive interface allows you to target the intelligence you need on all your devices.
Yeah. So, you're straight-up building a massive blackmail ledger, without a stated business model other than "We're helping the police save the children!".
One of my favorites, also from your front page:
STOP SENDING SUBPOENAS
Our database contains millions of records of classified advertisements representing up to two years of historical data. Stop waiting days or weeks to get a subpoena response from a hosting site that may only offer a few months of records. Find all the targeted intelligence you need right now.
Yeah, man, that whole due-process thing is a pain in the ass, isn't it? Better to do the work for the .gov instead of making them follow their own laws.
~
I don't think it is a surprise to anyone who's been watching the trends lately with regards to law enforcement in the US and the trends with data mining that you are not receiving an unconditional pat on the back.
Frankly, companies like yours are part of the problem--even if you do offer help in the small picture.
EDIT:
Bahahahahahaha, I love this one:
The user-generated information archived by Rescue Forensics is completely unmodified and retrieval of this information is an automated process. We only redact copyrighted material, such as company logos or other intellectual property.
Yes, so, you've got protection for companies, but nothing against, say, a deliberate smear campaign. Your platform looks like it doesn't do anything to prevent, say, a bunch of jerks deliberately scattering fake evidence, and you'll hoover it up all the same, I'm betting?
>Yes, so, you've got protection for companies
No, this protection is in the other direction - of their own lower back _from_ the companies. They don't care about smaller fish which can't bite.
Anyway, all this bro-hah-hah piled upon them is pointless. They are just one of many Palantir wannabes. There is no way they or others can be stopped. You can't stop the wave. A new kind of society is upon us where everybody would be able to know everything about everybody and thus information assymmetry power (be it of corporations, governments or whomever) will be no more.
Can a police officer just send a subpoena to them and get all the information for free?
No, it's what use you put those records to that is the definition.
I can collect the license plate numbers of every car that goes down my street in the morning. It's when I use that to figure out which house to break into that I cross the line.
The problem is that there is no distinguishing those cases until something bad happens, and by then it's too late.
Readily able to read and write due diligence are literate, educated, emotionally-intelligent populations who can be a part of (the granular war to determine) distinguishing records.
Your company is going to have problems with EU privacy laws.
On their data collection they will discover paedos --which is great, but they will also be able to discover philanderers, cads, tax cheats, drug users, etc. If these things fall under law enforcement's orbit, that's one thing, the bad thing is the possibility of third parties getting this data and using it to blackmail people.
Maybe they already have that angle covered, in which case, nevermind.
So the flaw in the algebra is that the government can buy services for things it cannot legally do itself. Which means, doing or buying should be considered equivalent, to regular citizens it does. Corporations and governments have special rights where misdeeds are waved off with warnings or a change in position.
The most common reason I've seen for my friends to be trapped in agencies or abusive pimps has been immigration status, by far. And nobody is doing them any favours by taking them in. LE hates the paperwork so much that a decent way to get out of a pickup is to feign being an illegal alien.
Underage workers are similarly avoided. If you're 16-17 with no fixed address, it's going to be a nightmare of social services for everyone involved before you're spat back out onto the street. (I was arrested twice when underage. Both times they let me go when they saw I was 17 and a ward of the state.)
I don't doubt that there's revenue here though, because LE just loves to do stings. Mostly they're single moms or otherwise trapped by circumstance and trying to make ends meet with a side gig. They're the ones who go quietly, who plead out, who pump arrest records, etc.
Sex trafficking is an immigration/social services problem far more than it is a law enforcement concern. Giving LE more tools to track us is going to make things worse.
I supported myself with sex work when I was a self-sufficient and independent from 15-19. Now I'm a software developer in my late 20's, but that's still my community. I realy wonder if these founders ever actually asked any of us what we thought about this idea before charging ahead?
Note: Throwaway acct. (And I mean throwaway. I'm in an incognito window I'm about to close, with a /dev/random -generated password, and won't be watching for replies. Please leave me alone.)
Federal grants are increasingly common, local and state multi-disicplinary task forces are being established more and more frequently, and they need solutions for dealing with these kind of problems.
Sex trafficking is rarely an immigration problem. According to the DOJ, 83% of their cases deal with victims of sex trafficking who are U.S. citizens and trafficked by U.S. citizens. The remaining 17% are foreign nationals. This is a homegrown problem, generally.
I'm glad to see this at least get mentioned; there are people in bad situations who need help, but too often well-meaning people are unfortunately reluctant to listen to the people they think they're trying to help.
I'm perfectly willing (in my ignorance) to believe that sex trafficking is a problem worth tackling (in scale, in urgency, etc). But I also (already) believe that anti-sex-work laws act to oppress and victimize already-marginalized women, with dubious benefit (without taking a side on whether this effect is deliberate).
For example, in my jurisdiction (IANAL), although I understand that prostitution itself is not illegal as such, the following things are illegal:
* posting/negotiating prices openly
* operating a place of business for prostitution (a "bawdy house")
* living "off the avails"
It seems sort of obvious that the right direction is to have better laws, and then enforce them. I'm not holding my breath.
And, to return to TFA, in the mean time, what stops LEAs from using Rescue Forensics to pad their docket by harassing already-oppressed sex workers who are not victims of trafficking, merely victims of being poor and desperate.
PS: I salute and hugely respect people tackling social justice problems, and I want to emphasize that I'm not condemning Rescue Forensics, I'm expressing a concern.
I can say with confidence that law enforcement, particularly human trafficking investigators, are also sensitive to these distinctions, generally. This used to not be the case, but a lot is changing and very quickly.
An example: An investigator I spoke to the other day said they used to be called a "VICE" unit, but they changed their name to the "counter-exploitation unit". This is similar to many agencies across the US and Canada.
We reserve the right to revoke a user's license if they are using our platform to harass persons, but so far this has not been a problem. In fact, just the opposite.
Underage sex work and human trafficking was already illegal in Canada, but they recently shut a lot legitimate sex workers down.
How are you actually auditing LE to make sure they're only targeting trafficking/minors or other real offenses?
Edit: To be clear, how do we know this isn't a sham like drug laws? No drug user I've ever known, even the ones that OD'd and died, ever benefitted at all from drug laws. Quite the opposite in fact. So forgive us for being skeptical about another morality law enforcement system that might have a similar damage ratio.
Even the first question that comes to me: Is the sex market so bad that buyers are interested in coerced workers? Sure, some people might be into underaged (regardless of the cutoff), and I suppose some people might be into abusive stuff they couldn't buy from willing participants. But does that make up the majority even? Or is it really just a lot of bored, or ugly, or busy, or curious, etc. etc. buyers?
More pointedly, where are your morals? Are you pushing for better laws, despite that they might hurt business?
Come on now, they founded a for-profit startup and are raising money from the VCs. The conflict of interest is obnoxiously obvious.
Then they charge the sex worker with conspiracy to traffick sex slaves.
There are retweets of sex work abolitionist groups, @SharedHope and @RestoreCorps. There are also tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/RescueForensics/status/25676583846244352... "We are building forensics to fight human trafficking online - abolitionists must bring the fight to the internet!"
It looks like Rescue Forensics has aligned itself with sex work abolitionist groups that pose as anti-trafficking groups. And who have huge incentives to inflate the problem by many orders of maginitude, to create government funding for their groups and for this kind of work.
An aisde: as of today, @RescueForensics has 6,231 followers but only 74 tweets. The first 6,000 or so of these followers look like they were bought. Some might say that gives some indication of the ethics of this company.
There are two other projects that are doing similar work in scraping sex work ads in the US. The first is MEMEX - a DARPA project. http://www.wsj.com/articles/sleuthing-search-engine-even-bet...
The second is ASPASIA project, an academic project out of University of Washington. ASPASIA is very sex worker friendly, and understands the difference between human trafficking and consensual adult sex for money. https://github.com/uwescience/incubator/wiki/aspasia-project https://twitter.com/aspasia_project
If you look at most human trafficking law enforcement efforts, the vast majority is arrests of adult men and women who are consensually buying and selling sex. This is incorrectly labeled "sex trafficking" by law enforcement and the media. But the federal definition of sex trafficking is coercion, or of someone under 18.
It is unconscionable for law enforcement and abolitionists to use stings to go after the large, easy targets of consenting adults to pump up the numbers and money, while the horror of real human trafficking takes real investigative effort, time, and money, but doesn't have large numbers to as easily justify this effort.
The real solution is to decriminalize consensual adult sex work (like in New Zealand and parts of Australia), allowing everyone to focus on the true horrors of human trafficking. But that goes against the goals of the religious-based abolitionist groups, which have hijacked the human trafficking discussion and funding to push their anti-sex agenda.
For more information, see my blog https://www.escortingadvice.org, or follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/EscortingAdvice.
How would such a company be treated if it was looking for drug buyers and sellers? Especially if such a company didn't encourage legalization but appeared to stand with Christian groups? What steps are they taking to ensure innocent people are not being prosecuted with their tools? Going by current laws is no moral compass.
Finally, if they or the anti trafficking groups want to be taken seriously, provide real stats. This is from their Twitter account:
"39,000 escort ads were posted on the #Louisiana Backpage since July. How many are sex trafficking victims?"
Well, I don't know, why don't you tell us? They've got big data and LE, but they post leading questions like that with apparently no followup.
It's like saying X number of people OD on heroin. For any X we should figure out A: if current legislation is helping or hurting that number, B: is infringing on the rights and potentially destroying people's lives worth the cost? I'm sure it feels great to save 100 people from OD'ing. Does that mean it's OK to imprison millions?
I know this probably comes off making me look terrible. And I don't know anything except this article and reading the company's Twitter account. But it feels slightly off, as if I'm being convinced of a problem without seeing all the numbers. Where're the calls for legalization and regulation? Maybe I'm just too cynical.
And isn't the illegality in the states (like the "seizure" of RedBook) just causing all sex work to go more underground?
Are sex buyers just gonna say "darn, I googled but didn't find anyone, oh well"? Especially the ones that are looking to find underaged workers?
Are you guys a nonprofit or a company? I am not a big angel investor (I have made one investment so far), but this sounds like something I would like to invest in / donate to.
My email is aj at ridelabs dot com if you're interested.
The content and images posted could also be copyrighted or such that they are only for viewing in a browser and any other purpose would be a copyright violation or at a minimum a violation of the terms and conditions of using the site.
Companies don't like their content being made available elsewhere, and would probably fight vigorously.
How much bandwidth would polling and copying the site take? Wouldn't the companies notice it? Wouldn't they stop it?
Wouldn't most of these sites would want to work with the police to ensure that there were no underage people offering sex for money or anybody of any age being forced to work? Wouldn't most of these sites have an alert link for each posting? People can probably ignore consensual adults making an illegal business transaction, but probably not underage or forced prostitution.
If the software can recognize under age workers or people being forced to work, wouldn't the sites welcome the software alerting them of such listing? Would they be willing to pay for it?
Pretty weaselly.
Look around, find something that interests or matters to you, and consciously move in that direction. Start now.