Tech Startup Is Helping the Cops Track Sex Workers Online
April 17, 2015 by Melissa Gira Grant highlights
"Big data" and "sex trafficking." That it took so long for someone to combine these buzz terms into one money-making venture is just one of several mysteries surrounding Rescue Forensics, a new startup.
The "big" in the Memphis-based company? Rescue Forensics claims it "archives massive quantities of data from classified advertisement sites specializing in commercial sex ads." It gathers a lot of text, and even more nude and semi-nude photos. Then it turns all that over to the cops.
What Rescue Forensics appears to be selling is just one more tool to help cops track people engaged in sex work through their online activities.
Rescue Forensics purports to have brought on more than 100 law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
There's a good chance that if you've placed an ad online in the last two years for escorting, massage, BDSM, stripping, private modeling, nude housekeeping, Rescue Forensics has a copy. And because Rescue Forensics has a copy, so do their users in law enforcement.
The tools the company says they provide to police sound pretty powerful: Apparently, through image matching, they can connect photos from deleted classified ads they've archived with existing social media profiles. The only search tool Dalton would tell me about in real detail was something they've built to clean up some of the data, like phone numbers, which advertisers are usually prohibited from typing out in an ad (and so might have obscured with extra characters or spaces). Rescue Forensics' users in law enforcement can more easily search for text that advertisers took steps to conceal.
But for Dalton (co-founder), the fight against trafficking isn't just about finding the people Rescue Forensics believes are "exploited": It's about abolition.
Before he co-founded Rescue Forensics, Dalton was a policy advisor to Shared Hope International, a faith-based anti-prostitution organization involved in "rescuing and restoring" people it describes as trafficked. The group claims that demand for commercial sex drives demand for trafficking and argues that websites like Backpage are facilitators of trafficking. They are currently lobbying Congress to redefine men who buy sex as "traffickers." They also organize a men's group called the Defenders, who pledge not to consume porn or any other form of commercial sex.
In their campaign "Demand Justice," Shared Hope makes the claim that "sex trafficking will end only when men stop buying sex." Last August, Dalton authored the campaign's launch announcement, inviting Shared Hope's supporters to become "an ally in the effort to eradicate the market force that fuels sex trafficking and victimizes the vulnerable."
Of sex work generally, Dalton told me, "I know there are people who choose to do that, but I'm not talking about those people... but there's a subset of those ads for people who do not choose that lifestyle."
To date, Dalton told me his company has collected "18 million records" from over 800 cities—a great number of them ads presumably posted by people who are not trafficking victims.
Scraping websites primarily used by sex workers can have even more serious consequences for the people who advertise there. "The ability to advertise online provides a level of safety for many," D'Adamo told me, "but does come with the very real fear of exposure and leaving behind a footprint." Despite Rescue Forensics claim to focus on those who are "exploited," their product runs on sex workers' ads. "Compiling all of this information and making it easily searchable will only exacerbate these fears," D'Adamo added.
Though he insisted to me multiple times that he does believe there's a difference between sex work and trafficking, Dalton still stands to profit from a product that can't make that distinction, placed in the hands of law enforcement officers who also routinely fail to make it. Police use every weapon at their disposal to harass and arrest sex workers, and Rescue Forensics can't guarantee it won't end up being one more.
If the so-called abolitionist movement is where Dalton's coming from—a movement that believes demand for the sex trade is responsible for trafficking, and therefore seeks to abolish the sex trade—you start to get a sense of why he might not be "clear."
Dave notes this could really help Arizona LE go after the new escort license law where your license has to be on your ad. Scottsdale seems to be enforcing the most so far. I have yet to see an ad that complies with the new law. I do not know nor have heard of any escort that has the required license which has to be carried on the sex worker, logging requirements of all activities (no sex) and log of all the clients with positive ID.
Or, of course if bad words like GFE or worse are used, its an automatic easy solicitation arrest without having to even set up a appointment, just get the records of who placed the ad advertising GFE or any sex act abbreviations or slang.
https://www.vice.com/read/this-tech-...ers-online-417
Tech Startup Is Helping the Cops Track Sex Workers Online
