Base – Human Trafficking

“Human trafficking is a growing global problem. According to the International Labor Office in Geneva The 2017 human trafficking estimate was 40 million people worldwide, including 25 million victims of forced labor and 15 million victims of forced marriage. One in four of these victims is under the age of eighteen.

While the United States has a long history of sustained efforts to investigate and prosecute human trafficking cases, there is still a long way to go for both victims trafficked within the United States and victims who come from outside the United States be brought to the country.

Victims of human trafficking are often not free to ask for help. Their ability to contact others is controlled and monitored by their abusers. Victims may have access to cell phones or social media, but are not allowed to speak freely online or communicate with lifelines. Some victims may not even know they are a victim, let alone that help is available. Their abusers can brainwash them, punish them, threaten them and, if the victim manages to escape, get them to come back and blackmail them into…”

I came across a web site looking for volunteers to help fight human trafficking. Been in business since 2004 . They have a tool named Torch, training, collect and analyze data, and provide law enforcement documentation mapping to human trafficking. Formalizing data from a case into something that Law Enforcement can legally act upon.

Another web site has posted stories from retired Special Operations folks going out on their own, locating active tracking, and reporting back to local authorities. Impressive, but I think that lack of formalization – trail of evidence may have hampered the effort.

Another organization, All Things Possible, an Individual goes out to some very hostile places and does what he can do to break the cycle.

The Department of Homeland Security has a web page devoted to human trafficking.

“Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Every year, millions of men, women, and children are trafficked worldwide – including right here in the United States. It can happen in any community and victims can be any age, race, gender, or nationality. Traffickers might use the following methods to lure victims into trafficking situations:

• Violence
• Manipulation
• False promises of well-paying jobs
• Romantic relationships 

Language barriers, fear of their traffickers, and/or fear of law enforcement frequently keep victims from seeking help, making human trafficking a hidden crime.

Traffickers look for people who are easy targets for a variety of reasons, including:

• Psychological or emotional vulnerability
• Economic hardship
• Lack of a social safety net
• Natural disasters
• Political instability”

If you want to play offense, the book “Open Source Intelligence Techniques” by Michael Bazzell is excellent. Extremely well written, example after example of what you need to do to find out anything about anyone. Price on Amazon is about $41.00(US). Read it, practice the techniques, and you are off to an excellent start as a collector of “FREE” information – information that will finally define an individual and is open source.

If offense is not comfortable for you, and you feel more comfortable with defense:

There is the book “Extreme Privacy: What It Takes To Disappear“. Read it, apply the techniques, and you are on your way to anonymity. Book is also written by Michael Bazzell. Another $41.00 and a few weeks of learning, and you start to get a feel for how relatively easy it is for folks to slide under the radar.

Time to revisit the introduction line:

“Human trafficking is a growing global problem. According to the International Labor Office in Geneva The 2017 human trafficking estimate was 40 million people worldwide, including 25 million victims of forced labor and 15 million victims of forced marriage. One in four of these victims is under the age of eighteen.”

The number back in 2017, was over 40,000,000 human beings being trafficked for the profit of individuals and nation states. With so many folks knowing so much about the human trafficking problem, it is difficult to understand how the number of individuals being trafficked has gone up and not down. Not really.

1. There is a common theme in much of my reading. Whether it is a drug cartel or a human trafficker, they understand human behavior, have taken the time to cultivate victims, have learned from what folks do on the offense to minimize human trafficking success, and apply OSINT tools to protect their business.
2. On the offense, those that seek to identify, track, and document activities of drug cartels and human traffickers, are not effective. If anyone wrote about 40,000,000 lost or injured in a global conflict, there would be outrage. Agencies such as the CIA and NSA are fully capable of tracking drug cartels and human traffickers. However, there is often the “big picture, you simply don’t get the big picture”.
3. The tools that are used in the open are too manual. Advances in machine learning, the cloud, while not replacing the analysts, are not being leveraged to assist the analysts. All of the cloud vendors have moved forward leveraging automation, machine learning, image, text, and audio processing in the fight against cyber-crime. Azure has cognitive services, search, that supports multi-sensor fusion.
4. Too many other things in the world going on to make an honest effort at addressing drug cartels and human trafficking. There is too much profit.
5. I applaud the OSINT community, but with over 40,000,000 victims, there needs to be a change in the business model.