Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet

A new set of search tools called Memex, developed by DARPA, peers into the deep Web to reveal illegal activity

Hidden in Plain Sight: Investigators are using DARPA's Memex technology pull information from the so-called "deep Web" that can be used to find and prosecute human traffickers. Courtesy of PhotoDisc/ Getty Image.

In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive. The accident was an act of both desperation and hopethe woman had climbed out of the sixth-floor window to escape a group of men who had been sexually abusing her and holding her captive for two days. Four months ago the New York County District Attorneys Office sent Benjamin Gaston, one of the men responsible for the womans ordeal, to prison for 50-years-to-life. A key weapon in the prosecutors arsenal, according to the NYDAs Office: an experimental set of Internet search tools the U.S. Department of Defense is developing to help catch and lock up human traffickers. Although the Defense Department and the prosecutors office had not publicly acknowledged using the new tools, they confirmed to Scientific American that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys (DARPA) Memex program provided advanced Internet search capabilities that helped secure the conviction. DARPA is creating Memex to scour the Internet in search of information about human trafficking, in particular advertisements used to lure victims into servitude and to promote their sexual exploitation. Much of this information is publically available, but it exists in the 90 percent of the so-called deep Web that Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines do not index. That leaves untouched a multitude of information that may not be valuable to the average Web surfer but could provide crucial information to investigators. Google would not confirm that it indexes no more than 10 percent of the Internet, a statistic that has been widely reported, but a spokesperson pointed out that the companys focus is on whether its search results are relevant and useful in answering users' queries, not whether it has indexed 100 percent of the data on the Internet. Much of this deep Web information is unstructured data gathered from sensors and other devices that may not reside in a database that can be scanned or crawled by search engines. Other deep Web data comes from temporary pages (such as advertisements for illegal sexual and similarly illicit services) that are removed before search engines can crawl them. Some areas of the deep Web are accessible using only special software such as the Tor Onion Router, which allows people to secretly share information anonymously via peer-to-peer connections rather than going through a centralized computer server. DARPA is working with 17 different teams of researchersfrom both companies and universitiesto craft Internet search tools as part of the Memex program that give government, military and businesses new ways to analyze, organize and interact with data pulled from this larger pool of sources. Law and order DARPA has said very little about Memex and its use by law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate suspected criminals. According to published reports, including one from Carnegie Mellon University, the NYDAs Office is one of several law enforcement agencies that have used early versions of Memex software over the past year to find and prosecute human traffickers, who coerce or abduct peopletypically women and childrenfor the purposes of exploitation, sexual or otherwise. Memexa combination of the words memory and index first coined in a 1945 article for The Atlanticcurrently includes eight open-source, browser-based search, analysis and data-visualization programs as well as back-end server software that perform complex computations and data analysis. Such capabilities could become a crucial component of fighting human trafficking, a crime with low conviction rates, primarily because of strategies that traffickers use to disguise their victims identities (pdf). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates there are about 2.5 million human trafficking victims worldwide at any given time, yet putting the criminals who press them into service behind bars is difficult. In its 2014 study on human trafficking (pdf) the U.N. agency found that 40 percent of countries surveyed reported less than 10 convictions per year between 2010 and 2012. About 15 percent of the 128 countries covered in the report did not record any convictions. Evidence of criminals peddling such services online is hard to pinpoint because of the use of temporary ads and peer-to-peer connections within the deep Web. Over a two-year time frame traffickers spent about $250 million to post more than 60 million advertisements, according to DARPA-funded research. Such a large volume of Web pages, many of which are not posted long enough to be crawled by search engines, makes it difficult for investigators to connect the dots. This is, in part, because investigators typically search for evidence of human trafficking using the same search engines that most people use to find restaurant reviews and gift ideas. Hence the Memex project. Inside Memex At DARPAs Arlington, Va., headquarters Memex program manager Christopher White provided Scientific American with a demonstration of some of the tools he and his colleagues are developing. Criminal investigations often begin with little more than a single piece of information, such as an e-mail address. White plugged a demo address into Google to show how investigators currently work. As expected, he received a page of links from the portion of the Internet that Google crawlsalso referred to as the surface Webprioritized by a Google algorithm attempting to deliver the most relevant information at the top. After clicking through several of these links, an investigator might find a phone number associated with the e-mail address. Thus far, White had pulled the same information from the Internet that most people would see. But he then faced a next step all Web users confront: sifting through pages of hyperlinks with very little analytical information available to tie together different search results. Just as important as Memexs ability to pull information from a broader swath of the Internet are its tools that can identify relationships among different pieces of data. This helps investigators create data maps used to detect spatial and temporal patterns. One example could be a hub-and-spoke visualization depicting hundreds of Web sites connected to a single sex services e-mail, phone number or worker. > > Scientific American exclusive: A sneak peek at Memex data maps

White also showed how MEMEX can generate color-coded heat maps of different countries that locate where the most sex advertisements are being posted online at any given time. These patterns and others could help reveal associations that investigators might otherwise miss, says White, who began working with DARPA in 2010 as a consultant developing data-science tools to support the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Search results The technology has already delivered results since DARPA began introducing Memex to select law enforcement agencies about a year ago. The NYDA says that its new Human Trafficking Response Unit now uses DARPAs Memex search tool in every human trafficking case it pursues. Memex has played a role in generating at least 20 active sex trafficking investigations and has been applied to eight open indictments in addition to the Gaston conviction, according to the NYDAs Office. Memex helps us build evidence-based prosecutions, which are essential to fighting human trafficking, says Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. In these complex cases prosecutors cannot rely on traumatized victims alone to testify. We need evidence to corroborate or, in some cases, replace the need for the victim to testify. Different components of Memex are helping law enforcement crack down on trafficking elsewhere in the country as well. A detective in Modesto, Calif., used a specific piece of software called Traffic Jam to follow up on a tip about one particular victim from Nebraska and ended up identifying a sex trafficker who was traveling with prostitutes across the Midwest and West. The investigation culminated in his arrest. Traffic Jam, developed independently of DARPA in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers and later spun off into a company called Marinus Analytics, enabled investigators to gather evidence by quickly reviewing ads the trafficker posted for several locales. DARPA has since awarded Carnegie Mellon a three-year, $3.6-million contract to enhance Traffic Jams basic search capabilities as part of Memex, with machine-learning algorithms that can analyze results in depth, according to the university. Carnegie Mellon researchers are also studying ways to apply computer vision to searches in a way that helps investigators identify images with similar elementssuch as furniture from the same hotel room that appears in multiple imageseven if the images themselves are not identical, says Jeff Schneider. Schneider is the project's principal investigator and a research professor in the Auton Lab at the universitys School of Computer Science, which studies statistical data mining. Furniture in a hotel room, for example, could help law enforcement identify the location of trafficking operations. Vance and other law enforcement officials welcome such advances. Technology alone wont solve cases, but it certainly helps, he says. Weve had the most success with this effort when we married traditional field intelligence with the information this tool provides. White agrees that DARPAs technology is a supplement to other investigative methods, including interviews with victims. In addition to targeting human trafficking, law enforcement officials are finding that they can tap Memex to crack down on other, related crimes, including trafficking in guns and drugs

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Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet