Indoor Scene Localization to Fight Sex Trafficking in Hotels

Images are key to fighting sex trafficking. They are: (a) used to advertise for sex services,(b) shared among criminal networks, and (c) connect a person in an image to the place where the image was taken. This work explores the ability to link images to indoor places in order to support the investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking. We propose and develop a framework that includes a database of open-source information available on the Internet, a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering additional images, and explore a variety of matching approaches based both on hand-tuned features such as SIFT and learned features using state of the art deep learning approaches. We concentrate on spatio-temporal indexing of hotel rooms, and to date have an index of more than 1.5 million geo-coded images. Our smart-phone app collects contextual information and metadata alongside images

Computer Vision for Multimedia Geolocation in Human Trafficking Investigation: A Systematic Literature Review

The task of multimedia geolocation is becoming an increasingly essential component of the digital forensics toolkit to effectively combat human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and other illegal acts. Typically, metadata-based geolocation information is stripped when multimedia content is shared via instant messaging and social media. The intricacy of geolocating, geotagging, or finding geographical clues in this content is often overly burdensome for investigators. Recent research has shown that contemporary advancements in artificial intelligence, specifically computer vision and deep learning, show significant promise towards expediting the multimedia geolocation task. This systematic literature review thoroughly examines the state-of-the-art leveraging computer vision techniques for multimedia geolocation and assesses their potential to expedite human trafficking investigation. This includes a comprehensive overview of the application of computer vision-based approaches to multimedia geolocation, identifies their applicability in combating human trafficking, and highlights the potential implications of enhanced multimedia geolocation for prosecuting human trafficking. 123 articles inform this systematic literature review. The findings suggest numerous potential paths for future impactful research on the subject

Learning about Large Scale Image Search: Lessons from Global Scale Hotel Recognition to Fight Sex Trafficking

Hotel recognition is a sub-domain of scene recognition that involves determining what hotel is seen in a photograph taken in a hotel. The hotel recognition task is a challenging computer vision task due to the properties of hotel rooms, including low visual similarity between rooms in the same hotel and high visual similarity between rooms in different hotels, particularly those from the same chain. Building accurate approaches for hotel recognition is important to investigations of human trafficking. Images of human trafficking victims are often shared by traffickers among criminal networks and posted in online advertisements. These images are often taken in hotels. Using hotel recognition approaches to determine the hotel a victim was photographed in can assist in investigations and prosecutions of human traffickers. In this dissertation, I present an application for the ongoing capture of hotel imagery by the public, a large-scale curated dataset of hotel room imagery, deep learning approaches to hotel recognition based on this imagery, a visualization approach that provides insight into what networks trained on image similarity are learning, and an approach to image search focused on specific objects in scenes. Taken together, these contributions have resulted in a first in the world system that offers a solution to answering the question, `What hotel was this photograph taken in?\u27 at a global scale

Content Moderation as Surveillance

Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of social media in detecting, investigating, and preventing crime. This Article, prepared for a symposium dedicated to Joel Reidenberg’s germinal article Lex Informatica, untangles the relationship between content moderation and surveillance. Building on Reidenberg’s fundamental insights regarding the relationships between rules imposed by legal regimes and those imposed by technological design, the Article first traces how content moderation rules intersect with law enforcement, including through formal demands for information, informal relationships between platforms and law enforcement agencies, and the impact of end-to-end encryption. Second, it critically assesses the degree to which government involvement in content moderation actually tempers platform power. Rather than effective oversight and checking of private power, it contends, the emergent arrangements between platforms and law enforcement institutions foster mutual embeddedness and the entrenchment of private authority within public governance

Human-Centered Approach to Technology to Combat Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is a serious crime that continues to plague the United States. With the rise of computing technologies, the internet has become one of the main mediums through which this crime is facilitated. Fortunately, these online activities leave traces which are invaluable to law enforcement agencies trying to stop human trafficking. However, identifying and intervening with these cases is still a challenging task. The sheer volume of online activity makes it difficult for law enforcement to efficiently identify any potential leads. To compound this issue, traffickers are constantly changing their techniques online to evade detection. Thus, there is a need for tools to efficiently sift through all this online data and narrow down the number of potential leads that a law enforcement agency can deal with. While some tools and prior research do exist for this purpose, none of these tools adequately address law enforcement user needs for information visualizations and spatiotemporal analysis. Thus to address these gaps, this thesis contributes an empirical study of technology and human trafficking. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, systemic literature analysis, and a user-centered design study, this research outlines the challenges and design considerations for developing sociotechnical tools for anti-trafficking efforts. This work further contributes to the greater understanding of the prosecution efforts within the anti-trafficking domain and concludes with the development of a visual analytics prototype that incorporates these design considerations.Ph.D

White savior projects: An examination of the Antitrafficking Social Movement

For this dissertation, I conduct an ethnography of three antitrafficking programs; interview 38 activists and survivors of trafficking; and analyze organizational texts, websites, and social media. I examine the history of the antitrafficking movement. Among the three organizations, activists provide housing; food, clothing, and hygiene items; medical services; mental health services and counseling; mentorship; education for survivors; a 24-hour hotline; outreach; case management and referrals; training for law enforcement; a drop-in center; and education and awareness events. I examine activists’ diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing of sex trafficking, and other framing tactics, such as frame alignment, frame diffusion, frame resonance, and cycles of protest. Activists within the three organizations connect sex trafficking to the Atlantic Slave Trade, referring to human trafficking as “modern-day slavery.” Activists also frame trafficking as happening in “our own backyards;” happening primarily to girls and women; and conflate sex work and sex trafficking. Activists believe that sex trafficking is caused by childhood sexual abuse, pornography and pornography addiction, and systems of oppression. I find that evangelical Christianity influences the organizations through services for survivors, training for staff and the public, the recruitment of staff and volunteers at church, and the practice of Christianity in front of and with survivors. I also find that evangelical activists employ language and strategies that cast them as white saviors seeking to ‘rescue’ survivors. There are several factors that have contributed to the success of the antitrafficking movement, such as increased political opportunities, resource mobilization, effective leadership, strategic use of grievances, and cultural context. Activists face several challenges in their work, namely lack of funding and resources, like housing. For the future, activists would like to see increased punishment of clients and traffickers; reductions in pornography and pornography addiction; increased education and awareness about trafficking; installation of survivors in leadership; and increased funding. I conclude by recommending that sex work and sex trafficking be distinguished in research, legislation, policies, and practice; rehabilitation of traffickers and clients; and make systematic changes to lessen the factors which contribute to trafficking

Warnings Against the Exploitation of Children in Young Adult Dystopian Literature

The works of Suzanne Collins, Koushun Takami, and Neal Shusterman present a unique subset of young adult literature in which young adults are forced to kill one another. My thesis argues that the presentation of child gladiators in these stories is a form of weaponization conducted by the fictional governments as deterrent weapons against the parents of these fictional dystopias. This weaponization is accomplished through the creation of spectacular events that are meant to draw the attention to the power of the government, also as a form of deterrence against rebellion. Next, my thesis demonstrates how the human body is devalued and transformed into a weapon in various ways. Finally, my thesis focuses on how the characters in these stories are stripped of their individual personalities and reassociated with weapons as a final step in their weaponization. This dehumanization culminates in the loss of human identity and the creation of an identity that is based on their usefulness as a tool and not their value as a human being. I will argue that these acts should be read as warnings of the dangers of exploitation of childhood by adulthood, and these novels challenge readers to use these fictional examples as ways to identify potential real-world exploitative threats to children