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Your Hotel Room Photos Could Help Catch Sex Traffickers (cnn.com)
100,000 people people have already downloaded an app that helps fight human trafficking. dryriver summarizes a report from CNN:
Police find an ad for paid sex online. It's an illegally trafficked underage girl posing provocatively in a hotel room. But police don't know where this hotel room is -- what city, what neighborhood, what hotel or hotel room. This is where the TraffickCam phone app comes in. When you're staying at a hotel, you take pictures of your room... The app logs the GPS data (location of the hotel) and also analyzes what's in the picture -- the furniture, bed sheets, carpet and other visual features. This makes the hotel room identifiable. Now when police come across a sex trafficking picture online, there is a database of images that may reveal which hotel room the picture was taken in.
"Technology drives everything we do nowadays, and this is just one more tool that law enforcement can use to make our job a little safer and a little bit easier," says Sergeant Adam Kavanaugh, supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force. "Right now we're just beta testing the St. Louis area, and we're getting positive hits," he says (meaning ads that match hotel-room photos in the database). But the app's creators hope to make it available to all U.S. law enforcement within the next few months, and eventually globally, so their app is already collecting photographs from hotel rooms around the world to be stored for future use.
"Technology drives everything we do nowadays, and this is just one more tool that law enforcement can use to make our job a little safer and a little bit easier," says Sergeant Adam Kavanaugh, supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force. "Right now we're just beta testing the St. Louis area, and we're getting positive hits," he says (meaning ads that match hotel-room photos in the database). But the app's creators hope to make it available to all U.S. law enforcement within the next few months, and eventually globally, so their app is already collecting photographs from hotel rooms around the world to be stored for future use.
And what is the purpose of this technical solution anyway? Police see an online ad but can't find the location of the "trafficked girl"...when all they'd need to do is call and ask!
I also question that they are really going after "sex traffickers" as opposed to independent women who simply make their own choices about how to earn money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As much as I'm a fan of law and order, clamping down on sex trafficking is way down on my priority list.
By and large - not all cases, certainly, but mostly - it's adults making consensual decisions about their own bodies.
That the article explicitly mentions an "underage girl" is an appeal to emotion by highlighting a specific case. This alone implies that there is *no* scientific evidence that cracking down on sex trafficking is useful or even cost effective. If there was (scientific evidence), the article would lead with it and it would be highly cited. The fact that the article is written with such an appeal implies that the scientific evidence is *against* legal enforcement, saying in effect "we know it's ineffective and harmful, but we want you to support it anyway. Think of the children!"
How unusual is this specific case? Would the law enforcement resources be better spent in education rather than enforcement? Is this effort easily made useless (by photographing against a sheet, for instance)?
We don't actually regulate sex trafficking very well, perhaps not at all. It only serves as a wedge that the police can use against the citizens. In the places where it's been legalized (Nevada), the criminal and health disadvantages have been eliminated - and if that situation would hold across the country, it implies that there is no sociological reason to criminalize that behaviour.
As a country, we waste a lot of time, effort, and money on useless endeavours, trying to regulate sex trafficking is one of these.
I have no interest in helping the police with any of them, especially if it's based on an emotional appeal without strong scientific reasoning.
Instead of trying to crowdsource this in a crazy patchwork fashion based on the motivations of random travelers, shouldn't law enforcement ask the hotel chains to provide systematic pictures of their rooms, assuming this is a useful line of inquiry?
There are a lot of Korean hookers that come over here just to work, then go back home. They are here to make money, they do work through agencies but they are not doing anything they did not plan to do.
You don't need to speak the same language to have sex, as many travelers have also found.
Why don't they just get the hotel operators to take a picuture of every room instead of crowd sourcing it to the public? Sheesh. Hotels.com could sponsor it under the guise that they'd have a picture of the room you are booking when you make a reservation.
Even chains often differ significantly.
The trick is that traffickers must limit themselves to the very specific chains like Motel 6, and then hope they are in one which hasn't recently had an update that makes it different to all the others.
But then even the clue that traffickers prefer a given chain narrows down search results dramatically.
As for the "boy", he was 17 years old, with a history of selling himself for sex/drugs.
And as for the Senator, he's married with children and has a history of pushing anti-gay and anti-marijuana legislation. Then he gets caught in a motel with an underage boy and marijuana. It's just another example of the incredible projection and hypocrisy that infects the Republican party to its core. Anytime a conservative starts yelling about outlawing something, look closely because he's probably doing a lot of that thing himself.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
It might affect the Republicans more because they are more focused on condemning things as immoral, but it's really just a human thing - self-loathing. People hate something about themselves, and the only way they can feel any better about it is to very loudly and publicly condemn it - and pledge to themselves that last night was the last time they'll do that, really.
Your plumber makes the informed, consensual choice to dig into your toilet and root about in your waste rather than starve to death. I wrote software rather than starve to death. McDonald's employees make fast food and take extremely low wages in order not to starve to death. We all make these choices; we value them in various ways, depending on our personal outlook.
If it's not a great choice for you, that's fine, then perhaps you'd want to try really hard not to make that choice. But don't tell others it's not a great choice. Ask them if it's a great choice. If they say no, and you can offer them an alternative they agree is better, by all means, feel free to do so.
Totally in favor of this. Unfortunately, we're presently under the thumb of people who are not.
Prostitution is a real choice, just as much as anything else is. Perhaps you're confusing it with slavery, which is something else again (and very, very rare, despite the current agitprop.)
We all have to work, unless we're born rich or we want to starve. That's the only extent to which prostitution is "forced" on anyone. Or in other words, pretty much the same as everything else that involves innate skill and suitability.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.