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Self-styled abolitionist Ryan Dalton’s new tech startup, Rescue Forensics, wants to change the way the police fight human trafficking sex work by dredging up that old spectre The Satanic Panic under a new guise: Human Trafficking Hysteria.
The reality is that Rescue Forensics preys on sex workers — by selling their online activity to Law Enforcement Agencies.
A Vice’s Melissa Gira Grant reports:
“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.
Rescue Forensics has said it’s “making it harder for bad guys to hide on the internet.” And while it’s hard to quantify that claim, the company certainly achieved some success in attracting investors: Paul Graham’s influential Y Combinator incubator selected Rescue Forensics for funding, after which TechCrunch dubbed the service the “software [that] eats sex trafficking.” With Rescue Forensics, users can “#tracethetraffickers,” as one of its own Facebook memes puts it.
From what I could learn, though, 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 and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). (A spokesperson for one segment of DHS—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE—said that as far as they could tell, they aren’t using the software, while the FBI refused to comment on investigations.)
Rescue Forensics’ web copy encourages cops to “stop sending subpoenas.” Law enforcement, they’re saying, shouldn’t bother using the legal process when they can get sex workers’ histories of online ads using Rescue Forensics—for a price.
Finding out exactly how Rescue Forensics uses sex workers’ data wasn’t easy. Co-founder Ryan Dalton wouldn’t let me demo the software, so I couldn’t verify any of the claims made about what they do. “I don’t want to be portrayed as somebody who’s hiding the ball,” Dalton told me.
So, with his caveats, here’s what I could gather: Rescue Forensics is a database with a set of search and flagging tools, possibly custom-built, for law enforcement. It’s a more easily searchable mirror of ads for sexual services placed on websites like Backpage.com—though Dalton wouldn’t confirm that Backpage.com was one of the websites they collected data from, or give me the names of any other sites that end up in their database.
What this means is that 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, selling your underwear, or any other permutation of the various sexual services people can put on offer, 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.
The rationale for collecting all of these ads, Dalton says, is that sometimes, behind them are people who are “exploited.” They can be identified because some ads, he said, “contain suspicious behavior.” According to him, those could be “an ad that says someone is 18 years old” or “a photo that shows a person whose body is underdeveloped,” “photos with braces,” or “babyfat in their face,” or “text written in a third person.” Rescue Forensics, he added, “gives law enforcement tools to find trafficking victims,” in some part based on what’s contained in these ads.
That’s the whole premise behind the business: Rescue Forensics, a for-profit company, has an innovative solution that publicly-funded law enforcement agencies should buy. But as Kate D’Adamo, national policy advocate for the Sex Workers’ Project, told me, “Private individuals and companies like Rescue Forensics policing the internet is not how anti-trafficking work happens.”
The Sex Workers’ Project assists people who have been engaged in the sex trade, whether through choice, circumstance, or coercion, and routinely represents people who have been trafficked. In the eyes of advocates who work to support actual trafficking victims who may need emergency legal help, housing, or medical care, Rescue Forensics is a product built to solve a poorly defined, if not entirely nonexistent, problem: the lifespan of an online ad. “The assumption that advertising websites do not maintain information,” D’Adamo explained, “or that this kind of advertisement is not accessible to law enforcement is not only absurd, it is a willful ignorance.”
But for Dalton, the fight against trafficking isn’t just about finding the people Rescue Forensics believes are “exploited”: It’s about abolition. That’s how Memphis magazine headlined a 2011 profile of him: “A Modern-Day Abolitionist.” That phrase, he told me, “comes from the premise that there are people who are compelled to do things against their will, and that is a lifestyle for those people,” including “people who would not choose to be part of the commercial sex industry.”
For him, “Abolition is the effort to undermine those criminal enterprises.”
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.
Read more HERE.
For those interested, sex work advocate Maggie McNeill has done a great deal of excellent work documenting and debunking the twisted disinformation campaigns concerning White Slavery Satanic Ritual Abuse Human Trafficking Hysteria at her blog, The Honest Courtesan.
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