Eric Schles on Fighting Human Trafficking with Python

The Python Podcast.__init__

Jun 25, 2015•1 hr 13 min

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Brief Introduction

Date of recording – June 10th, 2015
Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
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Overview – Interview with Eric Schles

Interview with Eric Schles

Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What inspired you to take up the fight against slavery? Is there personal story behind this choice?
Some of your work touches on the “Deep Web”. Can you provide listeners with some context around what that term means and role it plays in what you do?
- Tor .onion sites (Hidden Services) are examples
- Anonymous Web Experience
- Anonymity allows for illegal, immoral things like buying selling people
- Conceptually very important idea
- Bruce Schneier – Web technologies need to be more privacy aware
- Like a really scary version of “The Internet of the Old Days”
- Photos of young, exploited men and women
- Pedophiles are building communities, having parties through these hidden services
- Eric feels that Tor is an extreme
- Feels there had to be a way to protect the rights of legitimate while protecting against pedophiles
- Maybe a voting system?
- The Tor project feels that any compromise lessens the that’s so important for people in embattled or countries (Worded that poorly -Chris)
- No metrics on the amount of pedophilia that actually happens Tor – probably a lot
- Sexually abused victims of trafficking grow up damanged unable to do anything else
- Consumers of this type of porn were often themselves victims sexual abuse
- Structural dissonance which exists to create this problem society needs to be addressed
- Google puts the number to the anti-trafficking hotline at top of any trafficking search results
- Darren (Derek?) Hayes – redirect to trafficking resources when viewing advertisements for victims trafficking

Why did you choose Python as opposed to any other tool for your search engine?
- Needed solutions quickly with the ability to evolve as needed
- Able to rapidly develop and incorporate new features rapidly
- Easy to scale as needed
- Flask is easier to prototype and iterate with
- Python data science tools make the analysis easy
- Able to finish a 2 year C++ project in 3 weeks using Python
- Doing data science in Ruby is challenging
- Pandas Dataframe galvanized the creation of a lot of other useful tools
- Vincent – write Python which compiles to D3

Can you provide a high level description of the technical details the search engine that you created, and what it’s like to with Tor through Python?
- Directed search engine
- “It would be like if you went to Google but everything watched was Porn which you were uncomfortabl seeing and you sad”
- Get most case information through regular old detective work
- Person arrested / in holding yields phone number, other attributes that can feed the search engine
- Google can’t scrape the deep web
- Memex tool indexes the deep web – Eric’s search engine uses that
- Eric does design work for the Memex project
- Developed by the amazing Chris White
- Eric’s search engine uses the Tor driver in Selenium to .onion sites

What are some of the technical and legal challenges that you experienced in the course of your work?
- Most of the technical challenges are around automated processing
- Legal structure provides some limits on what can be worked on

Does your search engine try to infer who might be engaged in work voluntarily as opposed to those being forced into it their will?
- No, because they get all their case referrals from detective work
- You have to have been hospitalized or in some other way come the attention of the authorities for being deprived of rights
- Trafficking looks very different in different cultures
- Global similarities
- Afraid to say why if hurt
- Forced into having sex against your will
- Clear patterns of indication
- Urban versus Suburban versus Rural
- Fracking towns
- Demographics are very different – mostly men very women, LOTS of ads for sex workers
- Only helping people that want to be helped

What was the most surprising fact you uncovered as part of research?
- Imagery of exploited children is so depressing and sad

Without revealing anything you shouldn’t, are you aware of being set free as a result of your work?
- “Not my work, our work”
- Not an individual effort
- lawyers, analysts, larger DAs office

Given the complicated socio-economic aspects of human and prosecution of those who are responsible, can you discuss of the moral and ethical considerations that you have confronted with while building these tools?
- Privacy is the biggest concern
- Open source book to teach colleagues at the DA’s office how program to in Python
- Sometimes Eric works at Civic Hall

Are there any projects out there that you consider similar to you are working on?
- Thorn’s Spotlight tool
- Memex Project
- Polaris Project
- Datakind Anti Trafficking
- dosomething.org – more broadly focused – help center for teens
- RescueForensics – stage startup

What would it take for other municipalities and law agencies to get started with using your tools?
- Go to https://github.com/EricSchles?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
- Alert System and investa_gator
- Contact Eric at [email protected] to collaborate

How can our listeners get involved and help you with this Chris
- Tweet at @EricSchles or E-mail Eric
- Volunteer for any of the non profit anti-trafficking groups

Message to the community: There is a world of good waiting to happen

Picks

Tobias

Chris

Eric

Keep in Touch

Twitter: @EricSchles
Eric’s About.me page