Latest news with #TraffickinginPersons
The Star
09-05-2025
- The Star
Brunei joins workshop on Asean legal cooperation to combat human trafficking
The delegation in a group photo. - RBPF BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN: A delegation from Brunei recently attended a workshop on the Asean International Legal Cooperation (ILC) Handbook and Asean International Legal Cooperation (ILC) Compendium in Bangkok, Thailand. The delegation included personnel from the Prime Minister's Office, the Criminal Justice Division of the Attorney General's Chamber, the Human Trafficking Investigation Unit (USPM) of the Royal Brunei Police Force (RBPF), and the Immigration and National Registration Department, who attended as representatives of the National Working Committee on Anti-Trafficking in Persons. The two-day workshop, held on May 6 and 7, was organised by the Senior Officials Meeting on Transnational Crime in cooperation with Counter Trafficking Asean-Australia (Asean-ACT) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The workshop's objectives align with the implementation of the Asean Convention Against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (ACTIP), and the Asean Multi-Sectoral Work Plan Against TIP 2023-2028 (Bohol TIP Work Plan 2.0). It aims to strengthen international legal cooperation (formal and informal) among Asean member states, in line with Asean member states' laws on cross-border crimes, especially trafficking in persons (TIP) cases. The project aims to update the Asean Handbook on International Legal Cooperation in Cases of Trafficking in Persons and prepare an Asean Compendium on International Legal Cooperation in Cases of Trafficking in Persons. It also aimed at disseminating information to more stakeholders about the Asean Handbook and the Asean Compendium on Trafficking in Persons Cases to explore any future collaboration. The two documents are expected to be further discussed for endorsement during the 25th Senior Officials Meeting on Transnational Crime (SOMTC). The workshop was attended by 69 representatives from various Asean Sectoral Bodies, including participants from 11 countries. The programme also promoted international cooperation and the exchange of ideas and views on the increasingly complex issue of human trafficking, ensuring a stronger response against all forms of exploitation related to human trafficking. – Borneo Bulletin/ANN
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
‘Sound of Freedom' producer says AI tools helped nab child trafficker that eluded FBI for 10 years
Editor's Note: This article contains discussions related to child sexual abuse and pornography. Child predators are on high alert as organizations around the globe have begun rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) tools to bring sex traffickers to justice and rescue young victims, according to "Sound of Freedom" executive producer Paul Hutchinson. Hutchinson, who has led 70 undercover rescue missions across 15 countries, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that he has worked with "black hat" hackers to help identify child predators and bring them to justice. "The black hats. These guys are some of the best hackers anywhere. Some of them do highly illegal things for the right reasons, right? These are the guys who took down the Ashley Madison site and exposed all the guys who were cheating on their wives," he said. Through this relationship, the hackers were able to develop a piece of AI software to identify potential instances of child pornography on the dark web and other less-trodden corridors of the internet—where criminals believe they are truly anonymous. Migrant Sex Trafficking Survivor Speaks Out: 'I Saw Good People Die' Read On The Fox News App "What these guys aren't thinking is the fact that once they have those things on their computer, and they're part of a file-sharing network, this software can go in there and say, hey, I'm looking for this XYZ video of this child rape video, right? And boom, their computer is showing, hey, have that one too," Hutchinson said. The software can then illuminate a global identifier number that is unique to each individual computer. This number is not hidden by encrypted connections, such as a virtual private network (VPN). As a result, the hackers know when that computer goes online and where it originated. "This one piece of software in one month in the United States identified 800,000 unique individuals who downloaded one or more child rape videos. That's a huge number. And that's just what this thing caught," Hutchinson told Fox News Digital. The "Sound of Freedom" producer noted that this number represents a "big problem" in society, wherein people fall into an "addictive cycle" after consuming large quantities of pornography. Sean 'Diddy' Combs Hit With New Sex Trafficking Charges A Month Before Trial "That addiction for some of them ended up being like any drug addiction where you needed something harder to have that same fix. For some, harder was a little bit, you know, maybe rape videos or whatever. For some of them, harder was a little bit younger," he said. Pretty soon, these individuals are musing about something they wouldn't have even thought was attractive five years ago, leading them to act out these horrific fantasies, according to Hutchinson. In 2024, a U.S. Department of State's Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report revealed an increase in both victim identification and convictions versus 2022, with 133,948 victims identified and 7,115 convictions in 2023. A total of 1,912 persons were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2022, a 26% increase from the 1,519 persons referred in 2012, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). One black hat hacker who worked with his team was tasked with finding a man who U.S. federal agencies had chased over the course of a decade. The individual in question reportedly had abused well over one hundred children. 'Sound Of Freedom' Exposes Brutal Fight To Rescue Victims Of Child Trafficking "He was bragging about how he could get these kids to take their clothes off within two or three sessions of doing a photography session at his place, and then he's selling these children to wealthy Americans coming down. And the FBI couldn't find him. We're like, are you kidding me?" Hutchinson recalled. The hacker was able to breach into different file-sharing services on the dark web and determine that this man was uploading from Costa Rica and then later Nicaragua. After identifying the names of some of the individuals the man had been spending time with in the country, Hutchinson and his team acquired the IP addresses of these individuals and determined that they had all been logging in from the same sports bar. "So, I was undercover, talking to these guys and figuring out, and saying, 'hey, yeah, I'm down here for this,' and they go, 'Oh, we're gonna introduce you. We've got a friend named Bruce, keep this silent, but he takes care of guys just like you.' Boom, we got a warm introduction to a guy who the FBI hadn't got a hold of for 10 years," Hutchinson told Fox News Digital. The Movie The Media Tried To Kill Is Still Going Strong AI is also integrated with healing programs for the Child Liberation Foundation, an anti-sex trafficking and survivor rehabilitation nonprofit founded by Hutchinson in 2017. Through these models, children who have been the victim of abuse can have a conversation with a therapist that the system can then animate into the kid's favorite television character, such as Barney. These systems, Hutchinson said, are created to help relieve trauma and are built on thousands of books related to child psychology and therapy. "There's so much good out there that we are using to help combat this. Just as much as the bad guys are using deepfakes and whatever else to try to push their agenda in their direction. We're going to win," Hutchinson continued. "We're gonna win this war because there's way more good guys out there than there are bad guys and together, we can use this technology to save the kids." Readers can contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at article source: 'Sound of Freedom' producer says AI tools helped nab child trafficker that eluded FBI for 10 years
Fox News
07-04-2025
- Fox News
‘Sound of Freedom' producer says AI tools helped nab child trafficker that eluded FBI for 10 years
Editor's Note: This article contains discussions related to child sexual abuse and pornography. Child predators are on high alert as organizations around the globe have begun rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) tools to bring sex traffickers to justice and rescue young victims, according to "Sound of Freedom" executive producer Paul Hutchinson. Hutchinson, who has led 70 undercover rescue missions across 15 countries, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that he has worked with "black hat" hackers to help identify child predators and bring them to justice. "The black hats. These guys are some of the best hackers anywhere. Some of them do highly illegal things for the right reasons, right? These are the guys who took down the Ashley Madison site and exposed all the guys who were cheating on their wives," he said. Through this relationship, the hackers were able to develop a piece of AI software to identify potential instances of child pornography on the dark web and other less-trodden corridors of the internet—where criminals believe they are truly anonymous. "What these guys aren't thinking is the fact that once they have those things on their computer, and they're part of a file-sharing network, this software can go in there and say, hey, I'm looking for this XYZ video of this child rape video, right? And boom, their computer is showing, hey, have that one too," Hutchinson said. The software can then illuminate a global identifier number that is unique to each individual computer. This number is not hidden by encrypted connections, such as a virtual private network (VPN). As a result, the hackers know when that computer goes online and where it originated. "This one piece of software in one month in the United States identified 800,000 unique individuals who downloaded one or more child rape videos. That's a huge number. And that's just what this thing caught," Hutchinson told Fox News Digital. The "Sound of Freedom" producer noted that this number represents a "big problem" in society, wherein people fall into an "addictive cycle" after consuming large quantities of pornography. "That addiction for some of them ended up being like any drug addiction where you needed something harder to have that same fix. For some, harder was a little bit, you know, maybe rape videos or whatever. For some of them, harder was a little bit younger," he said. Pretty soon, these individuals are musing about something they wouldn't have even thought was attractive five years ago, leading them to act out these horrific fantasies, according to Hutchinson. In 2024, a U.S. Department of State's Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report revealed an increase in both victim identification and convictions versus 2022, with 133,948 victims identified and 7,115 convictions in 2023. A total of 1,912 persons were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2022, a 26% increase from the 1,519 persons referred in 2012, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). One black hat hacker who worked with his team was tasked with finding a man who U.S. federal agencies had chased over the course of a decade. The individual in question reportedly had abused well over one hundred children. "He was bragging about how he could get these kids to take their clothes off within two or three sessions of doing a photography session at his place, and then he's selling these children to wealthy Americans coming down. And the FBI couldn't find him. We're like, are you kidding me?" Hutchinson recalled. The hacker was able to breach into different file-sharing services on the dark web and determine that this man was uploading from Costa Rica and then later Nicaragua. After identifying the names of some of the individuals the man had been spending time with in the country, Hutchinson and his team acquired the IP addresses of these individuals and determined that they had all been logging in from the same sports bar. "So, I was undercover, talking to these guys and figuring out, and saying, 'hey, yeah, I'm down here for this,' and they go, 'Oh, we're gonna introduce you. We've got a friend named Bruce, keep this silent, but he takes care of guys just like you.' Boom, we got a warm introduction to a guy who the FBI hadn't got a hold of for 10 years," Hutchinson told Fox News Digital. AI is also integrated with healing programs for the Child Liberation Foundation, an anti-sex trafficking and survivor rehabilitation nonprofit founded by Hutchinson in 2017. Through these models, children who have been the victim of abuse can have a conversation with a therapist that the system can then animate into the kid's favorite television character, such as Barney. These systems, Hutchinson said, are created to help relieve trauma and are built on thousands of books related to child psychology and therapy. "There's so much good out there that we are using to help combat this. Just as much as the bad guys are using deepfakes and whatever else to try to push their agenda in their direction. We're going to win," Hutchinson continued. "We're gonna win this war because there's way more good guys out there than there are bad guys and together, we can use this technology to save the kids." Readers can contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘People will die': alarm after US orders removal of identity references from anti-trafficking efforts
The US government has ordered law enforcement agencies, the state department, and some non-profit organizations working to combat sex trafficking to remove references to victims' LGBTQ+ identities, race and immigration status from their communications and websites, a move experts warn will endanger vulnerable minors. Interviews with a prosecutor, government personnel, trafficking non-profit executives, as well as email correspondence reviewed by the Guardian show that agencies and organizations are complying with the orders to avoid losing federal funding. Experts in child safety say the policy is fostering a climate of fear, forcing organizations to acquiesce in order to retain crucial funding at the expense of helping victims. The directive stems from executive orders issued by Donald Trump targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and LGBTQ+ communities. Some non-profits receiving federal funding have been prohibited from using the terms 'marginalized,' 'vulnerable,' and 'immigrants' in correspondence from grant funders. Donald Trump signed the executive orders nixing DEI on 20 January, the day of the presidential inauguration. One order, titled 'Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing', mandates the removal of policies, programs, and activities relating to 'diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility'. Another, titled 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government' instructs the removal of all 'radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms'. Anti-trafficking organizations receive funding from a number of government bureaus including the Department of Justice, office for victims of crime, office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention, office on violence against women, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. The rollback by the US government will affect the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the state department, which evaluates global anti-trafficking efforts. Internal communications reviewed by the Guardian show that department staff have been directed to omit data on marginalized communities from the report. The office for victims of crime, part of the Department of Justice, removed the contents of a web page titled Faces of Human Trafficking, which detailed the stories of survivors, including those of people of color and people who identify as LGBTQ+. The page also contained educational resources on the legal needs and rights for victims, and on providing trauma-informed services. This content was replaced with a notice stating 'this content is temporarily unavailable' in early February, according to captures by the Wayback Machine, a digital library website that takes periodical snapshots of websites to preserve their history. 'A lot of people rely on the government for this type of information, accurate information, and it's no longer going to be there. People are only going to care about one specific population of people, which is going to be white, blonde hair, blue eyed, straight cisgendered females,' says Jose Alfaro, a gay Latino survivor of child sex trafficking and anti-trafficking consultant. According to Alfaro, silencing discussion of vulnerable groups will deter trafficking victims from reporting the crimes committed against them. They may fear harassment, discrimination or not being believed, he said. 'It's going to further stigmatize and also push everything underground. This is going to benefit traffickers,' he said. 'When you are further marginalizing and oppressing vulnerable groups, the response is going to be more homophobia, more transphobia, more racism, which then is going to create more vulnerabilities for those populations.' Traffickers often deliberately target victims from marginalized demographics they believe are less likely to report them. In Alfaro's case, he was trafficked as a minor by a man now serving a 30-year sentence who specifically targeted gay teenagers from the Latino community. 'It was known to him that Latino males who were gay would be basically rejected from their families, and so they would be in an even more vulnerable place,' says Alfaro. LGBTQ+ individuals face heightened risk of trafficking due to systemic barriers in employment, housing and social services. These challenges make them prime targets for traffickers, who exploit financial instability and lack of familial support. Racism is also a risk factor for being a trafficking victim, since factors like poverty, harmful stereotypes, and being in the foster care system – where Black youth are overrepresented – further heighten vulnerability, creating conditions that traffickers exploit. Previously collected data illustrate the disparities along fault lines of race and sexual orientation. For instance, in King county, Washington, 84% of child sex trafficking victims are Black, even though Black residents make up just 7% of the population. Latino communities also face high rates of exploitation, according to research by the anti-trafficking non-profit Polaris. The Trump administration's directive prohibits anti-trafficking agencies from collecting such data. 'Trafficking happens to those that are disproportionately vulnerable. We were able to have data to back that up, and then we were able to create and tailor programming specifically for those populations, and these executive orders rolled all of that back,' said one expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing concerns of potential retaliation. The censorship efforts have also impacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a major child safety non-profit which works to locate missing children and combat child sexual exploitation and trafficking, particularly online. NCMEC, whose main funder is the federal government, has been ordered to remove all references to LGBTQ+ people from its public-facing material, according to an email to NCMEC seen by the Guardian. NCMEC acts as a nationwide clearinghouse for reports about child abuse, which staff triage and forward to relevant law enforcement departments in the US and around the world. The center also provides education resources and data on trafficking, abductions and exploitation for law enforcement and others working on child safety issues. It manages distribution of the 'Amber Alert' system that alerts the public to missing children. Since the issuing of the executive order, the organization has removed publications that reference gender identity, queer and transgender children from its website. This resulted in the removal of guides on missing children who may be suicidal, children missing from care, male victims of child sex trafficking and recognizing and preventing child sex trafficking. 'Like many federally funded non-profits, NCMEC was directed by the DOJ to comply with executive order 14168 regarding gender ideology and to review our publicly facing materials to ensure compliance,' said an NCMEC spokesperson. 'No changes to NCMEC services have been made regarding sexual orientation, race, or immigration. NCMEC will continue to provide lifesaving support for all families and children who need our services. We remain committed to helping find missing children, combating child sexual exploitation and preventing child victimization.' Additionally, anti-trafficking non-profits have also been informed by federal workers responsible for grant allocations that conservative Christian organizations that have guidelines more closely aligned with the executive orders will receive preference over federal grants for supporting survivors, according to one source with direct knowledge of the new grant funding mandates. 'Organizations that don't understand those kids or adults and why they're disproportionately vulnerable, that maybe do conversion therapy – could be a faith-based organization that believes that being queer is wrong and will send you to hell–will still get funds,' said one expert. 'People will die because of it.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A statement from the state department read: 'We refrain from disclosing specific information regarding the Trafficking In Persons Report until it has received official approval and has been formally released by the Secretary of State to the public. The Department is committed to implementing President Trump's executive orders.' Major police departments across the country, which receive federal grants for investigations on trafficking crimes from the Department of Homeland Security and the office of justice, have now been instructed to stop collecting data on victims' race and LGBTQ+ identity, including for cases of violent crime and trafficking, according to a federal prosecutor. The prosecutor, who specializes in violent crime and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, warned that the decision could undermine efforts to address targeted violence and hate crimes. 'Crime data is super important and drives modern policing and law enforcement and making effective and appropriate decisions,' said the prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. 'It's particularly important to understand where we're putting our energies.' The change could also mean that violent perpetrators targeting specific minority groups to assault are not charged with hate crimes or civil rights violations, the prosecutor added. Omitting information about crime victims' sexuality or race from reports can hamper investigations and victim identification, the prosecutor said. 'You can't really take a victim-centered approach if we're not allowed to categorically approach the victim for who they are as a person, like if we can't acknowledge that they are trans,' said the prosecutor. 'You can imagine the impact that's going to have on how successful and how much people feel they're willing to open up.'
