International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 103

International Journal on Criminology
leads, to understand the elements of the network, and to provide a larger context
to place the activities of the criminals and groups that sold commercial sex.
DARPA transitioned operation of the Memex database in 2018 to an organization
funded by the District Attorney of New York, using monies seized from
criminals to maintain the database and continue scraping the web. The Memex
database, now known as Tellfinder, is composed of daily crawled and scraped escort
advertisements and sex buyer review forum posts, featuring over one hundred
different sites and sources on the publicly available surface and deep web. These
sources are available in multiple languages from international websites. Tellfinder is
employed by many law enforcement agencies on the federal, state, and local level. 18
Reactive vs. Proactive Investigations
Before the advent of Memex and the use of advanced processing technologies,
investigations of perpetrators of trafficking for sexual exploitation
were limited to those provoked by leads related to an event, report, or tangential
evidence connected to another crime. Traditional police work could not
efficiently identify the diverse networks of a larger human trafficking enterprise
with operations spanning numerous cities. With the new tools of Memex, complex
networks, and even supply chains, could be identified, as the subsequent case
study illustrates.
Without tools to provide macro-level analysis, criminals have an asymmetric
advantage. Criminals can reach large numbers of customers by posting numerous
advertisements across platforms, while law enforcement is limited in its capacity
to uncover large bodies of advertisements, unless unlocked by data analytics
and advanced processing tools. Using these tools to generate tactical intelligence
from large data allows law enforcement to document the operations of a criminal
perpetrator or organization.
Macro-level analysis of advertisements for sexual services has resulted in
an important shift in investigating trafficking for sexual exploitation. Previously,
proactive investigations focused on luring potential buyers of commercial sex using
“stings,” typically baiting potential buyers with an escort advertisement posted
and operated by law enforcement officers. The focus of such investigations was on
the buyer of commercial sex with the intention of curbing demand. This is an important
component of combating trafficking for sexual exploitation when looking
holistically at the problem, but has limited effect in curbing the criminal activity
given the sheer number of buyers. 19 Proactive investigations are also used by crime
analysts who sift through escort advertisement sites on a daily basis looking for
18 E. Hall et al., “TellFinder: Discovering Related Content in Big Data,” 2015, https://www.research
gate.net/publication/317411475_TellFinder_Discovering_Related_Content_in_Big_Data.
19 Demand Abolition, “Who Buys Sex?: Understanding and Disrupting Illicit Market Demand,” 2018, 4.
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