International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 99

International Journal on Criminology
The availability of the internet has allowed for a dramatic expansion of customer
access to the purchase of commercial sex and for exploiters to advertise
victims of human trafficking. The internet has allowed criminal organizations
and facilitators to reach customers in more direct ways while anonymizing
the identity of the perpetrators. The online environment was first used on a mass
scale by distributors of child pornography, with one distributor’s website alone receiving
over one million downloads in the late 1990s in a single year. 2 Yet the scale
of the trade in child pornography was subsequently overtaken by the proliferation
of advertisements for sexual services, many of these offering sexual services with
minors, which had a larger potential market than child pornography. A major
US government-funded computer research program, known as Memex, reported
identified advertisement sales of about $250 million spent on more than sixty million
advertisements for commercial sexual services in a two-year period between
2014 and 2016. 3 The ease of use of online advertisements allowed these criminal
businesses to expand with rapidity. A new technical approach was needed, as analyzing
the criminal advertisements on such a scale could not be done manually by
law enforcement.
Distributors of child pornography were among the first to take full advantage
of the anonymity and the reach of the internet through online websites in the
mid-to-late 1990s. 4 The provision of child pornography to users for pay or for free
exchange occurred at a time when the number of global internet users was a small
fraction of the present day, an estimated 150 million users in 1998. 5 The United
States Customs Service established a center in Northern Virginia in the 1990s to
monitor the distribution of child pornography. Its locale was advantageous as most
internet service providers (ISPs) were then located in Northern Virginia, meaning
at some point in the process of distribution, the child pornography would very
likely transit Northern Virginia. The Customs Service, working closely with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, had jurisdiction as federal statute prohibited the
production, distribution, and receipt of child pornography. 6 Having a unique window
into the distribution of child pornography, it was possible to determine the
recipients of the images and the distinct hubs around the world from which large
2 Interview done in conjunction with Louise I. Shelley, “Crime and Corruption in the Digital Era,”
Journal of International Affairs 51, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 615–617.
3 Larry Greenmeier, “Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet,” February 8, 2015, https://
www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-traffickers-caught-on-hidden-internet/ and also the
accompanying visualization that reveals the international links, “Scientific American Exclusive:
DARPA Memex Data Map,” retrieved August 7, 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/slide
show/scientific-american-exclusive-darpa-memex-data-maps/.
4 Shelley, “Crime and Corruption in the Digital Era,” 615–617.
5 Internet World Stats, retrieved August 7, 2019, https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.
htm.
6 United States Department of Justice, “Citizens’ Guide to U.S. Federal Law on Child Pornography,”
retrieved August 7, 2019, https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federallaw-child-pornography.
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