Josh Gearheart and his team are sitting in an operation center outside Washington, and over the past week they have tracked the Super Bowl sex traffickers with the technology he used to hunt down Afghan insurgents
Gearheart, a former Army intelligence officer, is one of two.
Annual partnership between trafficking researchers and a defense contractor called Praescient Analytics, 100 employees of the company typically provide intelligence analysis to the United StatesS.
The Special Operations Command, the FBI and other personnel at the company's headquarters in Alexandria, Va.
The organization's goal is to understand how gangs and drug dealers operate when 400,000 fans come to New Jersey and New York for the country's largest sporting event --
Take bacchanal as the theme and then apply this knowledge to the game in Arizona next year.
According to New York Attorney General Eric Schneider man, a separate coalition of law enforcement agencies arrested 18 people today, breaking a cocaine and sex ring that operates under the shadow of the Championship.
"Any stadium, especially the Super Bowl, is like a sex trade magnet," Republican Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey said in January . ".
27 hearings of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on trafficking and sports activities.
"In addition to welcoming enthusiastic fans, the state is preparing for a possible influx of domestic and international traffickers.
"The Foresight Project is one of the most comprehensive efforts to collect data on such criminal networks, which researchers say are attracted by well-off participants and large gatherings.
Praescient's team is collecting a lot of internet data. -
From the phone number in online advertising to the coding language pimps used to indicate the availability of underage girls ---in the lead-
Until this weekend at the East Rutherford Metropolitan Stadium in New Jersey.
Preliminary data collected by the project showed that prostitutes were being transported from more than half of the states in the United States to the areaS.
"It's really hard to trade sex. to-
See the question, "said Dan potoki, who directed the Initiative Group in Praescient.
"This is our experience with other hard work --to-
See the problems that terrorism can help. ”Anti-
Trafficking in people around the National Football League championship has previously been controversial, and law enforcement officials in cities such as Indianapolis, which hosted the event in 2012, said they were skeptical about whether the surge was true.
Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General, called the Super Bowl the biggest one-off love
Human trafficking in the United StatesS.
The issue has become a major focus for organizers in New Jersey, who are worried that intensive interstate highway networks and proximity to New York City will exacerbate this year's problems.
Starting with the announcement of the location, New Jersey officials have trained hundreds of hotel staff, airport personnel and even truck drivers on how to identify victims of trafficking.
According to a division statement, the state's criminal justice department held an event this week to raise awareness of "modern slavery before the 2014 Super Bowl.
Smith said at a House hearing that 10,000 prostitutes were transported to Miami for the Super Bowl on 2010 on the grounds that
Repeated statistics from national centres for Missing and Exploited Children.
Staca Shehan, director of the center's case analysis division, said the center did not know how Ernie Allen, its former president, came up with the figure for Miami.
"When asked, we tried to correct the record," she said . ".
According to the supporters of this effort, this is exactly what Praescient aims to solve.
"There's not a lot of data," said Senator McCain's wife, Cindy McCain, a Republican in Arizona. The Washington-
The McCain-based institute is funding the project through the Arizona State University's Sexual Trafficking Intervention Research Office, which brings a wealth of knowledge to the study.
According to Dominic Roy, the problem stems from organized sexual transactions, from a small number of pimps working together to trafficking in women by major cartels in several states
Sepowitz, Arizona State researcher who designed the project.
She said that it is well known that major gang groups are involved and often coordinate large networks from Los Angeles and other city bases.
The focus of the researchers is on identifying and helping minors and women who are forced into prostitution.
Getting women to act is a common strategy to avoid law enforcement, Roe said.
Sepowitz, he called it "circuit ".
"The Super Bowl is a particularly profitable stop point for food served by a combination of rich and male --
The crowd dominates, she said.
Praescient will use a data analytics platform initially funded by the CIA and manufactured by Palo Alto, California
Based on Palantir technology.
Praescient's chief executive, Katie Crotty, used Palantir software while serving as military intelligence officers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many of her analysts have had similar experiences in their previous American careers. S.
Special forces, the FBI, or the FBI. S.
Intelligence agency
Crotty said the software can sort out a lot of data from different sources and identify relationships that human analysts may have missed.
This makes it ideal to trace dark networks: insurgents in the Horn of Africa, money launderers fleeing money through the international banking system, or gangs selling women in multiple states.
"We can get things done in a few hours that researchers may take weeks to get done," said Jonathan Larkin, a visionary analyst working on the project.
"This is the analysis at the warp speed.
"Visionary engineers have developed software to collect data from websites where traffickers advertise.
They also have to learn the language used by human traffickers and create filters to mark it.
According to Roe at Arizona State University, "from the island" or "kitty" is one of the codenames of underage prostitutes
Sepowitz, although an advertisement written in a third person may suggest that a woman is handled by a pimple or gang.
Phone numbers that are common in many advertisements can connect several women to a network.
Larkin knocked a few keys on one of the project's computers and opened a map depicting the geographic scope of human trafficking this year.
It shows that women are transported from Arkansas, Missouri, Idaho, California, Washington and many other states to northern New Jersey and New York.
Gearheart, head of the Super Bowl project and deputy director of capabilities at Praescient, said the amount of data will surge as the game approaches.
Visionary analysts will be able to map out how prostitutes are deployed before and after the game, the hotels they use, and certain links between the population of traffickers and their operating technologies. “I have kids --
Many of us-
That's why we support this so strongly, "said Gearheart.
Next year's Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, will continue its trafficking program.
The State University's sex trafficking intervention research office will help analyze this year's data, and McCain said law enforcement in Arizona is planning to use the data to develop more effective strategies.
"I am very happy that this technology is used by our army, but I am also very happy that it will be used for this work," McCain said . ".
"We want to help protect these girls, but we also want their help.