Econ_May_05

78 Science and technology

The Economist

May 5th 2018

ODERN slavery comes in many

forms. The outright sale of human

beings as possessions is rare. But forced

manual labour and sexual exploitation, of-

ten in a foreign country, bymeans of fraud,

coercion or the threat of violence, are not.

Such cases are often, however, hard to de-

tect. Victims are understandably reluctant

to talk. And the labour market also in-

cludes people willingly and legally per-

formingwork that is not always clearly dif-

ferent from that of the enslaved.

The murky world of modern slaves is,

though, beginning to yield to high-tech

policing methods. In South-East Asia, for

instance, a particular scourge is fishing

boats crewedby forced labour. Crewmem-

bers are unable to escape because these

vessels never dock. Instead, they offload

their catches and take on supplies at sea.

Dornnapha Sukkree, co-founder ofa chari-

ty in Bangkok, called

MAST

, hopes to stop

this by developing software that analyses

data from transponders fitted to fishing

boats. These would track vessels’ move-

ments via satellite. Boats that failed to dock

from time to timewould thus be obvious.

Ten fishing boats are assisting Ms Suk-

kree in her study. If it is successful, she

hopes to persuade Thailand’s fishery au-

thorities to require all vessels above a cer-

tain size to be fitted with transponders.

Many countries do this already, though

with the intention of regulating fishing

rather than protecting crews. Illegal fishers

do sometimes switch their transponders

off, of course, in order to “disappear”. But

that very act raises suspicions.

Much human trafficking, as the trans-

porting of modern slaves is known, relies

on trickeryknownas contract substitution.

Recruiters lure people abroad with a lucra-

tive contract that is later reworded, some-

times in a language the individual does not

understand. Luis CdeBaca, who once ran

the American State Department’s anti-hu-

man-trafficking operation and is nowa fel-

low at the Open Society Foundations, a

pro-democracy organisation, hopes to pre-

vent this bait-and-switching using a type

of distributed database called a block-

chain. A government might issue work

visas only when signed contracts are con-

firmed by the blockchain to match those

originally given to potential migrants.

Software can also identify pimps. Da-

mon McCoy of New York University has

developed a program that has helped po-

lice unearth five big suspected prostitution

rings in California and Texas. His program

hunts for signs, such as word choice, punc-

tuation and emoji, that suggest a single

hand is behind apparently unrelated on-

line sexads—and thus that organised crime

is atwork. And it can linkbitcoinpayments

made for such ads to the ads themselves.

His plan is to release the program as a free

download later this year. A subsequent

version will detect tiny variations in the

pixel-quality of pictures, to identify those

takenwith the same camera.

Joining the dots

Nor is Dr McCoy’s program the only soft-

ware being employed to counter sex-traf-

ficking operations in America. Since June

2017 an unnamed federal agency has used

something similar, developed at Carnegie

Mellon University in Pittsburgh by a re-

searcher called Eduard Hovy. Like Dr Mc-

Coy’s, this program looks for connections

between thewords and images used in dif-

ferent sexads. But it can, DrHovy says, also

draw in data from other sources. It might,

for example, link a tweet about loud

screams at night in a particular building

with banter on an online “John board” dis-

cussing the sudden unavailability of a for-

eignwoman last seen badly bruised.

Future versions of such software could

seek to pull together disparate types of in-

formation in other areas of modern slav-

ery—the frequency of visits to health clin-

ics for the poor by strawberry pickers

complaining ofbackpain, for example. But

Dr Hovy cautions against deducing from

software alone who is a victim of traffick-

ing. He has accompanied police on opera-

tions to rescue people his program has

flagged up, but who have convincingly ar-

gued that they are working voluntarily in

conditions which may be tough but are

still better than those backhome.

In the end, like any other branch of

commerce, legal or illegal, modern slavery

is about making profits. And those profits

have to be deposited somewhere. This

gives investigators another way in. Banks

in some countries face steep fines if they

do not screen transactions for signs of hu-

man trafficking. For this purpose, some

banks use software originally developed

to detect money-laundering. Algorithms

flag up dodgy-looking transactions. These

are used by human analysts to generate

“suspicious-activity reports”. The number

of such reports sent by banks to America’s

Treasury is growing, says Hector Colón, a

trafficking investigator at Homeland Secu-

rity Investigations, a branch of the coun-

try’s Department ofHomeland Security.

The fingerprints of possible trafficking

activity are many and various. Payments

for repeatedly refuelling a vehicle at night

might mean forced labour is being trans-

ported under the cover of darkness. En-

slaved prostitutes are typically fed fast

food, not “a $30 curry”, says PeterWarrack,

a Canadian expert on the screening soft-

ware. Weekly condom purchases add to

the suspicion. Charges for exorbitant cock-

tails may be disguised payments for sex,

especially if the bar also buys advertising

on escort websites. Roughly one in 20 re-

ports of suspicious transactions sent by

banks to Canada’s finance department

mention human trafficking, and half of

those correctly identify the crime, Mr War-

rack says.

Traffickers are aware ofwhat is going on

and do their best to outsmart the algo-

rithms; one tell that is easily avoided is the

payment into a single account of receipts

from many different places. But the au-

thorities are also looking for new things to

try. According to Daniel Thelesklaf, the

head of Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelli-

gence Unit, government organisations are

already considering the screening of com-

munications sent through messaging apps

for hints of human trafficking. These can

sometimes be intercepted if sent via a

Wi-Fi network. Mr Thelesklaf reckons this

has “huge potential”.

That step, though, has huge potential

for controversy, too. It is one thing to scruti-

nise sexads. It is quite another to start traw-

ling on spec throughmessages sent mostly

by innocent parties. That sounds Orwell-

ian. Which is ironic, for the message of

“1984” was that in a society where surveil-

lance is ubiquitous, everybody who is not

one of the surveyors is, in fact, a slave.

Policing modern slavery

Traffic jammers

Software is able to detect signs ofhuman trafficking

Victim of a modern press gang

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