
Traffic Jam, a program that helps track prostitution rings by using public data - eegilbert
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/the-young-woman-who-created-a-new-way-to-bust-sex-trafficking-rings
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Jemaclus
Clever. One of the more interesting challenges that I've run into in the last
few years is just the sheer amount of raw data out there. It's mind-boggling
how many problems can be solved if we could sift through that data quickly,
from human trafficking down to weather. I'm particularly fascinated by her
intuition that writing patterns and templates can identify pimps. I'm not sure
how long it would have taken me to come to that conclusion.. but now that it's
out there, it's obvious.

I wonder what other problems we can solve with the same toolset.

~~~
nemo44x
The USGS learns about earthquakes in regions without censors via Twitter. [1]

I'm of the opinion we have only scratched the surface of what is possible to
predict by analyzing realtime data from social networks, user groups and
message board communities.

[1] [https://blog.twitter.com/2015/usgs-twitter-data-
earthquake-d...](https://blog.twitter.com/2015/usgs-twitter-data-earthquake-
detection)

~~~
J_Darnley
You mean sensors not censors. Sensors sense, censors censor.

~~~
nemo44x
Indeed I did!

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learning_still
"When I asked her how detectives differentiate Traffic Jam's data between
trafficked victims and sex workers, she said that they rely on their intuition
and knowledge of the community they protect."

It sounds like she's busting low class pimps, and hoping that a few of them
are human traffickers.

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dean
This is interesting. The article doesn't talk about she implemented the
Traffic Jam program, but it does discuss how she came to 'know' sex ads, as
way to keep tabs on pimps.

""I would literally just spend hours on these websites, looking at ads,
getting a sense for what was the norm," she said. She began to pick up the
nuances of every post, understand how a template was made, and get a feel for
the different voices behind these ads."

I don't know how this information fits with her implementation, but I was
reminded of an old article by Paul Graham "A Plan For Spam"
([http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)),
where he talks about automating the process of detecting spam using Bayesian
Filtering.

"I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the
way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can
circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they
have to deliver their message, whatever it is. If we can write software that
recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that."

Substitute the spam message for the sex message, and we're talking about the
same thing. It would be an interesting exercise to try Bayesian Filtering on
sex ads, or any other kind of message, to see where it leads.

~~~
jcromartie
I could imagine a naive Bayes classifier would do the trick when it comes to
figuring out which ads were written by the same person.

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llamataboot
But what does the software /do/ ?

~~~
asdf_asdf_asdf
If they told you, maybe you'd try to defeat it or create your own version in
furtherance of patronage. Instead just be aware:

There's software. Out there. Doing _something_. (and it's always _watching_ )

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ChuckMcM
Fascinating article, trying to automate what the CIA would call an Analyst.
Back when I was building my old computer collection I would read hundreds of
ebay listings to find the "good stuff" and started to recognize sellers that
listed under a variety of user names, or buyers who were also sellers. Just by
the way they talked about the hardware, and did they call it by its "common"
name or the product catalog name, etc. Never thought about making a resarch
project out of it though.

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Buetol
The product page:
[http://www.marinusanalytics.com/trafficjam/](http://www.marinusanalytics.com/trafficjam/)

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guelo
I'm really uneasy with police analyzing our social media data, it's heading
into thought-crime territory. But there's tons of money to be made off of it.

~~~
kirkbackus
Why are you saying this? There is literally no mention of social media in this
article. The data (at least from the original project) is mined from publicly
available data, which could be social media data, but that data has to be made
public in the first place.

It is possible that the "Research Grade" version of the program does use that
data, but there is no evidence of that here.

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macrael
Some happy medium between this title and the original title could be found.

~~~
dang
We changed the article's baity title to its subtitle (shortened to fit 80
chars) in accordance with the HN guidelines. If you or anyone would like to
suggest a better title, we can change it again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
eegilbert
Much better.

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searine
Interesting software, horribly written article.

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dalacv
Word

~~~
dalacv
why the downvotes? I meant 'Word' like I agree:
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Word](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Word)

~~~
com2kid
The Hacker News community discourages comments that do not add value to the
conversation. Simple statements of agreeing are best handled through the up
vote mechanism.

~~~
dalacv
I disagree

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andrewclunn
Oh it's used to find them so you can CRAK DOWN on them. Yeah, that's totally
what I expected, not an app or anything like that...

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

