Game changers
In 2015 the Super Bowl was not only one of the biggest sporting events of the year, but also the biggest event of the year for sex traffickers. This year in Houston at Super Bowl LI, DeliverFund, a counter-sex trafficking organization, joined forces with some of the best organizations that develop and use technology to aid law enforcement, collect digital evidence, provide human trafficking tracking and security, and find victims using facial recognition software for Operation Game Changer.
This collaboration, along with trend analysis of activity from Carnegie-Mellon University, led to 44 human trafficking targets generated, two national trafficking networks being identified, and eight target packages turned over to law enforcement within a 72-hour period. Law enforcement in Houston have already made arrests and freed victims based on information gathered during the Super Bowl.
DeliverFund was co-founded by two Montanans, former CIA operative Nic McKinley, formerly of Billings, and Kalispell native Jeremy Mahugh. Mahugh, a former Navy SEAL, will be speaking at the screening of the documentary “I Am Jane Doe” on Thursday, April 27, in Kalispell, about DeliverFund and the fight to end human trafficking in the United States.
One of the challenges of human trafficking is that it can cover vast geographic areas. A single victim can be sold in five to 10 cities and across state lines.
“There is a lot of trafficking that comes through Montana,” Mahugh said. “Just last summer, while we were not conducting any operations in the state, I was made aware of three trafficking cases in the Flathead. The problem is you can’t fight human trafficking in one place. We’ve traced a girl from Montana all the way to the East Coast.”
“I Am Jane Doe” is a documentary about mothers who rescued their daughters who had become victims of sex trafficking, and then sued Backpage.com, which McKinley refers to as the “Wal-Mart of human trafficking.” The screening is a fundraiser for DeliverFund. Mahugh said the goal of such events is to increase education and awareness and to raise enough money to do something significant in the fight.
“What I would like to see for Montana is a special unit that is full time and dedicated to doing human trafficking and sex trafficking for this state. We monitored Montana last year and there were just over 50,000 ads posted for sex,” Mahugh said. “Not all of these ads are sex trafficking victims, but they are hidden there within those ads.”
A dedicated unit for gathering two kinds of intelligence — cyber and human — would give Montanans someone to call with tips and information, Mahugh said.
AT THE Super Bowl, DeliverFund launched its International Human Trafficking Analysis Center, a sort of centralized brain for all things related to human trafficking. They partnered with Marinus Analytics, the creators of Traffic Jam, ShadowDragon, Atlantic Data Forensics, A21, which works on the restoration side of the mission, Red Jack, Obscurity, and FaceFirst, makers of facial recognition software.
“One of the big successes of Operation Game Changer was having all of these cyber experts together on site,” Mahugh said. “While we’re all working on the mission together we can identify what really works as well as ways the technologies could be made even better for this mission.”
When Mahugh explains DelieverFund and what it does, he draws on his time in the Navy.
“We are gathering two kinds of intelligence: open source intelligence and human intelligence,” Mahugh said. “What we’re doing to counter sex trafficking is just like what would have been done to find Osama Bin Laden. Those who were searching to find him were looking at more than just Osama himself. They were looking at all of social media and the internet using powerful software tools that is the open source intelligence side. But ultimately you have to put someone on the ground to confirm that what is being seen in the cyber world is the same as what will be found on the streets, that is the human intelligence side of it.
“And just like when hunting terrorists, you are looking at more than just one person. Their whole social network is taken into consideration. So to continue the Osama analogy, we didn’t know where he was, it was his courier who led intelligence gatherers to him. DeliverFund operates in the same fashion. We are taking the same methodology that we have used in our careers in counter-terrorism and the same technology, and a lot of the same people, and redirecting that to countering human trafficking.”
“I Am Jane Doe” will be screened at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Red Lion Hotel in Kalispell. Tickets purchased before April 27 will be $10 per person, and at the door they will be $15. There is limited seating. For more information, contact Walt Bourdage at 406-314-0798. Visit http://www.deliverfund.org.