Publications

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of involuntary labor and sexual exploitation. It affects tens of million of victims worldwide and generates tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits annually. While agencies across the U.S. Government employ a diverse range of resources to combat human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad, trafficking operations remain challenging to measure, investigate, and interdict. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate is addressing these challenges by incorporating computational social science research into their counter-human trafficking approach. As part of this approach, the Directorate tasked an interdisciplinary team of national security researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, to undertake a detailed examination of the human trafficking response across the Homeland Security Enterprise. The first phase of this effort was a government-wide systems analysis of major counter-trafficking thrust areas, including law enforcement and prosecution; public health and emergency medicine; victim services; and policy and legislation. The second phase built on this systems analysis to develop a human trafficking technology roadmap and implementation strategy for the Science and Technology Directorate, which is presented in this document.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of involuntary labor and sexual exploitation. It affects tens of million of victims worldwide and generates tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits annually. While agencies across the U.S. Government employ a diverse range of resources to combat human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad, trafficking operations remain challenging to measure, investigate, and interdict. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate is addressing these challenges by incorporating computational social science research into their counter-human trafficking approach. As part of this approach, the Directorate tasked an interdisciplinary team of national security researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, to undertake a detailed examination of the human trafficking response across the Homeland Security Enterprise. The first phase of this effort was a government-wide systems analysis of major counter-trafficking thrust areas, including law enforcement and prosecution; public health and emergency medicine; victim services; and policy and legislation. The second phase built on this systems analysis to develop a human trafficking technology roadmap and implementation strategy for the Science and Technology Directorate, which is presented in this document.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery affecting an estimated 40 million victims worldwide, primarily through the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children. In the last decade, the advertising of victims has moved from the streets to websites on the Internet, providing greater efficiency and anonymity for sex traffickers. This shift has allowed traffickers to list their victims in multiple geographic areas simultaneously, while also improving operational security by using multiple methods of electronic communication with buyers; complicating the ability of law enforcement to disrupt these illicit organizations. In this paper, we address this issue and present a novel unsupervised and scalable template matching algorithm for analyzing and detecting complex organizations operating on adult service websites. The algorithm uses only the advertisement content to uncover signature patterns in text that are indicative of organized activities and organizational structure. We apply this method to a large corpus of adult service advertisements retrieved from backpage.com, and show that the networks identified through the algorithm match well with surrogate truth data derived from phone number networks in the same corpus. Further exploration of the results show that the proposed method provides deeper insights into the complex structures of sex trafficking organizations, not possible through networks derived from phone numbers alone. This method provides a powerful new capability for law enforcement to more completely identify and gather evidence about trafficking networks and their operations.

Command and Control is one of the core tenants of joint military operations, however, the nature of modern security threats, the democratization of technology globally, and the speed and scope of information flows are stressing traditional operational paradigms, necessitating a fundamental shift to better concurrently integrate and operate across multiple physical and virtual domains. In this paper, we aim to address these challenges through the proposition of three concepts that will guide the creation of integrated human-AI Command and Control systems, inspired by recent advances and successes within the commercial sector and academia. The first concept is a framework for integration of AI capabilities into the enterprise that optimizes trust and performance within the workforce. The second is an approach for facilitating multi-domain operations though realtime creation of multi-organization multi-domain task teams by dynamic management of information abstraction, teaming, and risk control. The third is a new paradigm for multi-level data security and multi-organization data sharing that will be a key enabler of joint and coalition multi-domain operation in the future. Lastly, we propose a set of recommendations towards the research, development, and instantiation of these transformative advances in Command and Control capability.