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Brief Introduction
Date of recording – June 10th, 2015
Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
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Overview – Interview with Eric Schles
Interview with Eric Schles
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What inspired you to take up the fight against slavery? Is there personal story behind this choice?
Some of your work touches on the “Deep Web”. Can you provide listeners with some context around what that term means and role it plays in what you do?
Tor .onion sites (Hidden Services) are examples
Anonymous Web Experience
Anonymity allows for illegal, immoral things like buying selling people
Conceptually very important idea
Bruce Schneier – Web technologies need to be more privacy aware
Like a really scary version of “The Internet of the Old Days”
Photos of young, exploited men and women
Pedophiles are building communities, having parties through these hidden services
Eric feels that Tor is an extreme
Feels there had to be a way to protect the rights of legitimate while protecting against pedophiles
Maybe a voting system?
The Tor project feels that any compromise lessens the that’s so important for people in embattled or countries (Worded that poorly -Chris)
No metrics on the amount of pedophilia that actually happens Tor – probably a lot
Sexually abused victims of trafficking grow up damanged unable to do anything else
Consumers of this type of porn were often themselves victims sexual abuse
Structural dissonance which exists to create this problem society needs to be addressed
Google puts the number to the anti-trafficking hotline at top of any trafficking search results
Darren (Derek?) Hayes – redirect to trafficking resources when viewing advertisements for victims trafficking
Why did you choose Python as opposed to any other tool for your search engine?
Needed solutions quickly with the ability to evolve as needed
Able to rapidly develop and incorporate new features rapidly
Easy to scale as needed
Flask is easier to prototype and iterate with
Python data science tools make the analysis easy
Able to finish a 2 year C++ project in 3 weeks using Python
Doing data science in Ruby is challenging
Pandas Dataframe galvanized the creation of a lot of other useful tools
Vincent – write Python which compiles to D3
Can you provide a high level description of the technical details the search engine that you created, and what it’s like to with Tor through Python?
Directed search engine
“It would be like if you went to Google but everything watched was Porn which you were uncomfortabl seeing and you sad”
Get most case information through regular old detective work
Person arrested / in holding yields phone number, other attributes that can feed the search engine
Google can’t scrape the deep web
Memex tool indexes the deep web – Eric’s search engine uses that
Eric does design work for the Memex project
Developed by the amazing Chris White
Eric’s search engine uses the Tor driver in Selenium to .onion sites
What are some of the technical and legal challenges that you experienced in the course of your work?
Most of the technical challenges are around automated processing
Legal structure provides some limits on what can be worked on
Does your search engine try to infer who might be engaged in work voluntarily as opposed to those being forced into it their will?
No, because they get all their case referrals from detective work
You have to have been hospitalized or in some other way come the attention of the authorities for being deprived of rights
Trafficking looks very different in different cultures
Global similarities
Afraid to say why if hurt
Forced into having sex against your will
Clear patterns of indication
Urban versus Suburban versus Rural
Fracking towns
Demographics are very different – mostly men very women, LOTS of ads for sex workers
Only helping people that want to be helped
What was the most surprising fact you uncovered as part of research?
Imagery of exploited children is so depressing and sad
Without revealing anything you shouldn’t, are you aware of being set free as a result of your work?
“Not my work, our work”
Not an individual effort
lawyers, analysts, larger DAs office
Given the complicated socio-economic aspects of human and prosecution of those who are responsible, can you discuss of the moral and ethical considerations that you have confronted with while building these tools?
Privacy is the biggest concern
Open source book to teach colleagues at the DA’s office how program to in Python
Sometimes Eric works at Civic Hall
Are there any projects out there that you consider similar to you are working on?
Thorn’s Spotlight tool
Memex Project
Polaris Project
Datakind Anti Trafficking
dosomething.org – more broadly focused – help center for teens
RescueForensics – stage startup
What would it take for other municipalities and law agencies to get started with using your tools?
Go to https://github.com/EricSchles?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Alert System and investa_gator
Contact Eric at ericschles@gmail.com to collaborate
How can our listeners get involved and help you with this Chris
Tweet at @EricSchles or E-mail Eric
Volunteer for any of the non profit anti-trafficking groups
Message to the community: There is a world of good waiting to happen
Picks
Tobias
@accidental_aRt
tldrlegal.com
Rishloo
Chris
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Overture
Alchemist Brewing’s Heady Topper
Hen of the Wood
Eric
James Powell’s Blog
Julia Nunes
XKCD
Explain XKCD
Keep in Touch
Twitter: @EricSchles
Eric’s About.me page
More From Eric
He presented at PyGotham 2014
He also talked at the Open Data Science Conference 2015 Boston
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA