Big Brother Wants Your Help to Track Down Pedophiles

It’s no secret to anyone that we are all under constant surveillance. London is probably the most surveilled city in the world, with security cameras focused on just about every public place in the city, but most cities are now gridlocked with intersecting security cameras.

So, yeah, privacy went by the board more than ten years ago, and there’s nothing that we can do about it…but at least we can use the intrusions on our privacy to track down some real villains.

There’s a website and smart phone app called Traffickcam.com that wants you to take pictures of your hotel rooms as you go about your travels and upload them to their servers so that they can use those images to track down pederasts and child molesters.

It seems that such people tend to use hotel rooms to shoot sexually explicit pictures which are then offered for sale on the Dark Web.  That makes a certain kind of sense. People with children in tow are always passing through hotel lobbies and sometimes the kids don’t look very happy about it…but it is a brave man or woman who will step up to confront a total stranger who seems to be giving some random kid a hard time and ask for identification.

The TraffickCam program was created in 2015 by The Exchange Initiative, an organization dedicated to cracking down on sex trafficking of all kinds. On their website, The Exchange Initiative calls sex trafficking a modern-day equivalent of slavery in which adults and children are forced to commit sex acts. Traffickers use drugs, violence, physical restraints, and psychological tools to keep their victims under control.

The numbers are daunting, with 300,000 underage Americans, some of them less than 12 years of age, being  lured into sex slavery every year in a $32 billion a year industry…but that’s just a drop in the bucket when compared to the estimated 20 to 30 million enslaved people worldwide, according to DoSomething.org which estimates that the per capita cost of a slave today is just $90.

Think about that for a moment. Human beings are being sold into slavery around the world for the cost of a moderately priced dinner for four people. Worse yet, they are being sold for less money than some people pay to have their cars detailed.

DoSomething.org also estimates that 80 percent of these indentured humans are being used for sexual exploitation; only 19 percent are actually being used for slave labor, another indication of how the value of manual labor continues to decrease around the world as robotics take over from human workers.  No one has yet invented a convincing robotic hooker, although they are probably in the works. The average age for slaves entering the slave trade is around 13 years of age. It is estimated 55 percent of the enslaved are females.

The U.S. State Department estimates that 600,00 to 800,000 people are bought, sold or driven into slavery each year,  and that number only reflects the victims who are transported across international borders. No one knows how many slaves may be held in the countries where they were born. They don’t get counted.

It seems like an absurdly simple thing to do. If you are frequent traveler, all you have to do to strike a blow for freedom is to join Traffickcam.com, take some snapshots and upload them from your phone. Even if you don’t travel much, the snapshots you take on your yearly vacation might just save someone’s life.

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