The testimony should be considered as a kick off for its final objective, and that is billing where I have recently voiced my concerns that the "re-engineering" of foster care initiative is nothing more than a free-for-all in the implementation of privatized billing schemes and absolute access to what should be considered as a human trafficking database, devoid of any public scrutiny.
Upon reading the submitted congressional testimony, it was found that there was no mention on why this "foster care to human trafficking pipeline" exists.
There was no mention of poverty being the crime of abuse and neglect, neither was there any mention of the lack of civil rights, the horrid conditions of drugging, rape, torture in foster care, nor the fact that these child welfare workers have the right to lie in a court of law to keep these children in foster care.
There was no mention of addressing the ills of poverty or the lack of access to resources.
There was no mention of being charged, without notice, placed on a central registry, without notification or the ability to enter a plea, neither acknowledgment of not being afforded the right to face one's accuser, or being tried as guilty until proven innocent.
If Ashton Kutcher claims to have saved so many foster children from the sex trafficking the industry, then why is it that no one from the foster care leadership communities has stepped forward to even state in the public record that this issue is so pervasive in child welfare, to even justify the activities of this new initiative?
The only thing this testimony promoted was a new fraud scheme to hustle money from the failed system of child welfare.
One would think if there is a need to further assist youth aging out of foster care, and those who just ran away, then that would be a red flag identifying just how bad the child welfare system is.
But, no.
There was much push for more privatization, without any topics being broached on the fact that privatization has no oversight nor a civil rights database.
What is even more questionable is why U.S. Senator John McCain is participating in anything dealing with human trafficking.
McCain Institute Caught Stealing Millions In Child Trafficking Donations
I am still waiting, for anyone besides myself, to speak out on these databases and their predictive modeling for financial sustainability.
Who is watching the watcher?
As of right now, the watchers are the same ones who have always watched over the children, in the name of the tax exempt God.
Having the financial and technical support of Google and Palantir, Kutcher is positioned as the spokesperson for Thorn as what I consider as another Clinton Global Initiative nefarious child welfare front to establish the next generational system to suck the Social Security Trust Fund, dry through its partner, the Hack Foster Care Silicon Valley Summit.
There is not one mention of any form of fraud prevention in billing, which will be Medicaid or the fact that foster care prepares children for human trafficking.
Why does foster care prepare children for human trafficking, well, if you want to track humans, what better way than starting with the child.
Ashton Kutcher Claims He Helped Cops Save Way More Sex-Trafficking Victims Than Authorities Say They've Found
On Wednesday, actor Ashton Kutcher testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on behalf of Thorn, an anti-sexual exploitation organization he co-founded with Demi Moore. Thorn's main project is Spotlight, a cloud-based data-collection and analysis tool that purportedly helps police find sex traffickers. According to Kutcher's testimony before Sen. John McCain and other U.S. lawmakers, the app—funded by the McCain Foundation—has helped save more than 6,000 U.S. sex-trafficking victims, including 2,000 minors, in the past 12 months.
But there's something fishy about these and other stats put forth about Spotlight. According to Cloudera, the company behind Spotlight's technology, the app was used in 8,305 criminal investigations into sex trafficking between September 2015 and September 2016, identifying 4,624 adult victims and 2,025 minor sex-trafficking victims (defined in the U.S. as anyone under age 18 engaging in prostitution).
These numbers wildly outpace the average number of new criminal investigations into sex trafficking opened in the U.S. each year or average number of victims identified by U.S. law enforcement. For instance, between late 2009 and late 2015, FBI agents working with state and local police across America identified an average of just 175 minor victims per year, according to the Attorney General's 2015 Annual Report to Congress and Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
The report also notes that in government fiscal-year 2015, the FBI identified around 672 adult and child victims of sex or labor trafficking. The FBI opened 802 human-trafficking investigations (resulting in 453 convictions) that year, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened 1,034 sex- or labor-trafficking investigations (and got 51 sex-trafficking convictions). In addition, Uniform Crime Reporting data from the states indicates that 744 investigations into state-level sex-trafficking offenses were opened in 2015.
There's almost certainly overlap between the FBI and state investigations. But even if we count all cases separately, we're looking at a total of 2,580 investigations into sex or labor trafficking—5,725 less cases than Thorn allegedly helped identify in a one-year period.
While final state and federal data from 2016 has not yet been released, the Justice Department did put out a January 2017 report summing up the previous year's efforts to combat human trafficking. It mentions neither a significant increase in the number of victims identified or investigations opened in 2016. The FBI and its human-trafficking task force partners among state and local law-enforcement opened around 1,800 investigations into sex- or labor-trafficking last year.
How can Kutcher's group have helped in dramatically more sex-trafficking investigations than were actually opened across America? I can see two explanations. But first, it's important to note how Spotlight works. While no one involved will divulge specifics—Kutcher told Congress he "can't disclose exactly how it works," and my multiple attempts to communicate with Thorn have gone unanswered—what we do know about the app is that it collects and analyzes adult ads posted to Backpage and similar sites. Using proprietary techniques, Spotlight pinpoints ads allegedly likely to feature sex trafficking.
It's impossible to know how accurate their method is without more details. But the majority of adult ads on Backpage are posted by sex workers themselves, and the people arrested in cops' "human trafficking" stings based on these ads are predominantly sex workers and/or men looking to pay other adults for sex. Police might be looking for trafficking victims when they contact ads featuring young-looking women or certain supposed code words, but when their hunches don't pan out (and this is most of the time), they arrest the target for prostitution.
Considering the data we do have on state and federal human trafficking cases, the only way the numbers from Kutcher's group could make sense is if a) they're counting every red-flag ad Spotlight identifies, regardless of whether these tips are ultimately deemed worthwhile enough to prompt a criminal investigation, or b) they're counting cases of consensual prostitution between adults and lumping all adult sex workers identified into the "adult trafficking victim" numbers.
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