Wow. Who could have guessed that "evangelical military vets" who are programmed by cults of sexual repression, exploitation, and human/sex trafficking would use surveillance tools to target vulnerable populations (i.e., sex workers)... Just like the FBI...

Evangelicals are programmed by:

> by cults of sexual repression, exploitation, and human/sex trafficking

I think you have evangelicals confused with the Catholic Church.

I think sex work should be legalized, but I don’t agree with your characterization.

Who could've guessed that when we give law enforcement or the military leeway in violating civil rights in the name of a specific societal concern, they will take that power and start broadening its scope

As always, first promise promise only for the biggest crimes, terrorist et al.. then suddenly it used for someone consuming weed. And then we are all excited to see what happens when the next ruler with dictatorship ambitions comes into place.

All for the good, "I had a bad feeling when voting for it but it was against the bad guys, right?" blablahblah, "noone could have ever expected it", "why do people always assume it goes that way" - bah.

Evangelicals are pretty pro LGBTP these days. Anyhow yes I agree with your post.

I don't think this is factual, see: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu... or the current controversy in the methodist church as an example.

>vulnerable populations (i.e., sex workers)

got a giggle out of me

they need all the support we can give them

i honestly can't tell if this is a joke

Their wages should be tied to inflation, certainly.

This might be a surprise to you, but many non US western countries have legalised sex work.

Why?

> “I fought the worst of the worst: ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban,” Skull Games president and former Delta Force soldier Jeff Tiegs has said. “But the adversary I despise the most are human traffickers.” Tiegs has told interviewers that he takes “counterterrorism / counterinsurgency principles” and applies them to these targets.

I agree with this. Human trafficking is a nice way of saying slavery. Human traffickers are some of the worst criminals on earth and I'm very happy that the counterintelligence techniques we've developed are used against them.

> The attempt to merge computerized counterinsurgency techniques with right-wing evangelism has left some Skull Games participants uncomfortable. One experienced attendee of the January 2023 Skull Games was taken aback by an abundance of prayer circles and paucity of formal training.

However, this is cultish stuff. It seems to me that Tiegs' statement above is cover for what seems to be a religio-political organization with overarching goals. It co-opts the good intentions of decent human beings who oppose slavery and sexual abuse into a situation that seems pretty exploitative on its own. Despicable.

* * *

> Human traffickers are some of the worst criminals on earth

... which is why it's so valuable to some people to expand the definition of "human trafficking" beyond ACTUAL human trafficking.

Right at the moment, if you hear the phrase "human trafficking" in some random place, especially used by somebody who's asking for money, power, or support of whatever kind, there seems to be about a 95 percent chance it's being used to refer to something that is NOT human trafficking as understood by normal people.

Someone going after people keeping child sex slaves doesn't really seem to be stretching the definition of human trafficking.

If you read the article, you'll see some TALK about child sex slaves. The only evidence you'll see of any ACTION is doxxing self-employed adult prostitutes.

That's probably because actual child sex slavery is relatively hard to find.

Call it logical fallacy, but just because it's hard [for you] to find doesn't mean it's not going on.

I used to work with multiple ex-vice detectives. They had some seriously harrowing stories about the shit they routinely found on motel raids.

If you think actual child sex slavery is "relatively hard to find," come visit Georgia. It's only been made hard to find because of FOSTA-SESTA; such services used to be advertised in plain English on Backpage.

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/atlanta/news/pr...

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/31-arrested-in-georgia-as-p...

That's totally irrelevant. I didn't say that it didn't exist.

Even if it WERE being advertised openly, there'd still be less of it around than plain old adult prostitution. And as you point out it's NOT being advertised openly. So it is in fact relatively hard to find.

Therefore these guys go for the low-hanging fruit, because as far as they're concerned all prostitution is human trafficking (one of them says exactly that in the article). In their propaganda, it's in their interest to talk as if they were going after children in bondage... except, of course, when they give a count of their cases. That number is going to include everybody.

I agree with you. But what do you think about organizations that use a facade of taking down child sex traffickers to cover up the fact that they use virtually all their resources to doxx self-employed adult sex workers?

These links are weak evidence that this is a wide-spread problem. Indeed, they arguably lack evidence for even the existence of human trafficking.

> https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/atlanta/news/pr...

48 of the 71 individuals identified (and having their names published online) are female adult sex workers. No claims are being made that any were victimized.

10 are crimes related to children, of those, 7 are "enticement", which may be LE setups. Certainly, no one being trafficked into motel rooms here.

We don't have details on the "11 juveniles recovered", but they are more like a 17y at risk of homelessness than what one would traditionally imagine to be "child sex slavery". It's also unclear if they are being helped by this recovery, or if you'll find their name appear on the arrest list for prostitution by next year's "human trafficking operation".

> https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/31-arrested-in-georgia-as-p...

What this article actually describes are people arrested for possession of CSAM. No claim is made that any victim was found during any motel raids. There is this:

> Seven of those arrested in Georgia traveled for the purpose of meeting and having sex with a minor.

But the phrasing makes it pretty reasonable to assume they were meetings setup by law enforcement.

Not to mention, the ones doxxing prostitutes also have a good reason to do so - perhaps creating a smokescreen around their own pedophilic closet. We already saw this in various ways, including the campaigns against gays and drug users.

> The only evidence you'll see of any ACTION is doxxing self-employed adult prostitutes.

Can you quote that part of the article? They make reference to looking for kids and browsing escort listings, but they're obviously looking for people on the younger side and even the article contains this bit:

> When asked about Skull Games’s position on arresting victims, Tiegs emphasized that “arresting is different from prosecuting” and argued, “Sometimes they do need to make the arrest, because of the health and welfare of that person. She needs to get clean, maybe she’s high. … Very rarely, in my opinion, is it right to charge and prosecute a girl.”

I don't see the word 'adult' at all in the article unless my ctrl+F isn't working, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that their "ACTION" is doxxing adults.

> "All we have is a picture and a fake name"

That's an admission that they don't know the target's age. Which we knew anyway; they can't know it until after they do the doxx.

Even if they go for the ones who both have pictures and look young, there are more 18-and-19-year-olds out there than 16-and-17-year-olds, so their "random" sample will be mostly adults. And of course nobody is going to post a picture of a CHILD-child, since that's obviously a huge red flag that will get them caught.

> "but, using some of these tools, you’re able to identify her mugshot."

Children don't tend to have mugshots that often. And, by the way, if they have one, that means the system has arrested them in the past and obviously failed to get anywhere.

> "Finding a target’s high school diploma or sonogram imagery nets 15 points,"

Children don't tend to have high school diplomas almost ever.

I have no idea what the sonogram thing is about.

> "while finding the same tattoo on multiple women would earn a whopping 300"

I will admit that that does sound pretty off, so I won't claim it as going after the "self-employed". However, it does count as going after adults, since it's hard for a minor to get a tattoo at all.

> "In a July Skull Games webinar, one participant noted that they had been able to use PimEyes to find a sex worker’s driver’s license posted to the web."

The longer you have your license, the more time there is for a picture of it to get posted.

In fact, all of the stuff they say they're using tends to accumulate over time. You are far more likely to find any of that stuff on an adult than on a teenaged minor, and you'll pretty much never find any of it on a child as the term is normally understood.

As for arrests, first, they've already been doxxed, by people most of them would really prefer not know who they are, before the question of arrest comes into it. Second, "the group has no information about how many have resulted in prosecutions or indictments of actual traffickers". So they're handing this stuff over to cops and at best just hoping they won't prosecute any of the people they consider to be victims. That's, um, irresponsibly optimistic.

> That's an admission that they don't know the target's age

That's what they start with, but a picture is a pretty good way to figure out if someone is likely to bee underage and they also do significant investigation before turning this over to the police.

> And of course nobody is going to post a picture of a CHILD-child, since that's obviously a huge red flag that will get them caught.

This idea that people never post obvious criminal activity online is kinda silly when we're discussing people getting outed by... posting obvious criminal activity online. You can say it shouldn't be criminal, but there are democratic means to change that and actual locations where prostitution is actually legal, like that county in Nevada.

Nobody in the article seems to dispute that they catch actual child sex slaves, though. The main complaint is the unsubstantiated idea that they're catching mostly adults, but no evidence of this is presented. Instead, you're reading a lot of things between a lot of lines to infer that and claiming these inferences are obvious when they're not.

> Children don't tend to have high school diplomas almost ever. > it's hard for a minor to get a tattoo at all.

Better, but hardly proof. And you can still be trafficked when not a child if you're being held against your will. It's not like adult sex slaves are faring any better or like they don't exist and deserve sympathy.

> The longer you have your license, the more time there is for a picture of it to get posted.

I got mine at 16, posting it is something you're more likely to do when young and dumb.

> So they're handing this stuff over to cops and at best just hoping they won't prosecute any of the people they consider to be victims. That's, um, irresponsibly optimistic.

The DAs have standards about this, they're not going to randomly prosecute someone forced into slavery and the cops are the best people to actually deal with this since it's their literal job in society.

Also I have to note that your solution here is to ignore people being forced into literal slavery because you disagree with a democratically created law and want it changed by fiat instead of trying to actually fix it.

I get that there's a sort of trolley problem, but one might think that maybe they could do something legal or change the law instead of demanding that people ignore child sex slaves being sold online because they might get caught breaking a law they, and you, disagree with.

What?

> Tiegs argued that “100 percent” of sex work is human trafficking

He's completely upfront about conflating all sex work with human trafficking. I genuinely don't understand how you could read this and not get that the point of the "trafficking" rhetoric is shifting the definition to encompass what's not generally considered human trafficking.

Kind of like how the slander of "groomers" is being hurled at any gender/sexual-orientation the speaker finds distasteful.

In many ways it's a repeat with different packaging of the "all homosexuals are pedophiles" from a generation or two ago, sometimes from the same people and interest-groups.

There are people in this thread bringing up that bullshit. I really dislike a lot of the recent discourse on HN.

Yup. It’s a great way to get federal grants for the vice squad and buy cool toys to fuck around with pimps.

Losing weed as a source of easy convictions is leading to new opportunities.

He has quite the gall as well. What did he expect the Afghanis to do, roll over and let a foreign invader come in an wander in their home lands free without consequence, with his gang raping, stealing, and killing? What a load of ...

Retarget them at religious pedophiles. The biggest pedophile problems seem to come from religious officials with the backing of their organization. There's been Catholic priest scandal after Catholic priest scandal.[1] The Boy Scouts of America turned out to be a nest of pedophile scout leaders.[2] Brooklyn's haredi community [3] and ultra-orthodox in Israel [4] had their own organized pedophile rings.

Quit worrying about sex workers and porno. It's those well-organized religious conspiracies with their claim to moral authority that are the real problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boy-scouts-america-have...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_cases_in_Brooklyn...

[4] https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/22-haredi-sex-offenders-ar...

Any evidence for your implication that sexual abuse is more common in religious organizations than secular organizations that deal with children? There’s about 15,000 sexual abuse complaints every year in schools: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/15/sexual-violence-rep....

For comparison the John Jay report found about 11,000 sexual abuse allegations against catholic priests over a 50+ year period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_Report. There are estimated to be about 12,500 victims in the Boy Scouts in total: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12000-boy-scout-members-victims-se....

That is not to say religious organizations should be off the hook for failing to deal with the pedophiles in their ranks. But estimates suggest 1-5% of the male population is pedophiles. The evidence suggests that abuse is actually a cross-cutting problem. It arises whenever you put adults in proximity to children. Why focus only on the religious organizations?

> Why focus only on the religious organizations?

Likely because OP hates religion. Their post was a reddit tier hot take on an issue that transcends religious bounds as you've pointed out. It's a common trope about child-abusing priests but people forget the vast majority of these cases occur in schools. Anything to take a shot at the church and paint it as a pedophile training camp, I guess. OPs sources are absolutely garbage.

For the downvoters here's some evidence: a 55% increase in sexual assault from 2016 to 2018 in schools [0]. They estimate it is likely undercounted.

We'd do a lot getting groomers out of school as quickly and as forcefully as we can.

EDIT: Seems I upset the groomers on HN with this post lolz. It's funny OP's trash sources are getting upvotes and I'm getting downvoted to hell. Perhaps HN needs to cull it's own groomer population.

EDIT 2: Stay mad groomers.

[0] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/sexua...

Perhaps posts that lead and end by hurling childhood insults, paired with vague statements presenting as obvious facts, is always going to be considered noise.

A weak nitpick, no substantial responses to the inconvenient facts provided, instead make it go away is the typical hn style, just like joe biden, just pretend it doesnt exist, censor, deny, and lie lie lie.

The school stat is not limited to complaints about school personnel, it includes child on child violence.

The abusers in the church were part of the power structure. That same power structure systematically covered up and protected the abusers. Same thing for the scouts.

That happens at schools too: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual....

This happened at my kid’s (not religious at all) school: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch...

It’s obviously easier to uncover this when dealing with large national or supra-national organizations like the Catholic Church or Boy Scouts than tens of thousands of individual school districts.

The number of adults in the school system is vastly larger than the number of Catholic priests.

There are 37,302 diocesan and religious-order priests in the United States vs 3,500,000 full and 500,000 part time teachers in the US + even more support staff.

You can look into the past demographics, but it looks like there is dramatically more victims per priest per year than per teacher per year.

Of course—congregations are much bigger than classrooms. But the figures above are cited in terms of complaints (corresponding to number of victims) not number of perpetrators. Thus the better comparison is how many people attend school versus the number who attend Catholic Church. Catholics are 1/4 of the population, and over the relevant timeframe (back to 1950), probably half or more attended church regularly.

Wait no, this doesn't make sense. You should be comparing the rates of bad actors against the number of potential actors (ie church staffs vs school staffs). Comparing the volume of potential victims is meaningless. To draw an extreme example, what would you say about a religious sect where 100% of its leaders were rapists but there was only 10 people in each congregation? That's okay because public schools have tons more students?

Parents care about the probability of their kid being victimized. They don’t care whether 1 priest abuses 10 kids in a congregation of 300 or 10 teachers abuse 10 kids in a school of 300. The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population. There’s more complaints in one year against schools than in 50 years against the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s partly because way more people attend school (everyone) than attend Catholic church regularly. But the difference isn’t a factor of 50. In the relevant period—complaints peaked in the 1980s—probably 1 in 8 Americans attended Catholic Church weekly. (Probably even more than that because families with children are much more likely to attend church.)

> The relevant metric is number complaints normalized by the relevant potential victim population.

It's obvious there's problems with either rate you'd choose for either task.

We have varying degrees of exposure / vulnerability within the populations. Neither one really directly leads to a "risk per unit of exposure of child" or "risk of a given person being an offender".

But it seems like you have some pretty motivated reasoning going on: it sure looks like religious organizations have not done well, and are relatively likely to be much worse per unit of youth exposure.

That’s exactly the point though—where is the evidence that churches are doing “much worse per unit of youth exposure?” OP is the one engaging in motivated reasoning—the top post doesn’t even attempt to make a comparison against the base rate of sexual abuse of children, which is unfortunately extremely high.

Actually, they've provided evidence (somewhat flawed) that you've tried to wave away with other evidence/preferring another rate (that seems more flawed to me).

Religious organizations have a) smaller number of personnel, b) fewer youth contacts in total, c) lower hours of contact per average youth than your comparison organizations. We can debate about the importance of each of these in the denominator, but they're all signifiers.

Worse, you're trying to compare numbers for schools that include student-on-student sexual violence (the vast majority of cases) to complaints against staff and clergy for churches.

Okay, so say you have a kid and you're putting them into bible study and you have a choice between two sessions, one with 20 kids and an instructor that has a 5% chance of being abusive, and another with 10 kids and an instructor with 9.5% chance of being abusive. You would suggest the latter is better because the odds are better for your kid?

The expectation is higher in the first case, but then chances that it's your particular kid would be 1/group size. So I guess it would be more accurate to have 5 kids in the first group to make it 1% vs .95%. That's still not any better is it?

At the end of the day, it boils down to this.

Do you rather have your kid to have big N% chance of being abused, or small n%. At a micro level, you might get more control, but at the macro level, the results in aggregate are what matter.

The number of possible victims isn’t the limiting factor here, it’s the number of pedophiles and their ability to prey on children. A substitute teacher may teach tens of thousands of children per year, but they don’t have a position of particular trust nor are they protected by the school system.

The core complaint isn’t that the Church has more perpetrators, but rather that by protecting the perpetrators they increased the number of victims per perpetrator.

> nor are they protected by the school system.

Example from the day before yesterday: "5 school employees arrested for alleged failure to report student's sexual assault"

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/5-school-employees-arrest...

Bonus one from a couple months ago: "Knoch Primary School principal charged with failing to report alleged sexual abuse"

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/knoch-primary-school...

I don’t see why you think that supports your argument.

Here's another, December of last year, there are a lot of these: "Three school administrators in Bellingham accused of failing to report alleged sexual assault"

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellingham/school-a...

If teachers are willing to cover up for random child molesters in the community what do you think they'd do for one of their own?

> what do you think they’d do for one of their own?

Hang them out to dry, as should be evident by your failure to find examples.

Teachers failing to report student on student violence isn’t actively protecting perpetrators the way the church was reported as doing. Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up. It’s a very different situation.

> Church administrators would move pedophiles to new communities multiple times after accusations showed up.

From a few months ago: Oversight failures allow sexually abusive teachers to quietly move from school to school

"It's called passing the trash," said Morgan Stewart, an attorney representing students who have accused teachers of sexual abuse at Redlands Unified District schools. "They'd give them recommendations, they'd give them approvals. You've got this culture that just allows it to happen again and again."

Failing to report reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse is a crime, yet federal officials and experts told CBS they believe school administrators often do not contact authorities for fear of damaging the reputation of a teacher or the school. And teachers told CBS they observed a culture that discouraged reporting suspicions of misconduct in their schools.

TLDR: This practice is repeated in schools across the United States, risking harm to millions of children, according to experts and federal officials. On average, one offender passes through three different school districts before being stopped, and can abuse as many as 73 children in their lifetime, according to a 2010 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual...

That GAO report shows some serious lapses at private and public schools, such as using the wrong name for a criminal background investigation. It highlighted a few cases of people being given a positive recommendation after being fired for such things as watching porn on school computers.

Nationwide fingerprint checks really should be mandatory here.

Quite a leap from a textbook example of bystander effect to “teachers are protecting pedophile teachers.”

Schools absolutely protect sexual abusers. At my kid’s school, it was an open secret in the 1970s through 1990s that teachers were sexually abusing students: https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/01/29/key-sch.... This is an affluent, extremely progressive, private school in a deep blue state. It’s just about the opposite of the Catholic Church.

I think this his the nail on the head. Any time you create a role and imbue it with unimpeachable morality or trust, grant it power, and bring it into close private contact with vulnerable persons, you have a recipe for abuse. Crime requires opportunity. Sometimes abusers are created by being placed into those roles. And of course some abusers are already fully formed, and will seek out those roles. I'm sure a lot of them they don't even do it knowingly. They gaslight and groom themselves into abusers as much as they gaslight and groom their victims. They're almost always male, except for a "rounding error". And you'll the pattern in an array of different roles: police, doctor, priest, scout master, BBC TV presenter, rock star, sports coach, therapist, charity boss. The more power and trust, and the greater the contract with the vulnerable, the more it'll happen.

John Jay Report also found that the sexual abuse has largely been a problem of homosexual pederasty, not pedophilia.

I don’t believe the sexes of the offender or victim matter much when it is between an adult and a child. Always wrong and that should not be sidelined or downplayed.

> The evidence suggests that abuse is actually a cross-cutting problem. It arises whenever you put adults in proximity to children. Why focus only on the religious organizations?

Focus should not be exclusively on religious organizations. But focus should be disproportionately on them because of their track record of using moral superiority to explain away and stop abusers.

Current "oh-so-progressive" pope is known to be a pedo enabler, having saved his own brother from accusations by moving him to south America, and generally conducting a words-only war against pedophilia. See the Emanuela Orlandi case.

Love it, love that the retargeting is fine as long as you control the new targets. Love it.