[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 8 (Thursday, January 12, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S308-S309]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
INVESTIGATION ON INTERNET SEX TRAFFICKERS
Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I rise today during Human Trafficking
Awareness Week to talk about the scourge of human trafficking, and,
specifically, about an investigation that the Senate has just concluded
that matters to every single State represented in this Chamber and to
every American.
We are told now that human trafficking, including sex trafficking, is
a $150 billion a year industry. That makes it the second largest
criminal enterprise in the world, behind the drug trade. Unfortunately,
it is happening in all of our States, including my home State of Ohio.
It is growing as a problem.
A couple of weeks ago, two people were arrested in my home town of
Cincinnati in connection with sex trafficking. Police charged a women
with luring an underage girl to commit a sex act with a 56-year-old
man.
That was just 2 weeks after police in Blue Ash, OH, just up the road,
broke up what they said was a sex trafficking ring at a hotel. Police
said that two men and two women rented two rooms at a hotel, paying
cash, and forced four different women to perform sex acts. The women
were given crack cocaine and heroin, presumably to keep them dependent
on their traffickers.
This is what I am hearing back home a lot when I talk to victims of
sex trafficking. Typically, drugs are involved. In Ohio, it is usually
heroin. These cases are alarming, and, unfortunately, we have reasons
to believe that the problem is getting worse not better. The National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, really, the expert on this
issue, particularly of kids who get involved in sex trafficking,
reports an 846-percent increase in reports of suspected child sex
trafficking from 2010 to 2015. That is an over 800-percent increase
just in those 5 years.
The organization found this spike to be ``directly correlated to the
increased use of the Internet to sell children for sex.'' So it is kind
of the dark side of the Internet, isn't it. What I am told sometimes by
survivors of trafficking is that they say: Rob, this has moved from the
street corner to the cell phone. There is widespread evidence that sex
trafficking is increasingly doing that all over our country.
In order to confront this problem, as chairman of the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, along with my colleague and ranking
member Senator Claire McCaskill, I opened a bipartisan investigation
into sex traffickers and their use of the Internet. This investigation
began about 2 years ago. The National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children says that nearly three-quarters--73 percent--of all suspected
child sex trafficking reports it receives from the general public
through its cyber tip line are linked to one Web site--a single Web
site. That Web site is called Backpage.com.
According to a leading anti-trafficking organization called Shared
Hope International, ``[s]ervice providers working with child sex
trafficking victims have reported that between 80 and 100 percent of
their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com.'' Eighty to
100 percent of their clients have been bought and sold on Backpage.com.
Again, that is consistent with everything I have heard when I have
been back home and spoken to and met with sex trafficking survivors.
Backpage now operates in 97 countries, 934 cities worldwide. It is
valued at well over half a billion dollars. According to an industry
analysis, in 2013, 8 out of every 10 dollars spent on online commercial
sex trafficking in the United States went to this one Web site,
Backpage.
Others, by the way, have chosen not to engage in this. There have
been a number of cases around the country, including in Ohio, where
Backpage.com was used by traffickers to sell underage girls for sex.
Last spring, in my own State of Ohio, a man, who by the way has nine
children of his own, was sentenced to 12 years in Federal prison for
trafficking four underage girls who had run away from home in Akron and
Canton, OH. He kept them locked in a hotel, supplied them with drugs
like marijuana, heroin, and ecstasy, and sold them for sex on
Backpage.com. When he was arrested, by the way, he was found with more
than 8,000 bags of heroin.
Just this week, or a week later after that, a man from Fort Wayne,
IN, was charged with human trafficking and child prostitution after he
was arrested on his way to Ohio. His intention, police say, was to
traffic a 14-year-old girl whom he had met on Facebook, raped, and whom
he planned to sell on Backpage.com.
Backpage says it leads the industry in its screening of
advertisements for illegal activity. In fact, Backpage's top lawyer has
described their screening process as the key tool for disrupting and
eventually ending human trafficking via the World Wide Web.
But despite these boasts, this Web site and its owners consistently
have refused to cooperate with our investigation, with other
investigations relating to lawsuits around the country. With regard to
our situation, we subpoenaed them for the documents, and they still
refused to provide the documents or to testify. As a result, as my
colleagues will remember, this body, the Senate, for the first time in
over 20 years, voted unanimously to pass a civil contempt citation to
require them to supply the documents, to come forward with this
information.
In August a Federal court order rejected Backpage's objection to that
subpoena and compelled the company to turn over the subpoenaed
documents to the subcommittee. Backpage appealed that and asked for a
delay in that order. They took it all the way up to the Supreme Court
of the United States. But their request was rejected. Since then, the
subcommittee has been able to review the documents that have been
submitted--over 1 million documents--including emails and other
internal documents.
What we found was very troubling, to say the least. After reviewing
the documents, the subcommittee published a staff report on Monday of
this week that conclusively shows that Backpage has been more deeply
complicit in online underage sex trafficking than anyone imagined. We
reached three principle findings: first, that Backpage has knowingly
covered up evidence of criminal activity by systematically editing its
so-called adult ads; second, that Backpage knows that it facilitates
prostitution and even child sex trafficking; and third, that despite
the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in
2014, taking them outside of the United States, the true owners of the
company are the founders--James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer,
their chief executive officer.
First, on the editing of ads, our report shows that Backpage has
knowingly covered up evidence of crimes by systematically deleting
words and images suggestive of illegal conduct, including of child sex
trafficking. That editing process sanitized the content of millions of
advertisements in order to hide important evidence from law
enforcement.
In 2006, Backpage executives instructed staff to edit the text of
adult ads, not to take them down but to edit them, which is exactly how
they facilitated this type of trafficking, including child sex
trafficking. By October 2010, Backpage executives had a formal process
in place of both manual and automated deletion of incriminating words
and phrases in ads.
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer personally directed his employees to create
an electronic filter to delete hundreds of words indicative of sex
trafficking or prostitution from ads before they were published.
Again, this filter did not reject the ads because of the obvious
illegal activity. They only edited the ads to try to cover it up. The
filter did not change what was advertised, only the way it was
advertised. So Backpage did nothing to try to stop this criminal
activity. They facilitated it knowingly.
Why did they do that? Backpage executives were afraid they would
erode their profits. It is a very profitable business. In Ferrer's
words, they were
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afraid they would ``piss off a lot'' of customers. What terms did they
delete? Beginning in 2010, Backpage automatically deleted words
including ``lolita''--referencing a 12-year-old girl in a book who was
sold for sex--``teenage,'' ``rape,'' ``young,'' ``little girl,''
``teen,'' ``fresh,'' ``innocent,'' ``school girl,'' and even ``amber
alert''--and then published the edited versions of the ads on their Web
site. Backpage also systematically deleted dozens of words related to
prostitution.
This filter made these deletions before anyone at Backpage even
looked at the ad. When law enforcement officials asked for more
information about the suspicious ads, as they have routinely done,
Backpage had already destroyed the original ad posted by the
trafficker, and the evidence was gone.
So this notion that they were trying to help law enforcement is in
the face of the fact that they actually destroyed the ads that had the
evidence. We will never know for sure how many girls and women were
victimized as a result. By Backpage's own estimate, the company was
editing 70 to 80 percent of the ads in the adult section by late 2010.
Based on our best estimate, that means Backpage was editing more than
half a million ads every year. Internal emails indicate the company was
using the filter to some extent as late as 2014. We simply don't know
if they are still using a filter. Eventually, Backpage reprogrammed its
filters to reject some ads that contained certain egregious words
suggestive of sex trafficking.
But the company did this by coaching its customers on how to post
clean ads to help facilitate the criminal conduct of these traffickers.
So they did reject some ads, but then they went back to the customer to
say: This is how you could do it better. For example, starting in 2012,
a user advertising sex with a teen would get this error message:
``Sorry, `teen' is a banned term.''
With a one-word change to the ad, the user would be permitted to post
the same ad, the same offer. In October 2011, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer
directed his technology consultant to create an error message when a
user entered an age under 18 years old. Just like the word filter, the
customer could just enter a new age that the ad would then post.
With regard to ownership, our investigation revealed that acting
through a serious of domestic and international shell companies,
Backpage's founders lent their CEO, Carl Ferrer, more than $600 million
to buy the Web site. While Ferrer is the owner of Backpage, Backpage's
previous owners retain near total debt equity in the company and
continue to reap Backpage's profits in the form of their loan
repayments.
They can also exercise control over Backpage's operations and
financial affairs pursuant to the loans and to other agreements. The
elaborate corporate structure under which Ferrer purchased Backpage
through a series of foreign entities appears to provide absolutely no
tax benefit--based on their accountant's information to us--and serves
only to obscure Ferrer's U.S.-based ownership.
Based on all of these findings, it is clear that Backpage actively
and knowingly covered up criminal sexual activity--sex trafficking--
that was taking place on its Web site, all in order to increase its
profits at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.
Backpage has not denied a word of these findings. Instead, several
hours after our report was issued, the company closed what they call
their adult section. They closed it down. Frankly, this just validates
our findings.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said this about
Backpage's closure of its adult site: ``As a result [of this closure],
a child is now less likely to be sold for sex on Backpage.com.''
No one is interested in shutting down legitimate commercial activity
and speech, but we do want to put a stop to criminal activity.
I want to thank Senator McCaskill and her staff for their shoulder-
to-shoulder work with my team on the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations on this bipartisan investigation. I am also grateful to
the members of the full committee and the Senate as a whole for
unanimously supporting us as we pursued the enforcement of this
subpoena against Backpage.com.
But we are not done. In the weeks and months ahead, I intend to
explore whether potential legislative remedies are necessary and
appropriate to end this type of facilitation of online sex trafficking.
At a hearing on the report on Tuesday, Backpage CEO and other company
officials pled the Fifth Amendment, invoking the right against self-
incrimination, rather than respond to questions about the report's
findings.
The subcommittee also heard powerful testimony from parents whose
children had been trafficked on Backpage.com. One mother talked about
seeing her missing daughter's photograph on Backpage.com, frantically
calling the company to tell them that was her daughter and to please
take down the ad.
Their response: Did you post the ad?
Her response: Of course I didn't post the ad. That is my daughter.
Please take it down.
Their response: We can only take it down if you paid for the ad.
I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort to ensure that does
not happen again. What happens to these kids is not just tragic; it is
evil.
I urge my colleagues to join me in reforming our laws so they work
better to protect these children.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Blunt). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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