Santa Clara Amps Up Human Trafficking Patrol Ahead Of Super Bowl 50
SANTA CLARA (CBS SF) -- With Super Bowl 50 now just six months away, the Santa Clara County Sheriff is beefing up their human trafficking task force.
Highly trained detectives use specialized equipment to uncover sexual photos and videos of children buried deep in encrypted drives, even if they've been deleted.
Smartphones can often be hacked, even if they have a password, to extract data, texts, emails and browser histories.
Human trafficking for sex or labor has never been easier, faster or more lucrative. It's a $32 billion a year business.
"It's growing faster and has more money in it that arms trafficking or drug trafficking," said Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen.
Technology is driving the boom. There's now a whole generation of websites with features like ratings, search filters and reputation management.
"One gets taken down, another pops up," said Benita Hopkins with the anti-trafficking organization Love Never Fails. "They are usually always ahead of the game."
The most popular, by far, is Backpage.com, with tens of thousands of sex ads a day from all over the world.
But Backpage is in the cross hairs of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart in Illinois who is trying to shut down the site, saying it enables underage prostitution and human trafficking.
The company's attorney sent KPIX 5 court documents saying it's a First Amendment issue: "The Constitution does not allow censorship by a vigilante with a badge seeking to impose his views of what is or is not permissible speech."
Rosen says they work with website operators to discourage human trafficking.
"Sites that have not been willing to work with us, are simply sites that we give more attention to," he said.
As long as these websites stay active, investigators will use them for their advantage and as evidence of underage prostitution.
