Double Edged Swords: The Role of Technology in Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling

Background

This report summarises the key points raised during a closed roundtable discussion convened on 12th September 2024 by NatCen International, the global arm of the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), and Westminster Business School, to mark the launch of their new  Research Centre on Peripheral Populations. This in-person roundtable event was held at the Orla Gough Lecture Theatre of the University of Westminster and explored the role of technology in both exacerbating and countering exploitation in human trafficking and migrant smuggling. 

The two-hour discussion was chaired by Dr Sherine El Taraboulsi–McCarthy, Director of NatCen International; and Professor Lilian Miles, Director of the Research Centre on Peripheral Populations. Expert speakers include Sylvia Musalagani, Head of Safety Policy for Africa, Middle East and Turkey at Meta; Dr Tom Higgens, Director of Data and Technology, and Lucrezia Bosio, Data Engagement Manager at Stop the Traffik; Professor Roza Tsagarousianou at the School of Media and Communications, University of Westminster; Dr Alexander Bolotov at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Westminster; as well as Joe Calouri, Director of Crime, Justice and Security at NatCen. Participants at the event included academics from different disciplines, humanitarian researchers, and charitable donors based in the UK. The discussion was guided by the following provocative questions:

• To what extent are emerging technological advancements being weaponised by human smugglers for the exploitation of migrants and citizens?
• What forms of international solidarity among UN agencies, NGOs and counter-terrorism networks are necessary to tackle digitally enabled smuggling and trafficking?
• What lessons are there from other areas of law enforcement in using technology to counter people smuggling?
• Which emerging technologies are likely to present the greatest opportunities to people smugglers, and how should UK law enforcement prepare to combat their use?
• To what extent are government authorities able to adopt technology in regulating migration and, at the same time, meet its human rights obligations?
• What are migrants’ experiences and perceptions of the use of technological tools by smugglers? When do these technologies lead to more exploitation and abuse, and when do they facilitate their movements?
• How can migrants be supported by technological solutions in transit and host countries? How can such technologies help them avoid exploitation and abuse?

Key points

Under Chatham House rules, this report will summarise the key points without identifying the speakers or participants who raised them during the session.

Distinguishing between human trafficking and migrant smuggling

While human trafficking and migrant smuggling are often discussed together, including at this event, they are very different concepts. Human trafficking involves forcing or deceiving a person into movement within or across countries, isolating them from their original communities to control and exploit them during and/or after the journey for profit. It occurs in three stages: recruiting, demanding and profiting. Typical victims of human trafficking include sex workers in London’s old King’s Cross in the 1980s, many of whom were trafficked from Northwest England, had lives controlled by traffickers, and were exploited for profits from satisfying market demands in prostitution.

Migrant smuggling, by contrast, more specifically involve paying for the service of crossing international borders irregularly. In other words, the two concepts differ in terms of geography (any vs international movements) and consent (exploitation vs transaction). Under international law, victims of human trafficking are considered victims of crime, but smuggled migrants are not. That said, many cases of migrant smuggling morph into human trafficking when smugglers make use of their advantaged position to deceive, coerce or exploit migrants.

Morality in migrant smuggling

In this distinction, human trafficking is more clearly unethical because in involves exploitation by coercion and deception. Less so for migrant smuggling. Research by NatCen International and the University of Westminster has revealed that smugglers are portrayed and perceived very differently by the West and local societies. While Western governments and media easily describe smugglers as criminals and gangs, smugglers are often well-respected by refugees and even seen as their friends. Research in refugee camps also reveal that many smugglers are themselves refugees and asylum-seekers. For instance, a BBC documentary on North Africa mentioned that a smuggler is a respectable police officer who smuggle migrants as a side hustle for extra money.

However, both smugglers and migrants are often criminalized for crossing international borders irregularly, even though asylum-seeking is a human right under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and most refugees are forced to move not by traffickers but by humanitarian crises like war, poverty and underdevelopment. Before delving into discussions about the role of technology in countering trafficking, discussants warned against falling into the conventional border security perspective which obscures the root of the problem, namely crises caused by colonialism in the past, imperialistic activities by world powers in the present, and consequential global inequalities.

In this vein, discussants suggested that the provision of safe and legal routes for refugees to seek asylum is the only way to eliminate exploitative human trafficking, because it renders irregular border crossings much less appealing and profitable. However, there is still a long way to go towards this end. Current eligibility criteria for asylum are often unclear and unfair. Many states require refugees to come directly from their home countries, which is an impossible requirement to satisfy considering their difficult situations. For example, Syrians who fled to and lived in Turkey for a few months before coming to the UK would not qualify for asylum, while those who came directly would, although they are escaping the same civil war in the same country. A rare example of well-implemented safe and legal routes in recent years are pathways for Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s war to the UK. This may be attributed to racial inequalities privileging white Europeans over people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), or other regions.

Technology as a double-edged sword

Focusing on exploitative human trafficking, abusers often use technology to facilitate their activities. Traffickers use social media platforms to stay anonymous and build trust with their online connections, before recruiting them into being trafficked with fake job offers, illicit services like money laundering, romance scams and sextortion.

It can be difficult for law enforcements to catch up with abrupt technological advancements. In the 1990s, burner phones were suddenly available to the masses at very cheap prices and at convenient high street locations in the UK. Drug dealers who are often involved in domestic human trafficking made use of burner phones immediately to organize their transactions while staying off-the-grid. The UK police scrambled to respond. Only later did they develop technologies to trace the location of phones by triangulating its cellular signals to cell towers. This enabled the police to locate suspected drug dealers and identify people in their vicinity, which ran the risk of suspecting innocent people who just so happen to be around drug dealers. It also fell short of collecting more nuanced evidence about the drug dealers’ activities. 

Now, authorities are using synthetic datasets with aggregated and anonymised metadata to track down trafficking networks. It was noted that the Ministry of Justice will publish a major synthetic dataset very soon. NGOs are also working in this space. Stop the Traffik, for example, collects and shares data with tech companies like Meta, international law enforcements such as Interpol and Europol, national police forces – but only when they are part of the solution and not the problem – as well as financial institutions such as banks and credit unions, who can freeze traffickers’ assets. But the use of data is not without its problems. There are questions over the scalability and update frequency, as well as ethics in sharing data across organisations. More importantly, governments and corporations owning and controlling the data would have much power in interpreting those data and acting upon them, reproducing their stereotypes against irregular migrants as shown in current, mainstream political discourse. 

Tech companies are also leveraging technology to tackle human trafficking. Meta continuously monitor behavioural signals that may indicate an account is used for trafficking. For example, if the account is sending hundreds or even thousands of friend requests to people in a specific location, it is likely to be traffickers targeting victims from particular regions. In cases of suspicious activities like this, Meta will close the accounts before they commit the potential violations and crimes. On the contrary, if the account did not show any signs of suspicious activity, there is little Meta can do even if there are reports that those accounts are controlled by human traffickers. Beside account monitoring, Meta also shares information they have with financial institutions so that suspicious transactions can be identified and stopped. The source codes used by Meta to monitor human trafficking are also made open, encouraging other tech companies to follow suit and adopt their mechanisms. Meta also helps victims by connecting them with legitimate help centres rather than fake accounts and pages pretending to offer help. Migrants are using social media to escape surveillance and reach safety information, such as legal aid.

Conclusions and next steps

At the end of the session, Dr Sherine McCarthy and Professor Lilian Miles thanked the speakers and participants for coming and contributing to the fruitful discussions. They were pleased that many critical issues were raised during the session but stressed that they have yet to be fully explored due to time constraints. It was suggested that the roundtable can be extended into a series, enabling discussants to continue the insightful conversations, especially around the complex morality of human trafficking and migrant smuggling, the ethics in the control and use of data about trafficking and smuggling, as well as bringing in a human rights or international law perspective. Finally, NatCen International and the Research Centre on Peripheral Populations celebrated their close partnership and expressed keen interests in continuing to work together on future events and research projects on this pressing topic.