Editor’s Note: This article contains discussions related to child sexual abuse and pornography.
Child predators are on high alert as organizations around the globe have begun rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) tools to bring sex traffickers to justice and rescue young victims, according to “Sound of Freedom” executive producer Paul Hutchinson.
Hutchinson, who has led 70 undercover rescue missions across 15 countries, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that he has worked with “black hat” hackers to help identify child predators and bring them to justice.
“The black hats. These guys are some of the best hackers anywhere. Some of them do highly illegal things for the right reasons, right? These are the guys who took down the Ashley Madison site and exposed all the guys who were cheating on their wives,” he said.
Through this relationship, the hackers were able to develop a piece of AI software to identify potential instances of child pornography on the dark web and other less-trodden corridors of the internet—where criminals believe they are truly anonymous.
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“What these guys aren’t thinking is the fact that once they have those things on their computer, and they’re part of a file-sharing network, this software can go in there and say, hey, I’m looking for this XYZ video of this child rape video, right? And boom, their computer is showing, hey, have that one too,” Hutchinson said.
The software can then illuminate a global identifier number that is unique to each individual computer. This number is not hidden by encrypted connections, such as a virtual private network (VPN). As a result, the hackers know when that computer goes online and where it originated.
“This one piece of software in one month in the United States identified 800,000 unique individuals who downloaded one or more child rape videos. That’s a huge number. And that’s just what this thing caught,” Hutchinson told Fox News Digital.
The “Sound of Freedom” producer noted that this number represents a “big problem” in society, wherein people fall into an “addictive cycle” after consuming large quantities of pornography.
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“That addiction for some of them ended up being like any drug addiction where you needed something harder to have that same fix. For some, harder was a little bit, you know, maybe rape videos or whatever. For some of them, harder was a little bit younger,” he said.
Pretty soon, these individuals are musing about something they wouldn’t have even thought was attractive five years ago, leading them to act out these horrific fantasies, according to Hutchinson.
In 2024, a U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report revealed an increase in both victim identification and convictions versus 2022, with 133,948 victims identified and 7,115 convictions in 2023.
A total of 1,912 persons were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2022, a 26% increase from the 1,519 persons referred in 2012, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
One black hat hacker who worked with his team was tasked with finding a man who U.S. federal agencies had chased over the course of a decade. The individual in question reportedly had abused well over one hundred children.
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“He was bragging about how he could get these kids to take their clothes off within two or three sessions of doing a photography session at his place, and then he’s selling these children to wealthy Americans coming down. And the FBI couldn’t find him. We’re like, are you kidding me?” Hutchinson recalled.
The hacker was able to breach into different file-sharing services on the dark web and determine that this man was uploading from Costa Rica and then later Nicaragua.
After identifying the names of some of the individuals the man had been spending time with in the country, Hutchinson and his team acquired the IP addresses of these individuals and determined that they had all been logging in from the same sports bar.
“So, I was undercover, talking to these guys and figuring out, and saying, ‘hey, yeah, I’m down here for this,’ and they go, ‘Oh, we’re gonna introduce you. We’ve got a friend named Bruce, keep this silent, but he takes care of guys just like you.’ Boom, we got a warm introduction to a guy who the FBI hadn’t got a hold of for 10 years,” Hutchinson told Fox News Digital.
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AI is also integrated with healing programs for the Child Liberation Foundation, an anti-sex trafficking and survivor rehabilitation nonprofit founded by Hutchinson in 2017.
Through these models, children who have been the victim of abuse can have a conversation with a therapist that the system can then animate into the kid’s favorite television character, such as Barney.
These systems, Hutchinson said, are created to help relieve trauma and are built on thousands of books related to child psychology and therapy.
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“There’s so much good out there that we are using to help combat this. Just as much as the bad guys are using deepfakes and whatever else to try to push their agenda in their direction. We’re going to win,” Hutchinson continued. “We’re gonna win this war because there’s way more good guys out there than there are bad guys and together, we can use this technology to save the kids.”
Readers can contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
