Original subtitles

This week on Vice:

combating crime on the Web.

You've been in less than a minute

and you have four private messages.

And then, the fight for jobs

in coal country.

We're a couple of miles deep into the mountain.

This is the most terrifying place to be if you're claustrophobic.

This community is founded on coal.

There's nothing else.

Go, go, go!

We are not animals!

Never in human history

has there been such universal access to information.

Now, this has been the result of the spread of the Internet

around the world.

But this increased connectivity also has a dark side,

allowing global criminal economies to flourish online.

We embedded with the agents

from the Department of Homeland Security,

as they scramble to combat

this burgeoning sector of the Internet.

We're at an undisclosed location

where an undercover agent with HSI

has been tracking a woman in the Philippines,

who has been exploiting children, including her own daughter,

to perform sex acts online.

The undercover agent, who we'll call Mike,

is posing as a pedophile who wants to buy

an online sex show featuring young children.

"Please, all girls are here now."

Doggie style, spread legs...

The suspected pimp is located in the Philippines,

so Mike is sharing this evidence in real time

with anti-trafficking agents in Manila

who are gearing up to raid the location.

The woman puts the children on camera,

giving Mike the evidence he needs to launch the operation.

So, the youngest is five, and the oldest is 13,

and there's seven of them.

Mommy!

How are you feeling?

The global production of child pornography

has become a multi-billion dollar industry,

and the number of images and videos being distributed online

is skyrocketing.

One of the biggest markets for this illicit material is the US.

So, each pin represents

a individual IP address where...

child pornography files are being shared

within the last hour.

So this is right now?

This is right now, and this will keep going.

- It's not stopping? - No, and it won't.

It will literally cover the whole country eventually.

Analysts here comb through vast quantities

of sexual abuse imagery,

looking for clues to identify perpetrators and victims.

In 2015, they analyzed

more than 7,500 terabytes of data,

or the equivalent of almost 100 years of video.

Division Chief Mike Prado

acknowledged his team is facing an uphill battle.

The enormity of the problem

is... undebatable.

Back in the late '90s, when the Internet

really became ubiquitous across the United States,

um, we saw a major increase

in child exploitation material being traded and trafficked.

Unfortunately, as we continue to see

the use of the Internet grow in developing countries,

we've seen that problem continue to exponentially grow.

What kind of resources does it take to do this?

We're seeing increases

on average of about 20 to 30 percent

every year, each year,

in the amount of data that our forensic examiners have to go through.

So, I mean, it is a full-time,

24-hours-a-day operation,

going through this material.

Stopping the spread of these digital images is crucial,

because a recent government study showed

that more than half of the individuals

who admitted to watching child porn,

also admitted to physically abusing a child.

Back in the Philippines, HSI Special Agent Mike,

was investigating a case that followed this type of escalation.

So, this guy, how long have you been talking to him?

We followed Mike to a restaurant,

where he'd arranged to meet his target, known as Kim.

Although he's never met Kim,

he's seen plenty of pictures of the girls he was selling.

Once the deal was made, Kim expected an easy payday

for bringing underage girls to a sex party at Mike's rented condo.

Which is what?

One strike team was staged in an apartment down the hall,

while another set up in the condo's master bedroom

to record the evidence.

As soon as Kim takes the money,

the strike team can move in.

Go, go, go! Go!

Hey!

Kim's crimes now carry

a mandatory life sentence in the Philippines.

But as we learned the next day,

Kim wasn't willing to pay that price.

What happened yesterday?

Unfortunately, um...

he committed suicide.

While in custody, Kim hung himself

with the cord of an electric fan.

Apprehending a single predator is difficult enough,

but it doesn't compare to the challenge of rehabilitating

the tens of thousands of Filipino children who are abused each year.

It's up to nonprofits, like the Preda Foundation,

to help them begin the long road to recovery.

Counselor Eresa Venson

can personally attest that this therapy works.

While places like Preda do their best,

they simply can't cope with the sheer volume

of children showing up at their doors.

And as Internet access spreads further

into poor communities across the Philippines,

the reports of abuse have grown exponentially

to almost 50,000 cases in 2015.

The difficult part of this job is that we can't do more,

that there is only so many hours in a day.

There's only so many agents

and detectives and police officers

that have the ability,

the time, the resources

to devote to this problem,

because we know, at the end of the day,

when we go home, that this material

is continuing to be produced.

There's no doubt that more can and should be done

across the board.

While authorities struggle

to contain the spread of child porn,

a radical experiment is underway,

that might turn the tide in the fight against online predators.

Sweetie, an avatar of an 11-year-old Filipino girl,

was created by a Dutch NGO called Terre Des Hommes

as a digital solution to a digital problem.

One of Sweetie's operators agreed to show us

just how effective she is at identifying predators.

You've been in less than a minute

and you have four private messages.

"What about your pussy?" How many people are in this chat?

Sweetie is the brainchild of Hans Guijt,

one of the directors at Terre Des Hommes.

The moment you go online

and pretend to be a 10- or 11-year-old child from the Philippines,

they just jump on you.

And they're so eager

that actually they volunteer all sorts of information

which you can use to identify the perpetrators.

During a 10-week test, Sweetie's four operators

were able to identify over 1,000 men

from 71 countries.

They did an incredible job,

but they only covered 19 chat rooms on the Internet.

So, 19 chat rooms is nothing.

We need to scale up.

You can no longer work with human operators.

You need to look for an alternative,

and the alternative is artificial intelligence,

the application of chatbots,

and that's exactly what we're doing.

Sweetie 2.0 will have sophisticated new avatars

based on motion capture technology,

and will be fully automated so that a virtual army of Sweetie-bots

can patrol the Web,

identifying potential predators

on an industrial scale.

Instead of conducting three of four chats with individuals,

we'll have hundreds of conversations simultaneously.

One of our objectives is to make sure that law enforcement

will take over this work.

We have to do something about it.

And the only way to do something about it

is to look on the Internet,

and find out who is sitting on the other side of the webcam.

The coal industry

became one of the focal points

of the 2016 election,

with President Trump making the return of coal mining

a central campaign promise.

We're going to save the coal industry!

We're going to save that coal industry!

Believe me, we're gonna save it.

But in the span of just one year,

three of America's largest coal companies

filed for bankruptcy

and dozens of mines closed,

leaving the sector reeling.

So we sent Isobel Yeung to the heart of coal country

to see what it will take to revitalize

this controversial industry in America.

We are heading right into the belly

of a coal mine in Eastern Kentucky

where they're extracting

what looks like a hell of a lot of coal.

We're a couple of miles deep into the mountain.

I'll tell you, this is the most terrifying place to be

if you're claustrophobic.

Each side you can see these deep, kind of, caves.

They've all been blocked off, sealed off.

That's where they've already extracted all the coal they can.

So we're having to go deeper and deeper into the mountain.

There used to be about 900 or so people

working on this site at any given time.

Now there's about 200.

Advances in technology

have revolutionized coal mining.

But this machinery, paired with the rise of cheap natural gas,

has led to a huge decline in coal jobs.

This has miners like Bridgett Cowden

worried about their future.

Coal has been in my family for centuries.

You know, grandpas, great-grandpas.

I remember when I was little bitty, my papaw would come in

and he'd be all black.

And I'd get in his little bucket

pretending that I was in the coal mines.

And that was when I was five, six year old.

But here, right now, you're lucky to get a job.

I've been in quite a few mines, just in Perry County

that shut down

because they just, they couldn't afford it.

You must have seen a lot of people get laid off.

Yeah, a lot of good friends got laid off, you know, and it's hard.

You just, you thank the Lord every day for a job.

Are you hopeful that Trump's gonna turn things around?

I'm hoping.

He promised he was going to do what he could,

and Hillary...

I was for Hillary, I'm just gonna be honest, at first,

until she said...

that she wasn't for coal,

and that was it for me. I didn't have nothing else.

I was gonna vote for Trump.

Do you think a lot of people felt the same way about that?

In coal mines, yes, they did.

For the first half of the 20th century,

coal was America's primary source of energy,

and a lucrative industry.

But over the last three decades,

coal jobs have declined 70 percent,

and economists like Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson

doubt that they'll ever return.

There's no way it's economically viable

to restart most of the coal mines.

It's simply a fact that coal has become uncompetitive

versus natural gas, and increasingly,

solar, hydro, wind power.

So hard-minded capitalists are looking at that

and saying this is not an industry that we want to invest in,

and there's no point in trying to reverse that tide.

What's the significance of Appalachia and the coal country as a whole,

when it comes to the US economy at-large?

I think Appalachia is symptomatic

of the biggest economic challenge that our society faces today.

The powerful forces of technology

are fundamentally transforming our economy.

Cars are beginning to drive themselves.

Machines are diagnosing diseases.

This is a whole new ball game,

and it's having fundamental effects

on the nature of the workforce.

Sadly, I think most of the US economy is not very well prepared.

Coal has not only been central to Appalachia's economy,

but also to its history and culture.

State Representative Chris Harris

took us on a tour of his constituency,

starting with a recently closed mine.

Most of the communities in eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia,

were built on those people who came here to work in the mines.

There was a tremendous recruitment effort at Ellis Island

to bring people to the Appalachian region to work in the coal mines,

because they could offer you a home to live in.

They could educate your kids and give you a job.

And those are things that people really wanted

when they came to this country, looking for the American Dream.

People here aren't... they're not in love with coal.

They're in love with the American Dream,

and it's being taken away from us.

Since the entire local community relies on coal,

the ripple effects of its decline

are being felt far beyond the mines.

Terri Blake and her husband

have owned this once-thriving hardware store

for the last 28 years.

This is what we've done all of our life.

How's business?

Keeps getting worse over the last three years.

To the point where...

you wonder if you're gonna be able to hold on another month.

How well was business doing a few years ago,

- and how bad are things now? - I'm off at least 35 percent.

That's basically to say, if you was doing a hundred thousand a month,

I'm down to 65 thousand a month.

There is no profit left after that.

So, I mean, it just trickles all the way down from the top.

The coal mine shuts down, you know,

it shuts something else down,

then it shuts something else down,

and that's where we're at now.

There's no money left.

The individuals that's living here

have even had to take over the lighting system here in Warfield,

just to have lights at nighttime.

So, individuals have to pay for the streetlights?

Well, yeah. Because we have no money coming into our town anymore

that paid for the streetlights.

Coal is our industry here.

This is how we make our living.

When coal hurts, we all hurt.

And while the market continues to work against coal,

the people who are hit hardest

are often families who can't afford to leave.

Virginia Williams and her family

have struggled to make ends meet

after her husband was laid off from the mines.

I found a job at 7-Eleven.

With the both of us working now,

makes up his one income.

We've been getting creative a long time.

So, it's like, spaghetti,

you know, you can get the dollar-can.

But, uh, you make it do.

Some days, it's a lot of potatoes.

Well, the Food City card saved, uh...

It saved you $2.08 today.

That's a good deal.

- Hi! - Hey.

I worked in the mines for 12 years.

I was one of the unfortunate ones that got laid off.

John has spent the last three years in and out of work.

For the past two months, he's been working as a contractor

for a fraction of the pay.

Is it steady work you have now?

Yes, it is. The pay is not as good as what the mine's was.

You had to take a pay cut?

About $17 an hour difference.

That means at least $35,000 less per year

for a family of eight,

which has left John holding onto hope

that coal jobs will return.

This is the last hat that I wore.

Uh, I wore it underground.

This is probably the same one I would wear if I went back.

What do you think it is about working in coal mines

that people from outside of this region misunderstand?

That we can afford to not have it.

I mean, don't get me wrong,

I'm all for being green,

I'm all for solar power, wind power,

you know, all that.

But this community and this area,

is founded...

on coal.

There's nothing else.

And for it to not be here

is disastrous for this area.

But it doesn't have to be.

It now falls on the next generation

to consider a future without coal.

I'm hoping that with technologies advancing

and different things like that,

we can establish our own sort of, uh...

industry, so to speak, here, and maybe help bring it back.

That's kind of the plan and kind of the hope, you know?

- That's the dream? - That's the goal.

The Williams kids are enrolled at Belfry High School.

In spite of significant losses in enrollment and federal funding,

the school is working to provide their students

with opportunities outside the coal mines.

How do you guys feel about coal?

I mean, growing up with it

and seeing the decline of it over the last few years?

One of our advantages is disillusionment.

You know, we've always kind of known what's at stake.

And we've always kind of known that you need to do good in school

and you need to go to college, because it's not gonna be there.

Everyone knows how hard it is right now.

All of a sudden, people have had to shift their life views

from saying, "I'm gonna be a manual laborer,"

to, "I'm gonna go for a larger education."

And a lot of people are scared about that.

You think the value of an education has increased?

- Because of... - As the need has increased,

the value has increased.

That's why they've tried to start new initiatives,

you know, start from scratch.

One of those things is technology.

With no reliable future in coal

for graduating students,

the school has tried to add more classes in technology and business

that can potentially create new industries in the region.

So, what is this you're doing here?

Well, what we're doing is we're 3D printing custom foot orthotics

for different foot disorders like flatfoot.

What we intend to do is get the prescriptions from the podiatrists

and fill the prescriptions with a scanner.

We intend to, uh, make a business out of this.

What do you think the solutions are when it comes to...

fixing the future for Appalachia?

We need to embrace this change and not try to freeze the past.

There's no better time in history

to be someone with an idea that can be encapsulated

in a digital form and replicated,

but that requires a revolution in our educational system

to transition people there.

While an investment in education

could help save Appalachia's future generations,

its current workforce is hoping that a revolution

in entrepreneurship and technology in the region

could capitalize on the thousands of people

struggling for jobs today.

Hillbillies coding is like the Jamaican bobsled team.

It just, it resonates in people's imagination.

Bit Source founders Rusty Justice and Lynn Parrish

believe cultivating a tech industry in Appalachia,

can diversify the economy and create new jobs.

From an outside perspective, it's not an obvious fit

to go from working in a coal mine to coding.

How easy is it to train people who have worked in coal mines to code?

A lot easier than you might think.

How does this work compare to your previous work?

You know, something that you have to understand

is that mining is a high-tech industry.

So, it's not... it's not a radical transition.

But, you know,

it's also a scary transition,

you know, to go, at my age...

It's a culture shock.

While Bit Source only employs about ten former miners,

it does show the region is eager to expand programs in new industries.

We had the idea, then we thought, "Well, maybe we can find,

you know, 50 folks that will apply.

This is just a theory."

So, we advertised,

and we had 950 applicants for ten jobs.

- Wow. - Which speaks to the magnitude of the problem.

Emerging start-ups like this

rely on federal funding through programs like

the Appalachian Regional Commission.

But President Trump has already proposed

to slash these efforts from his next budget,

leaving it to the people of Appalachia

to move the economy forwards.

The strategy of trying to go backwards into the past

has never worked for the United States.

The successful strategy has always been

to embrace the future, embrace new industries.

America has been the greatest economy in the world,

and we have the potential

to continue to be the greatest economy,

but it really depends entirely on our choices.