The founder of HALO Corporation, Brad Barker, provided an inside look at kidnapping & trafficking, along with accounts of rescue and recovery. He founded HALO as a private agency that works with state and local agencies to offer safety and security, as well as humanitarian assistance (his team was deployed to New Orleans to assist after Hurricane Katrina). Barker, who hosts the TV program Kidnap & Rescue on the Discovery Channel, includes a number of ex-military special operations officers on his team. Kidnapping has unfortunately become a huge growth industry on a multi-national level, with cartels or crime syndicates often collaborating with local gangs, he reported. He detailed a number of different types of kidnapping, beyond just kidnap for ransom-- there is kidnapping for extortion, in which someone seeks to gain a business advantage; shorter-term kidnapping where the victim's ATM accounts are drained over a number of hours; and even "virtual kidnapping," where, for instance, parents are told their child has been kidnapped, when in actuality they haven't been. The United States has an excellent infrastructure to combat the threat of kidnapping within its borders, but once a victim is taken out of the country, its capabilities plummet, and that's where HALO has proven especially useful working with law enforcement in countries such as Mexico, Barker explained. He described a successful case his team worked on, in which a wealthy man who owned several homes in the US ...