The larger issues surround freedom of speech and the protections that online service providers have. I would have expected this kind of thing to happen after FOSTA was officially signed into law, which hasn't happened yet. Apparently Michael Lacey, a cofounder of Backpage, has been criminally charged [1]. I don't know all the issues involved, but overall it's a scary day if you own a website that has anything to do with personal ads.
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
It’s a challenging strategic issue.
Considering the large percentage of people in this space that were using BackPage, I think the answer to your question should have been whenever they had proven so effective at busting the pimps posting on there that usage had gone down significantly. As I said, I’d have automated the process, even the production of warrants to get text messages/emails associated with a given ad. Have software fill in the blanks on a template warrant with all the necessary legal language and details about BackPage, auto-email that template to an on-duty detective and have them review, print, sign, and submit it to a judge. Have the software record all the ads in a database and prioritize cases by the number of ads a given email/phone number appears in.
One agency like the FBI could have created the system, then given it to all local law enforcement agencies across the country for free so that they could carry out the process locally. They could have nabbed thousands of pimps and sex traffickers this way.
would it be less unreal if you didn't consider the goal to be actually stopping sex trafficking etc, but to set precedent eroding freedom of speech and online service provider protections, under the guise of "for the children" and "obscenity"?
I was in the Las Vegas airport a few weeks ago. When I went to the bathroom, on the inside of the stalls, the Las Vegas Metro Police had placed notices with a phone number saying that help for victims of human trafficking is available. I noticed several billboards around town with the same message. If this has become such a widespread problem that law enforcement has resorted to trying to contact victims in airport bathrooms on their way into town, then they need to step up efforts nail the pimps and traffickers. This shutdown of BackPage was a big step backwards in that effort.
The assumes the law enforcement is sincere in its effort. Actual story could well be:
1. Put up ads everywhere seeking to help victims so as to convince the average person the problem is huge.
2. Pass sweeping repressive measure allowing unselective seizure of sex-ad websites.
3. Profit through increased funding, influence and programs (no ??? needed).
Are support people necessarily victimizers? Is someones driver automatically their pimp? Is the realtionship better or worse if it was transacted through an app?
If someone hosts child pornography on an AWS hard drive; should Jeff Bezos go to jail for it?
There's a lot of subtlety here.
And a government that is manifestly and overtly corrupt has no business enforcing morality on people.
Our public policy needs to somehow control incentive structures of these organizations. For example, the War on Poverty has spent trillions, with no measurable reduction in poverty. The War on Drugs, Prison State, Military Industrial Complex. And it appears to be even a cultural problem: CNN tells us we need to maintain an economy of killing innocents in order to keep jobs[1]. So many things are backwards.
In other words, perhaps public policy needs to fundamentally change the way it establishes and preserves government entities, in order to ensure their incentives align with their purpose.
1 - https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
For the USA, there is an endemic problem with all law enforcement and there is various serious documentation about this. That is not to say that the USA is the worst, there are many other countries that have a much more deadly situation. However, for a country that is supposed to be the leaders of the free world, it is rapidly getting the reputation of being third world in this matter.
When other countries warn their citizens not to have interactions with any US law enforcement then you should realise that there is a serious problem in the USA.
The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.
People who dedicate their lives to researching proposed policies still don't agree about their effects.
A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
> A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
This is an incredibly significant milestone in understanding an issue though. There are many many many people who entirely lack exposure to one half of the discourse on an issue; this is exacerbated by the fact that it's increasingly en vogue to consider it a moral failing to even consider the other side's arguments (even for the purposes of rebuttal).
Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance.
> How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important.
> Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description.
Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.
> Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weigh the cost of potential job losses from a higher minimum wage against the benefits of wage increases for other workers.
1. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
"What kind of persimmon faced killjoy is against a little adult fun?" is a more effective line to use than a dissertation on all the benefits of legal sex work?
Less pithily, I have no idea what you're trying to say and how it relates to my comment.
I'm not trying to claim any kind of parity between the two.
I am saying, it's another form of persecuting the supply -- and putting it at increased risk -- in lieu of dealing with the demand or even being honest about it.
It's also another excuse -- vehicle -- for the prescriptive moralists. Who, the more they complain about something, seemingly inevitably turn out to be engaged in it themselves.
"I can't control myself. But, by God, I can control you!"
Sex trafficking is a horrendous circumstance. Unfortunately, I'm left with no trust in our politicians being honest brokers with respect to the laws they introduce. Even if they honestly want to address the problem, they will -- heh -- not be able to "control themselves" with respect to how they use the expanded powers, going forward.
It is pretty easy to find the meat processing plants, agribusinesses, construction companies, etc who demand labor at prices not possible on the legal market.
Likewise, it is very easy to find the johns soliciting prostitutes, even high end ones. (Recall former governor Eliot Spitzer)
Hiring illegal immigrants harms low-skilled domestic workers and taxpayers. Prostitution is essentially a victimless crime.
I always found them courteous and well mannered. But there was this hardness in them that I could only attribute to the business they were involved in. Almost a kind of lifelessness in them. It is not a victimless crime, it is full of victims - a profound disruption of humanity.
Prostitution has had various levels of acceptability in many societies over the millenia. In some it was a highly regarded position, in others completely unacceptable and everything in between in others.
There are those who choose it as a way of life, there are many others who are forced into it. When we are unwillingly or unable to help these as a society then we, as a society, are failing these vulnerable people as we fail all those who are vulnerable.
Where did taxpayers come into it?
People (women or otherwise) who are trading sex for goods and services in the market are prostitutes.
Not to mention that there are acceptable places to do (small counties in Nevada) and unacceptable places to do so (everywhere else in the US). I won't even get into the number of countries that have either legalized or decriminalized this practice.
Finally, the best way to find sex trafficking victims seems to be decriminalization which removes the stigma of speaking out. What's really broken here is that the foot soldiers of sex trafficking seem to be against all this pending legislation, fearing it will drive the practice further underground, rather than assist with battling it.
Honest trade reduces opportunity for dishonest exploitation? Sure, I'll agree that's the case, but...
That's pretty much all women; what defines a prostitute is the transparent price schedule and lack of exclusivity.
Taxpayers might be harmed, but I suspect they'd be harmed much more severely by food prices skyrocketing because farms don't have sufficient labor to keep up with the demand from a growing national population (let alone global; California is the leading - and in some cases the only significant - exporter of a staggeringly-large number of fruits and vegetables).
Meanwhile, cracking down on illegal immigrants' ability to work and live in the US gives employers of said immigrants more leverage ("work these long hours for chump change or we'll report you and your whole family to the authorities"). Amnesty programs and other means to convert illegal immigrants into legal immigrants shifts at least some leverage back to the illegal worker, which then allows better negotiating power for higher wages and thus addresses the supposed problem that illegal workers are undercutting legal workers.
These jobs used to pay a man enough to support a family. Where has the money gone? What happens if an illegal gets hurt? Do they get workmen's compensation? I'm sure they get a small settlement, the cut fixed, and sent home. All the people are complicit. It is all about growth and more profit. You can have a sustainable business and employees that get decent pay with benefits.
$20/hour is enough to do exactly that in most places that don't start with "San" and end with "Francisco". I know full well that not every illegal-immigrant-hiring industry pays that well, but it's my understanding that agriculture does, and that's one industry that seems to be disproportionately affected by the lack of undocumented workers.
> What happens if an illegal gets hurt? Do they get workmen's compensation?
In California at least, as far as workmen's compensation is concerned, illegal immigrants qualify as "employees"[1], so if a legal immigrant (or natural citizen) is entitled to it, then so is an illegal immigrant.
Of course, this varies from state to state.
The big danger in America is the equality between prostitute and sex trafficking. They are not the same thing, and yet we're being fed the line that they are (except in some counties in Nevada).
TLDR: the criminal lifestyle one must pursue to obtain illegal supercharged versions of the drugs is vastly more harmful than the drugs themselves when legalized. I see a lot of parallels here in equating all sex work to sex trafficking. Both sides have their points, but what is the most effective strategy to minimize sex trafficking?
While there is clearly a crusade against the former (as the aerlier attacks on CLs erotic/adult services listings made clear), and that's probably why Backpage got lots of attention in the first place, it's not clear that the reality of Backpage matched the surface appearance or the reality of the earlier targets.
It's being siezed because it collaborated with criminal gangs who were kidnapping children and selling those children for sex.
People who think Backpage was helping law enforcement keep track of child rapists should read what Backpage themselves admit.
For the "they help law enforcement" argument to work Backpage needed to have kept the orginal ad text submitted by the criminal gangs and then either report that to law enforcement, or have it available to turn over when given a court order. What they actually did add a filter that removed words suggestive of illegal activity and then post the ad anyway.
> At the direction of CEO Carl Ferrer, the company programmed this electronic filter to “strip” —that is, delete—hundreds of words indicative of sex trafficking ( including child sex trafficking) or prostitution from ads before their publication. The terms that Backpage has automatically deleted from ads before publication include “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “teen,” “fresh,” “innocent,” and “school girl.” When a user submitted an adult ad containing one of these “stripped” words, Backpage’s Strip Term From Ad filter would immediately delete the discrete word and the remainder of the ad would be published. While the Strip Term From Ad filter changed nothing about the true nature of the advertised transaction or the real age of the person being sold for sex, thanks to the filter, Backpage’s adult ads looked “cleaner than ever.” Manual editing entailed the deletion of language similar to the words and phrases that the Strip Term From Ad filter automatically deleted—including terms indicative of criminality
Clearly, the "they help law enforcement" argument is fucking bogus.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
I have a big problem with this FOSTA law been passed in the dark with provisions such as retroactive effect which is clearly unconstitutional and indicates shoddy workmanship. But there looks to have been a very serious problem at Backpage.
But yeah, it's made a LOT worse by the lack of empathy, compassion, and understanding (not to mention puritanical notions) people have towards sex work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...
https://www.thestranger.com/news/2018/03/24/25953235/king-co...
Backpage was pretty sleazy. I don't think anyone's going to miss them, but are you not at all alarmed that there's a sudden onslaught of legislation that is claimed to target "sex trafficking", but which also apparently requires the deletion of the personals section from Craigslist, censoring of pornographic Google drive content, and even dirty words from Word documents?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/28/microsoft_services_...
Where is this heading? And do you trust the motives of the people behind it?
I've lost almost all respect for most modern feminists simply because they refuse to acknowledge actual logic and statistics - wage gap BS, sex trafficking hysteria, apex fallacy (e.g. the top 0.001% are over represented by cis white males, but we'll ignore the bottom 20% of laborers, homeless, disposables who are all male), etc.
My litmus test for any feminist is whether they support the legalization of prostitution. Logically, it's her body, her decision. Right?
Nevermind the issue with a male's ability to legally obtain sex / intimacy, even if paid - you'd think this would be considered a human right, deserving of more talk time than, say, the tax-free status of tampons, but I digress...
Feminists who use the sex trafficking BS as a defense against legalization of prostitution deserve 0 respect. They are simply opportunists, trying to establish a monopoly on access to sex, economically no different than Standard Oil, Microsoft, etc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/...
On the other side you have liberal feminists who are sex-positive, for regulated sex work and support Slut Walks.
I'm simplifying extraordinarily here, but one position might be "sex between men and women happens within the constraints of a patriarchal society and had inherent power imbalances, which is problematic; sex work is overwhelmingly poor and powerless women being exploited for sex by men" (at its extreme suggesting political lesbianism) and the other might be "there's nothing intrinsically anti-feminist about sex, and we can imagine forms of sex and sex work which are liberatory rather than oppressive. Sex work is often exploitative but is also work, and sex workers are women who deserve a voice and better treatment" (at its extreme leading to explicitly feminist pornography).
I prefer one to the other, but neither position is hypocritical.
That's the basis of the argument anyway.
Fundamentally you should have the right to do what you want with your body.
All people have a right to sex, so long as it is consensual.
[1] https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=link+between+prostituti... [3] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chelsealyn-rudder/sex-for-sal... [4] https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/publications/links-bet...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/29/521971468/in...
Both those nations also have legalized sex work too.
Australia has it better. Most waitstaff I know are on at least $20 per hour, with penalty rates for working after 10pm or working on Sunday.
Ideas like a mandatory "living wage", that while possibly well-intended, amount to coercive impositions that are rationalized by dogmatic self-righteousness, and end up having pretty severe negative unintended consequences.
They're in the same class of laws as those prohibiting prostitution and drug-use.
1) A worker in a restaurant has legal recourse if treated unlawfully in any way.
2) A worker in a restaurant can start their own restaurant to compete with their employer any time they like.
3) A worker in a restaurant is free to leave for a better paying job anytime they want.
4) A worker in a restaurant can disclose poor treatment to the press if they want.
Alternatively...
1) A sex worker often has no legal recourse without risking their life.
2) A sex worker often cant compete with their employer without risking their life.
3) A sex worker often cant leave their pimp without risking their life.
4) A sex worker can't disclose poor treatment to the press without risking their life.
See the difference?
You can’t “solve” human trafficking by attacking sex workers.
As is so often the case, the opinions missing from these debates are those of prostitutes themselves.
"The new bill holds website owners legally liable for criminal prosecution for any sex trafficking discussions that are viewable on their platform."
"The legislation says a website is responsible if it “assists, supports, or facilitates” sex trafficking. Some of the vague wording opens up the bill for interpretation and has critics fearing frivolous lawsuits against platforms that didn’t know trafficking was happening on their site."
The bar is not "knowingly aided". The bar is "built a platform that someone else used to sex-traffic".
This is about eradicating purpose-driven websites related to prostitution. Backpage's C-team did some really, really bad stuff. No jury is going to convict the CEO of Reddit because someone somewhere posted a comment about prostitution on a subreddit. Section 230 still exists.
Under the advice of his/her legal team (lawyers).
Are you sure? And are you in a position to be making that call?
No jury is going to convict the CEO of Reddit because someone somewhere posted a comment about prostitution on a subreddit.
That's probably why Reddit eliminated basically all the subreddits related to prostitution. They're also probably less concerned about their CEO being jailed than they are about massive fines.
MX records are gone at that point, so the press cannot contact general counsel for comments.
That's the propaganda, but the text does not restrict the limitation of Section 230 safe harbor to only apply to “purpose driven websites related to prostitution”.
> Backpage's C-team did some really, really bad stuff.
None of which requires modifying Section 230 to address.
Laws need to be clear enough where you can head off charges before they are filed with a letter to an investigator explaining why any case would be doomed. Section 230 drew bright lines and enabled that. If prosecutors think they can get to trial, and SESTA makes that dramatically easier through its loose language, that dramatically ups their leverage.
But yeah, similarly useful technology exists. I don't know if it's in use at all in order to fight abuse like this.
Source: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in... (and I work on Gmail ads).
No email data is used for any ad targeting
Doesn't that mean you are now on the hook for enabling sex trafficking with SESTA if a gmail account was used? Or is there a loophole wherein if you promise extra double hard not to look at said content, you're not liable? But in that case, why are you guys deleting teh p0rnz?
If it's about whether Google "knowingly" enabled sex trafficking, then it seems like a pretty simple argument is "sure, we knew about porn, but we didn't know about the sex trafficking" is a pretty reasonable defense.
Also, I don't know, I just work here.
If people were posting this on a public forum like Google Plus or something it would be a fair comparison. But Gmail hosting private accounts isn't quite the same.
And if there were a large infrastructure to use something like Gmail to traffic children then, yes, I would expect them to comply with the law to crack down on that behavior or face legal action.
People seem to think that all Backpage did was run ads.
That's wrong. You should read what they actually did.
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...
You should read what Backpage themselves were saying. They claimed that the Communications Decency Act means they had no responsibility for that ads that appear. This was tested several times in court, and the courts often agreed with Backpage.
So, after those court cases Backpage knew that ads were appearing because that was a finding of the court.
Please read pages 7 and 8 which give details of some of the cases against Backpage.
EG
> Although the court concluded that the plaintiffs “ha[d] made a persuasive case” that “Backpage has tailored its website to make sex trafficking easier,” it nevertheless upheld the dismissal of the suit under Section 230 on the ground that the site’s features did not render Backpage a content-creator. The court noted that “[i]f the evils that the appellants have identified are deemed to outweigh the First Amendment values that drive the CDA, the remedy is through legislation, not through litigation
The legislation that recently passed both Houses of Congress hadn't been signed or gone into effect yet, and had no bearing on the seizure (except to the extent that the seizure may have been delayed to advance the propaganda that the law was needed to deal with actors like Backpage.)
Correct. And I'm all for legislation that empowers a group of LEOs to troll ads to find the people doing that and throw them in jail. Hell, I'd be fine with my taxes being raised to pay for it as well.
Backpage is scum and they clearly interacted with such criminals.
That said, the laws that have been created recently are not a good thing and are intentionally designed to enable reaching beyond the narrow goal we both agree on.
I’ve personally donated to St James Infirmary in SF and related to charities that provide related protections.
Even in places where prostitution is legalized (Amsterdam), trafficking is an issue. When I was in Amsterdam 7 or so years ago, I recall stories of Russian and other traffickers.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/02/oakland-police-scanda...
https://babe.net/2017/07/11/perfectly-legal-cops-trick-prost...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abuse_of_sex_workers_in...
I am not quite cynical enough to think that law enforcement pursues these sites for the purposes of maintaining that imbalance. There are many different attitudes towards sex work (and everything else) among law enforcement officers, and many of them probably really do believe they're doing it to keep kids safe.
I was thinking that they wanted it to be more hidden... so that they could ignore it.
In fact, some studies suggest that legal prostitution actually enables trafficking to go unnoticed. If prostitution is illegal the police can crack down on any form of it they encounter, so if the prostitute in question is a victim of trafficking they're now in contact with law enforcement and might be given a way out.
With legal prostitution, the situation can go on much longer before law enforcement can step in and reach these victims.
Who would have guessed that those remaining in the illegal sector do not enjoy the benefit of decriminalization, almost like decriminalization create a bigger divide between what is legal and illegal. I would guess the same thing happened to smugglers after the prohibition, where those staying as a smuggler had to start transporting much more dangerous stuff like guns, explosives and heavy drugs. The lives of those smugglers surly got worse on the average, where the lives of those who went from illegal to legal got significant better. But let not look at those whose life got better since that would hurt the message of the study.
The police doesn't do this. If they did this, they'd have busted tons and tons of people via this Backpage website plus some warrants. They don't because they don't care.
What study was this and how do we know its results are accurate and apply in this case?
Edit: Also, hopefully we as a society should be looking to reduce, not increase a trade where a human being has to sell themselves like a piece of meat.
That's basically the argument against capitalism and wage-labor, sure. But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat, they just prefer making conditions worse for those who don't have much to sell that is valued by anyone with the means to buy other than sex.
Yeah, we also don't allow child labor. I assume you don't have a problem with that? Capitalism doesn't work by itself. Human beings are social animals and all capitalist societies have a welfare component.
>But, strangely, many people cheering shuttering prostitution marketplaces are quite happy maintaining and exacerbating conditions in which the bulk of the population is economically coerced to sell themselves like a piece of meat,
That is ridiculous. "Many people" are certainly not happy to harm vulnerable sections of society. I have no clue who you're refering to. People are against prostitution for rational sane reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2kJM9yQs9k
Arguably, this is an attitude problem on the demand side - people who want to buy other people like they're pieces of meat - rather than something about the supply, or the trade itself.
Here's a related interesting phenomenon: https://www.google.com/search?q=professional+cuddling
To end with a question: Would you consider professional dominatrixes to be in the trade [of selling themselves like meat]?
Offtopic but damn this is clever (back in the days).
Yes, which soliciting sex is also prohibited.
>Would you consider professional dominatrixes to be in the trade [of selling themselves like meat]?
I don't know. Are 40% of them former child prostitutes? Are they at a high risk of getting murdered? Do they get raped outside of work? Do the vast majority of them experience physical violence?
Edit: By the way you may find exchanging sex for money deplorable, but how about having sex for a promotion, or requesting sex in exchange for funding, how about sex for a home and meal. In reality people use sex all day in exchange for something. It is just when money is involved people flip.
No idea what imagined point you're replying to.
>By the way you may find exchanging sex for money deplorable,
Please don't put words in my mouth. I want to see fewer vulnerable people being exploited.
>but how about having sex for a promotion, or requesting sex in exchange for funding, how about sex for a home and meal. In reality people use sex all day in exchange for something. It is just when money is involved people flip.
Okay, .. and is this a good thing? I sure hope you don't think so...
Sometimes the law is just shit.
https://thinkprogress.org/craigslist-erotic-services-platfor...