Re:Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time
by fixermark on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:26PM
(#17812333)
If LEO was off-the-books collaborating with Backpage to allow prostitution while catching the child exploitation, that'd be a somewhat diabolical attempt at fixing a criminalization problem by turning it into a de-facto legal-and-regulated market (without legislative action to make it an actual legal-and-regulated market).
If that is, in fact, what was happening, it's kind of shame that some Congresspeople with bad strategic reasoning upset that apple cart; that'd be a superior state of affairs to one where both the prostitution and the child sex trafficking happen in the dark, beyond the reach of LEO intervention.
I think the moderator stuff is enough to say this company should have been put out of business. I'm not sure when congress got their e-mails, though. Backpage and law enforcement clearly had a long-standing relationship, and it could be that law enforcement were aware of these activities and permitted them in order to keep receiving tips and cooperation. Even while Congress was after them in 2015, they were getting lauded privately by the FBI.
It's possible that law enforcement are somewhat culpable, hence the vehement nature of Backpage's persecution. We will probably only ever see the government's public side of the story, which is not good, as one result of this is the recently passed SESTA/FOSTA bullshit.