I promise you its just on to the next website... I honestly wonder if the people that work these cases get tired or disheartened by their game of whack-a-mole.
Perhaps they just need to stop their mole-whacking game?
Some participants of law enforcement community (FBI, US Attorneys) take years to build and execute their cases. When successful, they receive commendations and continue their law enforcement careers.
State AGs are more of a "shoot from the hip" (or "sue early, sue often", since we're on HN) variety, as this elected post is viewed as a stepping stone towards another elected post, backed by the track record of "making neighborhoods safer".
In unrelated news, congratulations to California state AG Kamala Harris on becoming a US Senator from the state of California.
NSFW
Check out this escort forum online, it gives some really interesting insight into the whole debacle. as you can see, most of the girls don't really care and are even glad:
http://independentgirls.com/indiboard/index.php/topic/518200...
"Some criminals and low-life types formerly using Backpage will now go berserk without their money and/or their drugs. Violent crime in the streets. Unbelievable."
When you're a "pro" with your own website and $600/hr price, Backpage is competition. I don't think they're happy about it because of concerns about human trafficking.
yes, the existing laws are broken.
P.S. The "massage" page currently on Backpage seems to just be veiled prostitution that suddenly got more posts starting today. So maybe it's not even on to the next site, just elsewhere on the site.
At that point it's a matter of tapping the Onion Browser icon instead of Chrome/Safari and going to a different bookmark.
Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the next one run out of Russia, particularly if clients had to do some form of registration to get full access. Out of all the users you might get a few interesting email addresses worth tracking long-term, and you might even get reused passwords or at least a password pattern for some of those.
My bigger concern is that commercial entities (with their profit-driven motive and legal exposure) wouldn't be the only ones interested in the question of "Who's illegally hiring prostitutes AND do their hiring patterns indicate anything special about their interests?"
A few hosted servers or VMs, some dedicated bandwidth in a few datacenters, a few cutouts and "private investors" backing it who don't actually care about making profits, and you have a priceless intelligence source about horny people - mostly of no interest at all, but a few potentially of great interest and value. What would be the worth of a Senator or Representative with embarrassing interests? It's not like elected officials ever get caught in airport bathrooms, diapers, or sending tacky selfies on Twitter.
Considering the nature of business, Backpage likely used payments not just as a revenue source, but as a filtering mechanism protecting against excessive spam. Even if you're not in the industry, there's some motivation to post a fake ad just to prank (or shame) someone, play a bad joke on the ex, insert a URL or two to get some free Web traffic, etc. Payment requirement somewhat mitigates the spam/prank/fake threat, which happens to appeal to consumers as well.
I think the intelligence argument is overstated - communications of such nature are typically handled by phone/SMS/temp email anyways, and if someone is worried about their IP being tracked, they are likely to employ Tor or commercial VPN service.