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Comment by hendersoon | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, they shutdown a site on the internet. That'll work!

Shutting down backpage.com was obviously a mistake. It was a centralized location to advertise illegal services. Everybody knew it existed, it was hosted, owned, and financed in the US and subject to court orders and subpeonas.

Now another site will pop up shortly, either in a jurisdiction that doesn't answer to US law enforcement or, eventually, as a Tor hidden service. Prostitution and human trafficking volume won't be impacted except in the very shortest of terms. Just a stupid self-defeating response from our politicians.

The right answer would have been to leave Backpage's sex services classifieds up and pay for law enforcement to review the site on a regular basis. Control and regulate. Don't force your primary information asset to relocate to a less accessible location.

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In engineering and in governance, the "right" (optimal) solution can border on the impossible. Legalizing and regulating prostitution in the US in 2017 seems like one of those situations.

If you personally don't want to be the one to lead the culture war to make prostitution legal in all 50 states, could you explain why somebody else would find that an appealing job?

Keep in mind that leading a culture war means regular in-person harassment - in public, at home, when traveling domestically promoting your cause - until you die.

You would think that it would be helpful to leave Backpage alone, because the cops could use it to figure out who the child sex traffickers are.

I have a hunch that police didn't uncover lots of child sex trafficking rings on Backpage, nor were they interested in doing so.

It was far more useful as a honeypot & revenue generator for them through John stings. Setting up a fake Backpage ad for a weekend and raking in $20k through the relatively safe act of fooling non-violent offenders is the best deal out there for police.

At the end of it all you get a nice feel-good headline about how the local PD arrested 40 sex offenders.

This. Most of the times it was a honeypot service and backpage probably shut it down because of that.

The responsible thing to do with be to legalize and regulate prostitution for the safety of the sex workers. That would be responsible thing to do. To bring what's going to happen anyway under control so you can properly police for minors, rather than worry about people who choose to sell themselves.

I completely agree.

Thing is, even remaining constrained by current law assuming stopping prostitution is just and right, they /still/ went about it entirely the wrong way. Ultimately this will lead to a complete loss of control, more prostitution, and more trafficked/coerced people.

It isn't so simple when the voting public wants to see laws enforced. A lot of people consider it a betrayal of public trust to selectively enforce laws, or to outright ignore them.

A lot of Americans are hoping that the next federal government will crack down on states flouting federal laws regarding marijuana, for example. (No, prostitution isn't a federal crime. I know that. It's an example.)

How did that work for the silk road? I remember the same arguments told about it but never followed on it.

There were several rounds of diaspora following the Silk Road getting shut down, a couple of which essentially ripped off all their users. Last I read, there are now 2-3 major drug marketplaces on Tor hidden services rather than one central spot.

People are still getting their drugs in the exact same way. Shutting down SR had no mid or long-term effect at all.

The entire Silk Road debacle showed that law enforcement itself has become massively corrupt. The long-term effect of the case is further distrust of the government and law enforcement.

The success of the drug war is measured by body count, not achieving mission objectives; same as in the Vietnam War. Success for the drug warrior is arresting and prosecuting people and seizing assets, not decreasing the supply of drugs, which is too hard.

True enough, but Ross Ulbricht /did/ try to have someone killed. He began with the best of intentions then broke bad. It's challenging to find sympathy for him.

Drugs are illegal, so they are sold by criminals.

Allegedly.

http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-murder-charges-ross-...

Given an option Cops will always knock the easier door. Cops use civil forfeiture against old grandma living on fixed income rather than a rich lawyered drug dealer.

Like bullies law enforcement is cowardly too and likes to beat up the soft target.

Except for all the times that they aren't "cowardly".

I heard a facetious comment that shutting down backpage was just a way to encourage sex workers to develop better computer skills.

One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it creates communities that are interstitially embedded in "real life" communities and there is an opportunity friction between the mores of the two. Makes it challenging to have "community driven laws".

Setting up the new prostitute classifieds site will require IT skills, particularly on the Bitcoin tumbler merchant and infosec sides.

As for pimps and prostitutes, they'll simply run Onion Browser instead of Chrome or Safari on their phones and go to a different bookmark. And they'll need to convert some cash to Bitcoin to pay for their ads. No biggie.

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