Proponents of sex trafficking bill urge Silicon Valley to drop opposition
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Broad wording is what politicians love, because it lets government lump-under regulations & laws more things (even (especially?) things for which is was obviously not intended).
Precise wording is what technically-minded people prefer: clarity, concision, and focus.
Surely there is a balance that can address the problems of human trafficking without also threatening the 99.99994% of online users' free speech rights who view human trafficking to be as sickening as it is, but may happen to hold some collection of "unpleasant", "unpopular", or "sideline" views that don't jive with the majority (or, at least, the politically-correct class).
Laws didn't used to be massive 'we need to pass them to see what is in them' tomes. They used to be simple missives, written in everyday language, without umpteen dozen riders and special exemptions and funding stipulations and amendments and what-have-you. They used words and phrases like 'reasonable' or 'within reason,' rather than, 'a person shall be considered as belonging to Status B if they have retained Condition C for a length of time no less than 3 years but no more than 6, unless such a person can demonstrate Condition D...'
Judges used to have leeway in how they interpreted laws and applied sentences. Yes, it gave judges the power to give ridiculously short sentences and let their buddies/'our sort of people' get off scott free. And yes, it gave judges the power to give extremely heavy-handed sentences if they felt personally slighted. But they do those things today in our current system with minimal consequences, so I'd argue...so what?
I think that allowing people to act like people and reason like people is fundamental to any decent legal system. We can't try to make justice into some kind of an algorithm, because at the end of the day there's no reified reference for "Justice." There's just us.
It is the job of the judicial branch to apply law (after the executive branch pursues lawbreakers).
But look at simple, clear, concise laws vs things like the US tax code (which is annoyingly precise in some places, yet ridiculously vague in so many others) - the simpler, clearer, and - often - shorter the law, the better for everyone involved.
As part of due process, it should be clear from reading the law if I'm breaking it. I shouldn't have to guess and face years in prison if I happen to be wrong.
Personally, I think the blanket immunity platforms have gives them little reason to do more than moderate for the type of community they want, they have no legal responsibility for what their platform becomes. I would be okay seeing more of them be legally responsible.
EDIT with more: Also consider that the basic concepts of law like intent for criminal law won't be done away with. Law is built around reasonable actions. SESTA will not radically make everyone operating a platform in breach of the law, it will simply mean they can no longer hide behind a blanket immunity. It will be possible to call into question whether or not a platform is doing "enough" or meeting a "reasonable" standard.
It's obvious why corporations are against SESTA: It's super nice to not have to worry about it, to simply say "we're immune to this type of case". Blanket immunity is good for the company, and it is logical for any tech company to be opposed to this change. But I don't think blanket immunity is the best scenario for everyone else.
Intent doesn't help. If you're at the point where there is a debate about your intent, you're already in a pretty deep hole. Intent is an expensive basis to defend yourself on (you pretty much have to go to trial because it's so fact-based) and there is no telling what a jury will think of your story.
Blanket immunity, on the other hand, is good. You can tell a prosecutor to sod off if you've got blanket immunity, because proving that you're in an immune category is something you can do easily and inexpensively, unlike proving that you didn't have the mental state needed for a crime.
This particular law has the potential to be the section 1001 or honest services statute for pretty much everyone operating a website that hosts user-generated content. It's terribly drafted, overbroad, and the mens rea requirement is too low. You should be very worried.
I get that blanket immunity is cheap, but when we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms, with profits soaring so high they literally don't know what to spend it on, that we ask them to occasionally spend a little of it convincing the law they're doing enough to manage their platform?
With blanket immunity, law enforcement remains the responsibility of government agencies that (1) we pay to do those jobs, (2) have due process requirements, and (3) have broad immunity within the confines of their job. Without blanket immunity for platforms, we're requiring them to take on law enforcement responsibilities with none of the usual protections in place.
Banking secrecy and KYC laws are, I think, a great example of how consumer-hostile this can be.
Right now, tech companies have a perverse incentive to permit criminal activity. Changing the law would fix this. Consider that the reason banks have to prevent fraud is that they are responsible for fraudulent charges. Tech companies have no such responsibilities: They make money off everything, and aren't on the hook for anything.
Here's an example, there was an expose on The Verge about drug rehab fraud this month. You can find it here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... and the followup here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16309752/google-rehabs-ne...
Consider that in this example, Google makes as much as $230 per click. That's a lot of benefit for them to permit fraud, and there's more than enough information in the article to be sure that Google is definitely aware of the problem and that it continues despite their lackluster automated prevention attempts. Considering one rehab company says in the second article they spend "millions per year" on Google ads, we can probably conservatively guess that Google makes at least eight figures on this one particular brand of fraud. Google has no incentive to stop it, and they enjoy blanket immunity from responsibility for it.
Right now, the only jurisdiction with a say over these platforms appears to be the court of public opinion: Because bad press is the only thing that can encourage these companies to modify their behavior. Thanks to The Verge, Google is going to take reasonable steps, like having real humans verify the ads in this category in the future.
And they still walk away with all the money they made off of that fraud. Money that led people straight into these criminal enterprises rather than the legitimate search results below. At the very least, shouldn't the victims be able to come after the profits Google made on this enterprise?
No, we're talking about anybody that operates a website or app that allows someone else to post content to it.
Obviously blanket immunity is only good for those who operate web-services (and to some degree, everyone that uses those services.)
We want that immunity for good reason. If we are getting rid of that, we should make a good case for the value to be gained. Here, I don't see the argument being made clearly. The example website in the article is still being prosecuted. Why do we need this new law? Does this increase the potential penalties they face? Can't we just increase the penalties for those crimes?
edit: bad grammar
I've run into this when I've discussed sex slavery with people. The word slavery visibly doesn't sit well with some as a description for what's happening.
In the end, what matters is that support is brought against trafficking and slavery.
Actual human trafficking, which does exist in the industry today, rules it out. It just has to; theft of agency is about as bad a crime as I can think of.
But where can you stand on practical regulation? How do you draw a line that separates people who see it as a decent living all things considered, and those who detest the idea but have no other available means of affording to live? Would it even stop the issue of slavery and trafficking, if the laws were only local and on a small scale?
I dunno. But it's definitely thorny, so I'm guessing I'll have moved out of this tech blast zone by the time any of it gets resolved.
One random link I followed from the Wikipedia article is the source for the statement "Europe has the highest number of sex slaves per capita in the world". http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/ The page prominently advocates for the Nordic model.
There is a substantial political movement, that crosses the feminist left to the paternalistic right, that holds that all prostitution is in some manner coerced and is a subset of sex trafficking, and this group is part of the core if support for every anti-sex-trafficking law, and even moreso for laws like the proposed one that strip well-established protection and target people who aren't sex traffickers for some conduct several steps removed from trafficking.
While trafficking is a real problem that needs to be combatted, it's also the new banner under which the movement seeking ever more radical legislation to combat the existence of sex work is marching.
(It's also dishonestly framed as a “clarification” when it's a radical dismantling of one of the core pillars of the CDA.)
kafkaesq why did you share it?
*edit: And why is truth always so hard to take for people here?
> “We would support a specific amendment that would allow victims to sue for civil penalties in court to seek some form of redress for the horrible things that have happened to them,” said Slater, whose group represents tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.
Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers. If the allegations are true, these people need to be in prison.
Edit: Please read my response below before downvoting. Backpage didn't block child-sex ads, they concealed and protected them, allegedly.
By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert?
Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were.
The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex trafficking.
Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing silly solutions.
Read that section carefully. They didn't make a filter to block ads with words like "rape" and "little girl"; they hid the keywords to make them harder to find while leaving the ads up, and they did not report them to law enforcement. That's not keeping out abusers, that's protecting abusers.
were the ads saying "here's the vulnerable child you might have seen in the amber alert, in case you were searching for missing persons to rape" or something along those lines? How did you interpret it, and where could I find the truth of the matter
In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged, and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to do so. This was also linked directly from the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo...
Yes.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant but sunlight doesn't go underground.
If the market is above ground it might actually make stopping those violating the law easier. Never mind also, in this case, improving health by mandating things like screenings and protection.
They can and are being prosecuted for it:
> "Based on the August ruling in Sacramento, he said he had been left to prosecute Backpage.com on charges of conspiracy and money laundering"
It seems to me that this crime is already a crime. Actively encouraging/cloaking and profiting from the commission of a crime is conspiracy to commit and is illegal.
What appears to be the new illegality added by this amendment is being aware that your platform is being used to facilitate human trafficking (e.g. you saw an ad for human trafficking in your blog's comments) and doing nothing.
Would it also cover deleting that one ad/comment, but not engaging in active monitoring of all future comments or installing some sort of comment filter?
This is my problem with the vagueness of the law and the idea that we don't need the blanket immunity provided by the CDA. Small operators especially need this blanket immunity, because going to trial to litigate intent is simply not an option for them.
If we do remove blanket immunity, we should do so with a less board law that much more clearly lays out the standards for knowledge.
> Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers.
The goal here is not moral rectitude, but the reduction/elimination of human trafficking. Ideally while preserving as much freedom and creating as little friction as possible.
Given that slavery and conspiracy to commit slavery are crimes already, can't we just increase the penalties for those crimes to the appropriate level?