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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

I disagree here. Child porn and trafficking are always the arguments used to go after free speech on the internet in the court of public opinion.

If we narrowly edit the law to specifically go after those cases, then it creates less opportunities for scandal later that end in much broader restriction.

Also -- although it should go without saying, those things are actually bad! So if an unintended interpretation is making them easier, clarifying (with as little collateral damage as possible) that is congress' job.

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Except that's not what the bill does. The bill takes an existing law, 18 USC 1591, which provides a narrow scope of liability for "participation in a venture" to perform sex trafficking. I.e. running a sex trafficking business. It redefines "participation in a venture" to include "knowingly ... facilitating" sex trafficking, and then carves out 18 USC 1591 liability from the section 230 safe harbor.

This goes far beyond the backpage situation, which could've been reached with a higher intent standard like "intent to facilitate" sex trafficking.

If Google knows that sex traffickers are using gmail to coordinate their sex-trafficking activities, under the plain text of the statute, they'd be liable for "knowingly facilitating" sex trafficking. This will be abused by prosecutors and plaintiffs' attorneys.

Wouldn't it have to be a specific instance?

Also, What's the definition of know?

Someone somewhere in the organization knew?

you have reasonable processes in place to catch activity?

how does slang, metaphor and euphemism play into it?

Yes and no. "Knowing" encompasses "willful blindness," where you have warning signs but deliberately avoid investigating.

If I'm suing Google under the new 18 USC 2421A or the new 18 USC 1595(d), created by this bill, I'm arguing that "Google has tons of warning signs that its services are used by sex traffickers; even if it didn't know about the specific instance of sex trafficking I'm suing over, it was being willfully blind by not having a system in place to identify sex trafficking."

I'm really not trying to be facetious,

> If Google knows that sex traffickers are using gmail to coordinate their sex-trafficking activities, they'd be liable for "knowingly facilitating" sex trafficking

Is that not...good? If Google is reading my emails to sell me stuff (and I've given them permission to do so by using their service), and sees (reasonable) evidence I'm engaged in illegal activities, don't they have a responsibility to report that? Is that not the same thing as a GeekSquad technician stumbling across child porn on a laptop they're fixing?

Further, if Google doesn't want to knowingly facilitate, then they shouldn't know -- give me the ability to e2e encrypt my messages and stop reading my emails. Haven't they opened Pandora's box here by going that extra step further and data mining my email?

GeekSquad actively searches for it, so they would probably be in the clear under this law.

Facebook knows many drug purchases are coordinated openly on college groups, even though their intent is not to facilitate them, by not searching out and reporting them they would be liable once this law is naturally expanded upon.

> Facebook knows many drug purchases are coordinated openly on college groups

How does Facebook know this, if they still have to search them out?

> ...once this law is naturally expanded upon.

Yeah, I can see that. Slippery slope and all that. On the other hand, I feel like e.g. Facebook needs to have an incentive to police their community. I, at least, don't see a clear path to prevent Cambridge Analytica-style abuses, not through legislative changes, not in this political environment...

> Is that not...good? If Google is reading my emails to sell me stuff (and I've given them permission to do so by using their service), and sees (reasonable) evidence I'm engaged in illegal activities, don't they have a responsibility to report that? Is that not the same thing as a GeekSquad technician stumbling across child porn on a laptop they're fixing?

No, it's not good.

Any internet service provider that reaches mass adoption faces a dilemma:

- Face legal problems

- Become another arm for law enforcement (and maybe even bypass the 4th Amendment)

The prison industrial complex grows fatter.

The government & corporate prison complex has been declining for about a decade now. It has been rolled back about 20 years. It's not growing fatter:

https://i.imgur.com/ppyHKC4.jpg

By the time pot legalization gets to over half the states (in the next 10-15 years), we should have the incarceration machine rolled back to the mid 1980s, just six or seven years after the mass incarceration boom took off.

Do you really want every brother and their mother with your data to have the ability to ruin your life like that?

Maybe I'm not being clear...

In the absence of clear, well-considered privacy laws (which I'm not the least bit hopeful for, particularly internationally consistent..), Google will have access to this data. As a randomly chosen user, there's probably nothing I can do about this (assumption being the average random user can't figure out how to enable e2e encryption). So Google will be data mining my data, if they choose to. And note I'm only choosing Google here because the user I replied to used Gmail as an example, I don't think Google is particularly unique or special in regards to using their user's data for profit.

Under those assumptions, if Google finds something illegal, they should say something, right?

There are a number of "outs" here. Privacy laws, Google giving me the ability to opt out/encrypt my data, ...

Do I want this? Hard no, but that's really not my point.

Reading the bill, it seems two-(or maybe 2.5-)pronged: it seeks to restrict prostitution, and it seeks to restrict "sex trafficking" a term which is undefined and appears three times in the text, one of those times with the modifier "child" preceding. This seems deliberately sloppy, to give prosecutors total discretion to do anything they want. We have far too many laws like that already. Most of the time, new laws targeted at prostitution end up hurting individual prostitutes more than prostitution itself. The innovation here is to hurt e.g. hotels that have websites more than prostitution itself.

IANAL. However, I've seen "unintended" consequences often enough not to believe Hanlon. Also, it's far from clear that the best way of dealing with prostitution in this age is by prohibiting it.

As a reduction to absurdity, but also a very real threat given prosecutorial overreach:

Does your comment rationally questioning anti-prostitution laws “promote prostitution” under the words of the new bill? Does mine? Is any YC staff that sees this also complicit if they don’t remove our comments immediately?

Is a law unconstitutional if the threat of enforcement suppresses protected speech, namely policy debate?

"Promotion" would likely be interpreted in the sense of commercial advertising. A law that reached advocacy of prostitution in the abstract would be clearly unconstitutional under the standard set by Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). Only speech that proposes a specific illegal act is excluded from First Amendment protection. Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, 413 U.S. 376 (1973), and United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285 (2008).

Good grief, Mr. Williams was so dumb. Still, any ruling that leans so heavily on Free Speech Coalition probably isn't terrible.

Do you ear often cases of counterfeit money? Almost never because the punishment is very high and it is considered as a very severe crime. IMHO, child porn is only a scapegoat for liberticide laws. If the states wanted to fight child porn, it could eradicate it without changing any law. Even if child porn is a serious issue, I am convinced it is completely negligible compared to the number of children raped by their parents. Even stars like Woody Allen are concerned.

When I read that we should fight child porn, it means that we should give up our freedom and our democracy. Choose your fight.

> Even if child porn is a serious issue, I am convinced it is completely negligible compared to the number of children raped by their parents.

This problem is worse than that though. Children abused by parents/caretakers are victims of circumstance. Problems with foster care aside, moving the child out of that environment should stop the abuse.

The problem here is that of commerce. There is an endless stream of Uncle Lesters in the queue. The child is a victim for as long as they have value on the market, and then they're found dead in a ditch somewhere.

> When I read that we should fight child porn, it means that we should give up our freedom and our democracy. Choose your fight.

You're going to have a hard time finding popular support for the notion that freedom protects your right to sexually exploit underage girls.

>freedom protects your right to sexually exploit underage girls

That's not what he said or implied at all

Commercial child porn is extremely rare. In 2010, for example, not a single federal distribution case in the United States involved commercial activity. The majority of prosecutions are against people downloading it off peer to peer networks for free; the rest are against people trading it for more child porn.

https://injusticetoday.com/new-doj-report-demonstrates-stunn...

> Do you ear often cases of counterfeit money? Almost never because the punishment is very high and it is considered as a very severe crime.

You have drawn the wrong conclusion.

There is less counterfeit crime because it's harder to pull off, not because the laws are tougher.

Counterfeiting money is far more complex of a crime, and only benefits one-side, the suppliers. No business, legitimate or otherwise wants to deal in fake currency.

On the other hand, children are highly vulnerable and easy to victimize. The suppliers and the buyers are both incentivized to perpetuate this crime.

> Do you ear often cases of counterfeit money?

Unrelated tangent, but not only do I often hear cases of counterfeit money, I had friends who would counterfeit it in highschool just with a little image editing and a printer. This small scale type of counterfeiting is actually by far the most common type. Won't work against newer plastic-y bills in my country though.

This misframes the argument GP was making IMO. That those are reasons to go after free speech on the internet has nothing to do with who they are going after. Everyone agrees that they should go after the perpetrators, just not everyone agrees who the perpetrators are. The street analogy GP uses is apt if you assume these internet services are just infrastructure. If you do not and assume they are like newspapers or storefronts, you might think differently.

> If we narrowly edit the law to specifically go after those cases, then it creates less opportunities for scandal later that end in much broader restriction.

We already have law to go after these cases, just not the conduits. We have to keep our eye on who the real criminals are, go after them, and we already have the laws to do it. Unfortunately the emotional appeal will be strong enough to go after others (backpage being a bad example because they may have been actually complicit). And we know these grasps for more power/authority rarely are kept at their minimum state or reduced. Want to actually avoid "much broader restriction"? Stop it where it starts.

A government will always its power. That is why you give it as little as possible and let the people tackle the social issues.

What are the legitimate functions of government?

Possibly relatedly (depending on whether you think it's a legitimate function of government to be the answer to this question), what sort of social issues may the people tackle, and with what sort of power, and how is abusive vigilante justice prevented? Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer? (This is a new policy from approximately yesterday: https://redd.it/863xcj ) Should the CEO of Cloudflare, bending to public pressure, refuse to serve Nazis on ideological grounds? Should a religious person with a genuine belief that abortion is murder be allowed to use deadly force to stop an abortion clinic? Should the Black Panthers be allowed to bear arms in public whenever Oakland police are in black neighborhoods, in order to dissuade the government from abusing its power? (Ronald "nine most terrifying words" Reagan signed the act that made this illegal.)

> Should Reddit refuse to allow people to arrange for sales of alcohol using their site as a communication platform, because underage people might buy beer?

To be fair, they're doing that in reaction to Sec 230.

Sure. But that's ultimately because the government has defined that facilitating beer sales to people under 21 is illegal.

If the government decided to stay out of drug regulation entirely, would it be reasonable for companies like Reddit to decide on their own that people under some age should not be able to purchase beer online, set that age, etc.? (Presumably, because there is not overwhelming public support to repeal those laws, society at large believes that young people should be prevented, passive voice, from buying beer - if we move enforcement of that social problem to the people, how should that get implemented?)

The people for the most part either don't want to or can't deal with social issues themselves. They want someone else to do it for them. So then the people put pressure on social networks instead, and they do whatever they're going do to police their network.

I guess that's better? In theory at least, people can switch social networks. To some extent you'll get the level of regulation you prefer.

Even that's a bit optimistic, since a lot of people aren't technically competent and just do whatever their friends recommend.

That's the trap -- the problem is that to comply with the law with respect to these things, you need to provide a facility for interception and inspection that can trivially impact all things.

I'll give you an example where I've seen this impact. Due to an unrelated event, a past employer retained backup tapes which included certain information going back many years, which normally would have been lost in the normal cost of business. When a litigation event took place, they were forced to restore that data, which was inadvertently preserved.

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