Campaign against Craigslist reaches absurd heights
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Corning make almost all the glass that transmits all this digital pornography around the world.
Isn't it time somebody acted to stop these monsters profiting from the evil trade in dense wavelength division multiplexing?
Is the underlying concern nonsensical? No.
Did craigslist take a real step to ameliorate the concern of AG's around the country over trafficking ads? Yes.
Did craigslist eliminate trafficking ads (and ads for prostitution in general) from the site? No.
Is the Internet changing the game for the illicit sex industry? Yes. Is craigslist assuming a central role in that transformation? Yes. Is craiglist actively pursuing that role? Probably not.
Is it fair that they're bearing the brunt of public outrage over the Internet's role in making the illicit sex market more efficient? I don't know. Maybe.
Articles taking the piss out of CT Gov candidate Blumenthal for making a campaign issue out of craigslist: peachy keen.
Articles suggesting that public outrage against craiglist is intrinsically wrong, or articles that don't say that directly but form arguments clearly premised on that notion: not so great.
No, there are some sites that devoted solely to promoting prostitution:
http://www.theeroticreview.com/
Seeing state AG's going after Craigslist really shows how disinterested they are in addressing the problem they perceive and that they are merely playing for the camera.
Incidentally, many of the communities on these under the radar, non-Craigslist sites are now bracing for the equivalent of the Eternal September, like when AOL opened up access to Usenet and an ocean of newbies destroyed the careful equilibrium of a community which the general public mostly didn't know even existed. I worked for one of the bigger sites(in the top 5), and let me tell you, the amount of traffic they all get, the number of users and the number of women posting would absolutely shock folks. The entire online prostitution industry is much, much bigger than everyone realizes. It's just all under the radar, and for good reason!
Craigslist has always been the AOL of the industry, as the lowest hanging fruit, with the most blatant crime, spam, cops and worst behaved prostitutes. But at the same time, their traffic amounts were a high multiple of everyone else combined. All the AGs have accomplished is to redirect hundreds of thousands of posts and millions of hits elsewhere on the Internet. :P
The AGs surely must be grand-standing, or else I am vastly underestimating their intelligence and understanding of how the Internet works. They surely know damned well they stand no chance of going after the dozens upon dozens of other sites out there, wrangling each one through the courts, and shutting each down one by one. All it will take is one legal fuck up in one case against one site that gets thrown out or won to set the precedent, then the flood gates open and we're all back to where we started: the general public has a fundamental base level of protected free speech online, and online prostitution continues as it always has.
Also, the AGs have just made the jobs of the cops infinitely harder to go after prostitution. This is actually a law enforcement disaster—when you can't stop all the crime, the next best hope is that you can at least have an evidence trail for the worst crimes that you must go after. It's a triage system, as applied to law enforcement. Now the cops don't even have that. Before, with CL being the hub, the cops make one phone call and get IPs, credit cards, and post history—it was a nearly automated process that would shock most people how easy it was. Now, as the user base fractures amongst sites all over the world, the cops are going to have a much harder, less user-friendly way of getting any investigative information. So when some criminal fool posts on some board that they have a basement full of 12 year old Eastern European girls chained to the wall, or whatever extravagent crime you want to imagine, the cops won't be able to hit the ground running after one phone call. It could take weeks just to locate where the poster originated. Nice job AGs!
Not to mention that when women can't easily post online, their next best alternative is to work as street walkers, and that is a public safety disaster. You could even argue that in the past decade Craigslist has helped society by moving prostitution off the streets and onto the web.
Besides, many of the big sites are not even hosted nor incorporated in the US and are quite untouchable.
Basically it all boils down to this:
AGs: it's an election year, we need to drum up PR, sex & prostitution moves our political base, so it cannot possibly backfire, it's illegal, it has all moved to the Internet, so let's stop the Internet!
Internet: lol wut?!
People talk as if the sex trade can go completely underground, as if it's only exposed to the public eye through the benevolent lens of craiglist. Of course that's not true. Even among the worst offenders, the mafia-based sex slave traffickers, it's still a business, and it still needs customer acquisition mechanisms.
This is only plausible if such a crack down could change things so much that adult ads weren't just harder to make but near to impossible. And that seems highly implausible given that prostitution flourished quite well in a pre-Internet world.
Merely increasing the barriers to entry actually enhances the power of the "mafia-based sex slave traffickers" - when an individual can place a simple ad, they don't have to depend on a dicey character, otherwise they might.
And prostitution has had a variety of "customer acquisition mechanisms" stretching into antiquity. Full page ads you can find in many free weekly would qualify as authentic temptations for engage an prostitute (show lots of skin, etc). An ambiguously worded ad on craigslist is more like a means for a consumer to find the product they are already looking for.
We can see a similar pattern in the drug trade. Illegality creates large, monstrous cartels when it doesn't eliminate demand. For example, the semi-legal pot growers in California aren't great but they are much better than the Mexican cocaine cartels (murdering 100's of people at a time last I heard...).
Certainly, prostitution is not driven by organized crime currently. The point is that when it is more difficult for a prostitute to operate independently, she is more likely to turn to a pimp and/or a mafia controlled operation (not to deny that some pimps and mafiosi entice some people into prostitution now - but as you say, this isn't the majority currently).
We're more or less arguing over demand curves. Your argument boils down to claiming that more enforcement would change the supply-and-demand situation sufficiently to improve things for people. That is where both drugs and music downloading are good analogies because they both show the failure of enforcement to impact supply and demand sufficiently to change the situation (except for the worse).
It does not sound like a reasonable argument for saying that craigslist should be running ads to help the illegal sex trade.
This is not just Internet scare-mongering. Craigslist has genuinely transformed and streamlined the sex trade. It did so knowingly and, given the amount of topic-based curation it already does, deliberately. It is a valid public policy target.
The last time I looked, Craig wasn't soliciting donations for the Russian mafia. Craiglist doesn't run ads.
Craigslist's users run ads. Some of those ads might (or might not) be for prostitutes. The question under debate is what obligation should be imposed on craigslist to decide that something is an ad for prostitution and stop it.
And I'm not particular arguing for or against legalizing drugs or prostitution - legal or illegal, both have their problems. I would argue for more of a harm reduction perspective on both of these.
And "Craigslist has genuinely transformed and streamlined the sex trade": To claim Craigslist by itself did this is preposterous. The Internet as a whole certainly did but you're going to put that genie back in the bottle - well, not without a dictatorship harsher than China or Iran.
Plus, craigslist doesn't and can't really scan most content on the site because of its massive size, so being able to add or remove topics is extremely loose control at best...
Well there are a number of ways that can be interpreted.
Is there exploitation and misery within the sex industry? Yes but far from every sex worker is a fifteen year old Russian nanny tricked into prostitution. Many go into the field with their eyes open, make more money than they make in a mainstream field and leave. Others go in that way but get addicted to drugs or otherwise harmed. It's dangerous but so are a lot of things.
Is making it harder for prostitutes to find johns going to decrease exploitative aspects of prostitution? It seems highly doubtful to me. While I know of friends of friends who used the adult section to turn tricks, I'm far from an expert. Still, the most plausible argument is that craigslist makes it possible for prostitutes to operate in the safest possible fashion doing what they'd do anyway. If you disagree, I'd like to hear the argument.
So, is the entire campaign a political stunt that hasn't prevented a single act of child exploitation? I think the article makes a good case for this. As far as "outrage", that's also a rather nebulous thing.
But neither am I going to allow my recognition of that fact to reshape my views on the sex trade. Blumenthal being opportunistic and unfair doesn't make craigslist right.
What I see here is yet another case of technology complicating law enforcement, and the peanut gallery expecting the laws to change to accomodate it. That shouldn't be how the world works. I'm biased, because I'm pretty intimately familiar with other crimes that technology makes harder to enforce.
Generally it looks like Craigslist was making enforcement easier by providing a centralized repository of everyone's actions.
I simply don't believe that's an unreasonable position.
The situation is a signal that society needs to find a different means to deal with the problems like child-trafficking than making prostitution in general illegal.
And I certainly do expect law enforcement to accommodate - law enforcement works for me, meaning society in general, last I hear.
Law enforcement should accomodate the will of the people. It should not blindly accomodate the will of the market and the progress of technology. Markets are good, technology is good, but neither are great drivers of public policy.
If you're right about prostitution, change the law. Unlike newspaper classifieds, the legislative process did not become irrelevant when craigslist caught on.
Acts that could be called "victimless crimes" are acts which both sides are eager to engage in.
You can consider one or another of those who engage in drug trades or prostitution transactions to be victims if you'd like, I don't think that really changes the conversation here.
Regardless of the values involved, actions which both sides are eager to engage in are inherently difficult to stop - both sides happy to use subterfuge, etc.
So the cost to society for stopping such things is only going to increase as communication technology advances.
And enforcement always involves a cost-benefit equation regardless of whether one might think of laws as absolute. However bad it might be, prostitution is not going away and enforcement acts in the end are ways of dealing with it rather than something that is going to stop it.
The enforcement equation for drugs and prostitution have always been "perverse" - since police can't stop prostitution, their actions have often involved both self-aggrandizing media-events ("moral panics") and kick-back schemes. The perversity only increases with communications technology.
They have every right to do that, and I'm glad they did; it's more honest that way. However, nobody has any business feigning outrage that the AG's then questioned their step. Most of the time, when people stamp "censored" over content on their site, they do in fact intend to put it back.
You can break out the Ayn Rand when someone passes a law requiring craigslist to genuflect, instead of just issuing a sharply worded press release in an ongoing pissing match.
Well, unless you're outraged the AG ever began their campaign to begin with. Then you might feel outrage that they're following it to its conclusion.
I suppose you have a point that claim should have been "AG's campaign stays as stupid as it ever was ..."
Next you'll tell me that they're coming for the car stereo fences.
Craiglist has broken no law. The politicians are going on a moral crusade for their benefit. They pick on the geeks because well back in school they were the easy targets.
And speaking as one of the geekier people on HN, please spare me the geek exceptionalism.
Robbing a bank is an 'overtly criminal activity', so is murder. Prostitution is a different matter altogether and even if I can't fathom why someone would go to visit a prostitute I completely support the prostitutes in their position and the customers in theirs as well.
As long as everybody agrees to it and is 'of age' I really can't find any reason whatsoever that would cause me to think this is criminal.
To quote George Carlin: "Selling is legal, fucking is legal. Why shouldn't selling fucking be legal?".
It's like a replay of prohibition and a whole slew of other things including 'sodomy' (being gay is criminal?), smoking pot (I don't but I completely respect the right of others to smoke and drink what they please as long as they do it in a way that does not affect others) and so on.
I'm pro-euthanasia for much the same reason, people should be free to do as they please while respecting the rights of others.
If you like to have a very large number of people in jail you should create a society where lots of ordinary behaviour is illegal.
It is certainly fair to point out that the law leans significantly towards craigslist's side of the argument.