The key thing that will need to be proven is the complicity of the admins, although if they are already seizing the site I expect the authorities have what a judge or grand jury feels is enough evidence to warrant the seizure.
And now, well, "Oh yeah we had the power all along" which is what your comment is stating as your belief.
That is why your claims about spin are problematic to me. You are ignoring the background of the situation to make a very narrow claim about "spin" when the claims of "spin" are about the laws they passed citing Backpage.
No. That's what used to be necessary, before SESTA and FOSTA passed[0]. The whole point of SESTA and FOSTA was to remove that requirement - websites are now liable even if they aren't complicit. Even if they take active efforts to combat sex work on their service, they're still liable if someone manages to use the site for that purpose.
Again, none of this relates to sex trafficking. It applies to consensual sex work.
[0] And even though SESTA and FOSTA aren't signed into law yet, Blumenthal specifically wrote the law to apply retroactively. So once the bills are signed, this lower standard is what will apply.
Don't tell me there is none, or never been a sex trafficking thru Facebook.
Well, because SESTA hasn't gone into effect yet. You can bet once it does there will be at least private civil cases against Facebook. Public, including criminal, ones might take until they've got precedent from smashing less well-funded defendants, but they'll come, too, especially (even if Facebook takes drastic action now to prevent future liability) for past cases under the retroactivity provisions (which should be constitutionally problematic for criminal cases, but not so much for civil cases.)
FOSTA has an intent to facilitate prostitution requirement, SESTA has a lower threshold with regard to trafficking.
> Again, none of this relates to sex trafficking. It applies to consensual sex work.
True of FOSTA, but not SESTA.
> And even though SESTA and FOSTA aren't signed into law yet, Blumenthal specifically wrote the law to apply retroactively.
At least as far as criminal liability goes, that is a fairly direct violation of the prohibition on ex post facto laws; for civil liabilities that would otherwise be barred by the Section 230 safe harbor, though, that's not an issue.
The law does criminalize any activity relates to prostitution, not sex trafficking. That's not spin - that's literally the express purpose of the law as written. It's not a coincidence that the law is written to apply to all forms of sex work.
Blumenthal, the senator who authored the bill, has been personally crusading against sex work from the past decade, longer than he's even been in the Senate. He chose Backpage as the particular target for this bill, but it's not like he hasn't gone after any and all forms of sex work in the past.
Which is why the feds believe they crossed the line into actively assisting criminal activity when they should have just been dissuading or outright blocking the people creating this type of content on the site.
My guess is all of the charges will be dropped as it was mainly to ad hominem them to allow this Backpage takedown.
> Backpage started as the literal back page of the New Times, filled with classified ads. [1]
The New Times has a history in being pro-civil rights and anti-war [3][5].
> The Phoenix New Times is a free alternative weekly Phoenix, Arizona newspaper, published each Thursday. It was the founding publication of New Times Media (now Village Voice Media), but The Village Voice is now the flagship publication of that company.[3]
> The paper was founded in 1970 by a group of students at Arizona State University, led by Frank Fiore, Karen Lofgren, Michael Lacey, Bruce Stasium, Nick Stupey, Gayle Pyfrom, Hal Smith, and later, Jim Larkin, as a counterculture response to the Kent State shootings in the spring of that year. Gary Brennan played a role in its creation. According to the 20th Anniversary issue of the New Times, published on May 2, 1990, Fiore suggested that the anti-war crowd put out its own paper. The first summer issues were called the Arizona Times and assembled in the staff's La Crescenta apartments across from ASU. The Arizona Times was renamed the New Times as the first college issue went to press in September 1970.[3]
New Times has been kicking up dust on authoritarianism since the 70s. Lacey and Larkin also won a lawsuit against Arizona as recently as 2013 for false arrest which is still used to attack them [3].
> In December 2013, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay Phoenix New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin $3.75 million to settle their false arrest lawsuit against the county defendants.
Take a look at their civil rights fund to see what I mean about how they take authority orgs/politicians to task and encourage civil rights [2].
They have been trying to take down the New Times, Village Voice Media and Backpage for nearly a decade and a half [3].
Both Larkin and Lacey are big civil right advocates and donate heavily to civil rights causes, sex rights, gay rights and immigrant rights [2][3] and the New Times attack politicians for corruption on the regular. After they attacked Arpaio they had nearly a decade of attacks from him and associated groups [3]. They did a strange tactic attacking Larkin and Lacey going after New Times readers data and identities which Lacey and Larkin refused to give up.
> In October 2007, Maricopa County sheriff's deputies arrested Lacey and Larkin on charges of revealing secret grand jury information concerning the investigations of the New Times's long-running feud with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. In July 2004, the New Times published Arpaio's home address in the context of a story about his real estate dealings, which the County Attorney's office was investigating as a possible crime under Arizona state law. A special prosecutor served Village Voice Media with a subpoena ordering it to produce "all documents" related to the original real estate article, as well as "all Internet web site traffic information" to a number of articles that mentioned Arpaio. [3]
Arpaio tried to get all information on all Phoenix New Times readers and the paper has been known to be tough on Arpaio overreaches in Arizona on immigrants and civil rights advocates.
> The prosecutor further ordered Village Voice Media to produce the IP addresses of all visitors to the Phoenix New Times website since January 1, 2004, as well as which websites those readers had been to prior to visiting. As an act of "civil disobedience", Lacey and Larkin published the contents of the subpoena on or about October 18, which resulted in their arrests the same day.On the following day, the county attorney dropped the case after declining to pursue charges against the two. [3]
> The special prosecutor's subpoena included a demand for the names of all people who had read the Arpaio story on the newspaper's website. It was the revealing of the subpoena information by the New Times which led to the arrests. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas dropped the charges less than 24 hours after the two were arrested [3]
> In the weeks following the arrests, members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which the Phoenix New Times is a member, provided links on their websites to places where Arpaio's address could be found. This was done to show solidarity with the Phoenix New Times.[3]
There is a strange section of the Backpage report attacking Lacey and Larkin for selling it to an outside investor who is offshore. They appear to hide ownership from them some might say wisely if it is being the whipping boy for 'trafficking' claims when really it is a sex worker ad website [4].
> Third, despite the reported sale of Backpage to an undisclosed foreign company in 2014, the true beneficial owners of the company are James Larkin, Michael Lacey, and Carl Ferrer. Acting through a complex chain of domestic and international shell companies, Lacey and Larkin lent Ferrer over $600 million to purchase Backpage from them. But as a result of this deal, Lacey and Larkin retain significant financial and operational control, hold almost complete debt equity in the company, and still receive large distributions of company profits. According to the consultant that structured the deal, moreover, this transaction appears to provide no tax benefits. Instead, it serves only to obscure Ferrer’s U.S.-based ownership and conceal Lacey and Larkin’s continued beneficial ownership[4].
The whole report on Backpage, and their owners Lacey and Larkin who started New Times and Village Voice, might be a massive ad hominem [4]. It also appears to be an attack on owners of alternative media influence and funding for civil rights matters [2].
My guess is Lacey and Larkin, civil rights fighters that seem similar to Larry Flynt [2], won't let this just happen and they'll fight it. Most of the attacks on Backpage, and previously the New Times and Village Voice, attacks their character via ad hominems because they are causing trouble for authoritarians and pushing alternative news media funding, my guess is this takedown of Backpage is no different.
I have posted more here on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16780579, everytime they have been arrested they have later been cleared and even won damages for false arrest in 2013 in Arizona. It is easier for authoritarians to win initially against civil rights advocates if you associate them with bad things and ad hominems, but the truth prevails. This could be a modern day civil liberties event unfolding.
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2018/04/0...
[2] http://www.laceyandlarkinfronterafund.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_New_Times
[4] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...