Backpage.com Pleads Guilty to Human Trafficking in Texas | Hacker News Reader

Backpage.com Pleads Guilty to Human Trafficking in Texas

texasattorneygeneral.gov

129 pointsaviv155 comments

Honest question: does it mean they were really guilty of it, or simply they have been offered a better deal than going through the trial? I guess if somebody accuses me of 93 indictments, which potentially leads to a life sentence vs plead guilty and you'll only make 5 years, I'll plead guilty. I'm asking because there is an implication. If I run a website which does not facilitate human trafficking - but I can get accused and risk 25 years - I'll also plead guilty, even if my website is a fantasy football website.

I can't find a NY indictment, but the CA one is easy to find. Backpage principals are charged with:

* Systemic _knowing_ commercial promotion of prostitution.

* An elaborate internal management process focused on concealing evidence of their knowledge of prostitution, including internal employee training.

* _Knowing_ commercial promotion of child sex trafficking, in ads that included photos, in which their policy was to strip out keywords indicative of child sex trafficking while still running the ads.

* A long series of money laundering schemes to collect money from sex traffickers without routing those transactions through banks and credit card processing services.

* An elaborate series of financial moves designed to conceal their assets from prosecutors.

This isn't Craigslist. They ran the site like a criminal conspiracy, which is what it was.

I imagine they've plead guilty because they would have lost calamitously at trial, and the sentences they'd have received after a jury conviction would have been horrific. I'd imagine that if you were Carl Ferrer, you'd be thinking, "the prosecutors are going to show the jury a bunch of ads depicting children known to have been trafficked, with evidence that we knowingly massaged the ad to ensure it could be published for our profit".

Reading the indictment and doing some reading beyond that was tough to get through. Your bullet points lay it all out, and I just keep running through...

There must have been quite a few people involved in something that complex. I find it mind-boggling that so many people could live with themselves while profiting from, and enabling child sex trafficking. I accept that they clearly could, but assuming it’s not just staffed by sociopaths, it’s hard to imagine how they could. How did they rationalize it? How did they sleep at night?

I try to imagine the answers, but I guess I lack the mental horsepower to pull that off. I keep defaulting to anger or sorrow or confusion, and just hoping that they’re all sick. I don’t really believe that though, so I’m left wondering “how” a lot.

So as I understand it:

* They had a keyword filter that automatically stripped certain words (like Lolita and teenage) from an ad before it was posed. Usage of these words doesn't necessarily prove that the ad was for child sex trafficking. After all in Hollywood women are teenage heartthrobs into their 30s. I'm not sure the reason why they had this filter, but a poster in a previous thread said it was requested by law enforcement.

* Because they facilitated prostitution their credit card facilities were removed by VISA/Mastercard and so they forced prostitutes to use bitcoin to buy ads. I think this is what the money laundering charge is relating to.

I think that back page made a significant amount of money from prostitution ads. Because that is illegal in most of the US, they went through these elaborate processes (aka criminal conspiracy) to protect themselves from criminal charges. If they were knowingly hiding child sex trafficking they should have the book thrown at them. But at this stage, from what I have seen from what has been alleged there is nothing concrete to support that.

They were knowingly hiding child sex trafficking.

If you're not of the opinion that prostitution is immoral and must be outlawed, then the only problematic bullet point is the one about child sex trafficking.

But looking into it, they were stripping out hundreds of words from ads. This was being done to avoid prosecution for allowing prostitution ads on their platform. However, the senate's report and all the media focus on 5 or 6 words that have underage connotations, in an effort to scandalize you.

Read for yourself: https://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017.01.10%20...

It sounds like you are morally outraged and quite shocked to imagine that such a thing as prostitution could exist, and that you are clamoring for the government to sweep it under the rug. Banning and hiding prostitution does not make it go away, it just makes it more dangerous for the prostitutes. Your analysis here is based on moral outrage and your credulous reading of a report sensationalized to make some prosecutor's career.

> If you're not of the opinion that prostitution is immoral and must be outlawed, then the only problematic bullet point is the one about child sex trafficking.

I support legalizing prostitution, but that "only problematic bullet point" (where they knowingly covered up child sex trafficking) is reason enough to take down the site and prosecute the owners. It's ridiculous to say the focus on that is "an effort to scandalize you" — that alone is both legally and morally wrong, regardless of the rest of the charges, and they should be punished for it.

They took ads they knew to be for child sex trafficking --- they had keyword matching for them! --- stripped the incriminating words from the ads, and ran them, pictures and all.

Sort of related: I find lots of similarities here with regard to regulation of firearms in the US.

There's a non insignificant number of people who plead guilty to murder for that same reason (to avoid death penalty) but are later exonerated via DNA evidence.

How many of those cases involve defendants who can afford the lawyers that Backpage.com's execs can afford?

You can just say "significant".

Off topic here. But, I see those phrases as different, as most people probably do. I see non insignificant as...a few. If they'd said 'significant', I'd assume a high percentage.

You can also not not say not insignificant.

Not sure what happened in this case, but I believe what you’re talking about is known as an Alford plea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea

shows an incredible faith in our justice system.

It is not a made up thing, there is plenty of literature on the subject - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...

i didn't mean to imply your faith was unjustified. more that it's indicative of a problem

Yes, the same one where people are convicted due to lying police on occasion, it's pretty flawed

As long as you are judged by a 'jury of your peers,' there will always be people who take plea deals if they feel the evidence against them might be enough to convince a jury.

I'm not sure there exists a 'fair' system that can operate without some sort of jury, but as long as there's a human element no trial has a guaranteed outcome.

Plea deals are orthogonal to jury trials, by definition. You could have plea deals in a system without jury trials, and vice versa.

In addition, you’re oversimplifying why people agree to plea deals. Lawyers are expensive, and a poor person might prefer to just go to jail for a short time rather than spend thousands of dollars for an uncertain outcome. Even if they are confident they would win in a jury trial, that’s still thousands of dollars in fees to their lawyer.

>poor person might prefer to just go to jail for a short time rather than spend thousands of dollars for an uncertain outcome.

This was literally my point, jury trials are uncertain. Except it applies even in cases where people have millions of dollars to burn. A possible 40 years in prison or 5 years under house arrest?

Though of course, as I was typing I was reminded of the Android case. And countless other cases where a judge was the unknown factor, so really, it doesn't matter how much lawyers cost. Any trial will always be an unknown until someone can code a deterministic judge bot.

> so really, it doesn't matter how much lawyers cost

I really advise you to read up on some of the literature about plea deals; there are very few people who think that they are something we should have at the scale that we have them, or something that we should have “as long as” we have jury trials. The prevalence of plea deals in the American criminal justice system is primarily due to the fact that there are simply too many crimes for our courts and public defenders to handle promptly (an incentive for prosecutors) and that legal representation is so expensive (an incentive for defendants, and also for shady prosecutors).

Here’s a blog post on the ACLU’s website about it: https://www.aclu.org/blog/mass-incarceration/its-not-just-pr...

Back page was anything but fantasy football.

And the CEO himself pleaded guilty to money laundering. I remember people here were coming out in droves to defend the company against big bad government when the site was first seized.

This line is particularly condemning:

> It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Unfortunately all this might mean is that child trafficking cases not reported on Backpage have a much higher chance of never being reported.

So I don't view the statement particularly condemning RELATIVE TO (note the emphasis!) non-Backpage child trafficking cases. Furthermore, the age distribution of victims between Backpage vs non-Backpage victims probably differs considerably.

It also cuts off a significant channel. Only time will tell, but chances are it could make a large impact in reduction.

That is bullshit. I'm sure there are already 100 other sites doing this.

This is like shutting down piratebay. No one really cares except the owners.

As if you would shut down your very profitable human trafficking business because backpage.com is down. You already have your dungeons and people or whatever is entailed in this sick shit. You would just go to another site.

This argument is so often used; that shutting down access to one means of doing an illegal or negative act doesn't matter because there are other means and it's always false.

Any time you increase the cost of doing something by a non-trivial amount you are almost certain to decrease the amount that thing is done. The assumptions you make that you lead you to your conclusion aren't clearly based in fact:

1) It is effectively costless to move to a new service 2) Any new service has equivalent demand 3) The profits are significant (your very profitable human trafficking business)

The first is clearly false. You'll need to move all your workflows to a new platform, learn the new platform, understand how to market on it, etc.

The second is also clearly false. These are marketplaces meaning there are strong network effects. Backpage was likely the best marketplace meaning it had very large portions of both the supply side and demand side. Now, how do you what service to move to when no service is dominant yet? You don't. You almost certainly see decreased marketplace effects in the "100 other sites doing this".

For the third, is there any reason at all to believe the human trafficking business is "very profitable"? It seems like a very small market with very high costs.

Of course, a further effect here is the deterrent that shutting down such a website will be to developers who may wish to replace backpage.

A further example of what I will call "the fallacy of costless transfer" is in suicide prevention. Removing access to easy means of suicide, prevents the likelihood of committing suicide. Hence why there is to be a net around the golden gate bridge to catch jumpers.

Not to mention, of those hundred new sites that popup, some of them will be honey pots operated by law enforcement. Traffickers have lost a trusted marketplace and it will hopefully be difficult to find another.

Theres literally infinite number of places on the web human traffickers can start a market place.

Irrelevant. Once they start a new one, how will buyers know they're not a cop?

you should probably look into "Zero-Trust Authentication".

Yeah, prohibition has worked out lots of times.

When people refer to prohibitions failing, they're generally referring to consensual or victimless crimes: drugs, alcohol, (non-coerced) prostitution, gambling, etc.

That's not the case here. Coercion and violence are component to human trafficking. Taking down Backpage and similar websites isn't "prohibition" any more than laws against murder are.

And I think you missed the point completely and that's exactly why my comment had to be made.

The fact that you use murder here is a perfect example.

Prohibition measures are all about restricting the availability of something to curb the desire of it.

With the sole exception of the Quaalude, it has never worked. A single government had to convince a global industry to stop its production entirely. There were only like 7 or 9 labs making it though. Oh and with designer drug labs in China, you can actually get ludes made now if you're clever.

Human trafficking, coercion and violence is a side-effect of a desire creating a market. Driving that market underground will not eliminate the market, you have to eliminate peoples' desire for that thing.

You can't globally stop the production of human beings to curtail this market like they did with Quaaludes...

Murder is just about the freest, easiest thing you can do if that's your desire. Murder rates are on the decline because it's just something not that many people want to do anymore.

The crux of the prohibition argument is this:

> Human trafficking, coercion and violence is a side-effect of a desire creating a market.

But this will never be a legitimate market. We're talking about money being exchanged for sex with children. That is inherently violent, and has absolutely nothing to do with whatever market may or may not exist.

The argument against prohibition is that making the thing illegal is more harmful than regulating it. That's not the case with murder, and it's not the case with human trafficking — any occurrence of it is harmful, regardless of how you regulate it.

See Singapore's drug use policies.

Which are the complete opposite of prohibition. Singapore's policies have nothing to do with restricting access.

They're torture, life imprisonment or the death penalty. Apples to Oranges.

I'm very confused by how you mean this. I don't see why the type of penalties used means the policies aren't for restricting access under your definitions. It seems abundantly clear to me that they restrict access by making it so immensely costly to traffic drugs (ie provide access to drugs) that few are willing to do it. This is criminal justice 101 stuff.

For the opposite effect, see legalization of marijuana. It was never fully removed from the (black) market while illegal, but since legalization easy access has meant usage has dramatically increased.

99.9999999999999 % of ads were for legit prostitution on backpage. There were also many other uses for backpage.

You think if a child trafficker posts a single ad on Hacker News...that the entire site should be shut down?

No this was heavy handed and a huge step towards censoring the web as we know it.

In your hypothetical the site admins would have to be aware of the ads, profiting from them, laundering the profits, etc. In that case yes, burn HN down and scatter the ashes. Of course thst isn’t what they’d do, is it? They’d report the ad, delete it, and try to prevent any more such ads from appearing, which is the polar opposite of the actions taken. by Backpage. I’d also like a citation on your numbers, and how you can tell the difference between “legit prostitution” and someone being trafficked or pimped.

I’d add that if you actually care about broader issues of censorship, you could not be doing a worse and more counterproductive job of promulgating those beliefs if you tried.

What about forums sites like reddit/8chan/4chan who don't have enough admins to monitor the thousands of forums that are created on a periodic basis....

What about if the admins wanted to take a week off?

There's no doubt this gives the govt massive censorship power and forces a beauracratic burden on sites to hire more admins.

You're cool with throwing away our liberties and free internet all over something so statistically miniscule in comparison to the rest of the web.

We try to prohibit plenty of things, like murder and rape. What’s wrong with that? The imperfection of our attempts in. Omway invalidates those attempts, and the prevailing wisdom supported by evidence is that prohibiting violent crimes has better outcomes than not. Raping children and trafficking them for the purposes of rape is pretty violent, and while some black market will exist, it’s worth constraining, and fighting.

This isn’t prohibition against adults choosing to smoke some pot or have a drink after all, and trying to parlay the semantics of that prohibition to this discussion is grossly inappropriate.

People don't seem to want to consider that prohibition of these things is exactly the measure that creates violence around them. This is exactly the thing that sex workers are opposing this law and the destruction of Backpage for.

I'm not saying make it legal and I'd happily throw the switch on any human trafficker or child rapist myself.

The point is not to take people who are already in a desperate situation and put them in the way of more harm. That's what this does. It's an easy win for whatever politician is pushing this but does next to nothing to combat the real problem.

Raping a child is violence. Kidnapping is violence, as is trafficking humans for the purpose of being raped. These are inherently violent acts. You cannot take the violence out of raping kids or sex trafficking them.

Prohibition measures are all about restricting the availability of something to curb the desire of it.

No one thinks that you’re reducing demand for raping children by cracking down on child rapists. People think that they can reduce the rates of child rape by arresting people who rape children, and facilitate the rape of children. They also think that it’s worth saving some people from being raped, even if it’s a given that you can’t save everyone.

Murder is just about the freest, easiest thing you can do if that's your desire. Murder rates are on the decline because it's just something not that many people want to do anymore.

What? No. The risks of being caught for murdering someone have increased, so it’s far from free and easy unless you don’t care about losing your freedom or life as a result. The same applies for trafficking children for sex. You reduce activity by increasing the cost in the cost:benefit relationship. While people driven to murder will still do it, you reduce things like casual killing, or murder for hire. While you’re not going to make pedophiles lose their desire to rape kids, you can reduce the willingness of the people supplying them with kids to try and profit from those urges.

Prostitutes were so much safer when they had pimps and had to stand out on the street and hop into peoples' cars, right?

I question both your reasoning and your motives, given that you’re switching between talking about child sex trafficking and prostitution.

Prostitutes were so much safer when they had pimps and had to stand out on the street and hop into peoples' cars, right?

Yes, let's put them all back to doing that to pretend to save a handful of kids.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-traff...

We could make a bigger dent in child prostitution if we dealt with income inequality along racial lines than by closing Backpage, but nobody really gives about giving poorer people the same opportunities they have.

I'm saddened, but not surprised, that every post you're making in this thread is greyed-out.

I have a bad habit of saying the right but uncomfortable thing.

Also the average user of HN probably has zero exposure to sex work, other than maybe as a consumer. I grew up in Times Square, with street hookers on my corner. Some of my friends are/were sex workers. There's a lot of fear and anger around what's going on right now.

You really have a problem understanding that trafficking children isn’t “sex work” it’s kidnapping and rape, don’t you? Why is that? Is it just too inconvenient for your purposes to acknowledge that part of the discussion, and that’s your version of being right?

Maybe it’s just that you’re not going to get much pushback from many here about the wisdom of legalizing prostitution, so you lean on that crutch when discussing the issues here? The problem is that Backpage was aiding and abetting something that has no relation to “sex work” unless your definition includes kidnapping and rape.

tptacek 20 hours ago [-]

They took ads they knew to be for child sex trafficking --- they had keyword matching for them! --- stripped the incriminating words from the ads, and ran them, pictures and all.

How can you justify that? Put it together with the rest and it’s both illegal and immoral, and again, not about adult sex workers. If you care about the issue of legalizing prostitution, don’t get it tangled up in this mess.

Your anologies are all wrong.

Its like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer.

It's like a grocery store being closed because one of the manufacturers products was bad.

Its like burning down a house to kill a mouse.

Its like if someone created ads on Hacker News for prostitution and the government shut down the entire site.

Its like targeting the INTERNET instead of the actual HUMAN TRAFFICKERS....

These sensational news reports are a distraction from SESTA a really freaky law that allows the govt to bring criminal action against a sites owners for content they deem innappropriate...its already affected numerous sites beyond backpage.

Our civil liberties and the internet have been grossly eroded by SESTA and its sad to see the day when the government can shut sites down at their leisure.

I'm not reasoning through analogies like yours. I was reasoning from principles. Your analogies might be nice sound bites but don't have much value in describing the world.

Your problems with SESTA may be valid but that's a completely separate question from whether or not shutting backpage down would limit human trafficking. You're arguing from mood affiliation (that SESTA is bad and therefore anything associated with it is bad) and not against the principles.

You're arguing from poor statistics.

Backpage was the second largest classifieds ads service on the internet. Thousands+ of ads per week...

It blows my mind that people are fine with destroying the foundation of the free internet for something that's a minor statistical outlier drop in the bucket of activities on these sites no matter how horrible the activity may be.

In related news we've been spending 7.6 billion a year on the TSA after 9.11 to prevent terrorism....

It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The proportion of that site's activities that are related to illegal activities is completely irrelevant. It may be that 0.001% of the classifieds on Backpage were human trafficking related but if that made up even 10% of human trafficking cases this is a slam dunk success in terms of stopping human trafficking.

In related news we've been spending 7.6 billion a year on the TSA after 9.11 to prevent terrorism....

True and that's a terrible waste of money but completely unrelated to this.

It blows my mind that someone thinks allowing terrible illegal activity in the name of some mysterious concept of internet freedom is a good thing. Certainly you don't seem particularly concerned with the freedom of those being trafficked in the physical world.

Terrorism and Human Trafficking are related in the sense that they're tiny statistical blips.. miniscule drops in the ocean of human activities.

However they sound so horrible that people are perfectly willing to sacrifice massive civil liberties to stop them.

They have a 'mood affililation' and will do anything to stop these activities without looking at the principles of what they're doing.

I'm concerned about the freedom of those being trafficked..I just think theres other ways to help them that don't involve eroding the foundation of the free web.

Backpage was knowingly colluding with sex traffickers. So, to fix your grocery store analogy, it's more like shutting down a grocery store who was intentionally distributing known bad products from a manufacturer.

It's not like "targeting the Internet instead of the actual human traffickers"; they are the actual human traffickers.

Also, Backpage wasn't shut down under SESTA; SESTA hadn't yet passed when the site was taken down.

False. NUMEROUS other sex worker sites have been taken down including reddit removing its sex worker sub.

So are we targeting human trafficking or are we targeting prostitution?

To use my grocery store analogy its like if one box of cheerios was bad closing down every single grocery store in the country to prevent people from eating bad cheerios then passing a law saying the govt can shut down any grocery it wants in the future on suspicion of bad cheerios....

Heavy handed...

Not false. Backpage was taken down on April 6th [1][2] while SESTA wasn't signed until April 11th [3][4]. It's okay to oppose SESTA, but that's not what this is about.

[1] http://www.backpage.com/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-backpage-justice/sex-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...

[4] https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/11/trump-signs-fosta-sesta-...

Im saying your anology was false because NUMEROUS other sites have been taken down recently beyond just backpage in the name of 'stopping human trafficking'.

It's like backdooring encryption to 'prevent terrorism'.

You can say the exact same thing about human trafficking: catch one trafficker, 2 more will step in to take their place. But no reasonable person thinks that means we should stop prosecuting traffickers.

Read the Backpage indictments: these people ran a criminal conspiracy to profit by knowingly helping child sex traffickers.

Exactly.

It's weird how much backlash there is whenever a certain crowd gets the paranoid narrative of "first they came for X..."

I understand the appeal of that argument. Regulation should be approached with caution, but these people were selling children as sex slaves.

I also saw the "when they came for you, no one was left" shit in the threads a few days ago. That has to be the second most nonsense cliche behind attaching -gate to any controversy

SESTA is not about Backpage. It's about being able to take down any site and arrest the owners if the sites contains anything the government deems inappropriate.

SESTA is huge gov't overreach and everyone's distracted by these sensational news reports.

Backpage wasn't indicted under SESTA.

I find it strange, if not alarming, that nobody is talking about how backpage.com would still be up if Net Neutrality still existed.

> Unfortunately all this might mean is that child trafficking cases not reported on Backpage have a much higher chance of never being reported.

That is, in fact, exactly what it means.

That's why everyone from sex trafficking survivors to the Department of Justice was telling Congress not to pass the badly-named SESTA/FOSTA bills, because preventing people from conducting (consensual) sex work online makes it much harder to rescue actual victims of sex trafficking.

It backpage wasn’t limiting itself to consensual sex work. They were literally working with pimps that were selling kidnapped children to be raped.

> It backpage wasn’t limiting itself to consensual sex work. They were literally working with pimps that were selling kidnapped children to be raped.

As I already said, it's a lot easier to find victims of sex trafficking, rescue them, and prosecute the traffickers when sites like Backpage exist. That's literally why prosecutors opposed SESTA/FOSTA in the first place, along with former victims of sex trafficking.

I don't know whether people literally defended the company or not, and I'm willing to take your word for it. However, let's be careful not to confuse defending this one company, with defending constitutional rights or (separately) the moral/ethical legitimacy of voluntary sex work. Those strike me as things some HN readers would be more likely to defend.

> And the CEO himself pleaded guilty to money laundering. I remember people here were coming out in droves to defend the company against big bad government when the site was first seized.

They weren't defending Backpage, they were condemning the power grab in the form of a law that was passed (but has not yet been signed) where they let this whole situation languish to make it easier to "sell" the new powers for the Government.

You are confusing the fight over FOSTA/SESTA/etc. with the fight over Backpage just like the people who pushed those laws intended you to.

You must have skipped over the many hundreds of "Backpage actually reduces trafficking" comments.

If you actually listen to sex workers and people who were victims of trafficking, this is not the way to go. Law enforcement can be very unhelpful to sex workers and giving them more powers puts them in danger. Moreover, not having online platforms to screen customers and share information amongst themselves isolates sex workers and further endangers them, forcing them to engage in dangerous work on the street.

Here is a good link on this[0]. Here[1] is also a short interview of the author.

[0] https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-cele...

[1] https://youtu.be/2TEcWKz_TAg?t=8m52s

We're not just talking about trafficked adult women. Backpage is alleged to have facilitated a huge number of underage child sex trafficking transactions. Apparently, with some knowledge of what was going on.

Or they could look at the current guilty plea and the public evidence tied to it and come to a reasonable conclusion. That anecdotally some people are helped does not make up for the crimes committed against even more vulnerable members of society using that site. I disagree with the new law, but the site had to go.

Where were they and in context on HN? And please prove there were hundreds.

Actually, I saw lots of people defending backpage.

It is some sort of new age leftist thing, where the argument is that backpage somehow made things safer for sex workers.

No, this is the actual sex workers saying “places like backpage, where I can vet clients ahead of time, keeps me safer.”

The thing is they weren't defending Backpage but Craigslist (among others) that shut down due to new legislation.

I don't think anyone was really defending Backpage (the site itself, rather than the broker function) in any real numbers.

The issue is when the only choice is “poke or be broke” it’s time to rethink our culture

We’re all forced to sell our time but what we have to offer varies

You wanna suck dick for a meal? You hiring people without tech skills?

There’s a whole lot of “sucking it up” for a lot of women with little choice but to “suck for survival”

So you think if we had a better social safety net like say, the Netherlands, we would see less prostitution?

Not speaking for the green account, but, yes, I think improving the economic standing of all people would go a long way towards getting people out of the sex trade or from entering into it.

I'm pretty sure the comment you responded to was sarcasm, given the prevalence of red light districts in the Netherlands.

Yes, I'm sure it works great for the upper middle class white escorts who are essentially small business owners.

The issue is the effect that it has on trafficking, and that it makes trafficking much more profitable.

Instead of making assumptions about the people you believe you're saving, it would help to actually listen to them about what would help them and what wouldn't. Above I share an article from a former sex worker. Here is yet another that cites[0] sex workers as well.

[0] https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/sesta-anti-sex-trafficking-bi...

how does that link invalidate the parent comment? No more details on who is saying "backpage is good". And I almost guarantee sex-trafficked women aren't the ones defending it. So why don't we listen to the victims of the crime the bill is about: sex-trafficking. NOT prostitution.

But they didn’t even need the damned bill to nail the Backpage owners. So what’s the point of the SESTA power grab?

The point of the FOSTA power grabs is to make it easy to go after sites providing arms-length escort information with no or only incidental connection to trafficking and with none of the ancillary (money laundering, etc.) offenses in the Backpage or MyRedbook cases.

SESTA seems mostly to function as a smokescreen for FOSTA (since it drives all the media attention to it and it's knowing involvement in trafficking requirement).

I believe there is a valid argument that giving sex workers a platform where they can advertise relatively safely improves their safety.

I, for one, did not really research Backpage that much and so was unaware of the reality of the allegations against them. For myself, I chose not to weigh in on the debate, even though I have the belief I stated above, because I didn't feel I had enough background.

Do you think backpage is actually less safe than working with a pimp? A place can be pretty bad and still preferable to the alternative if that alternative is bad enough.

14-year old prostitutes weren't willingly signing up on Backpage. They were still managed by pimps. It was the pimps who were on (and actively helped by) the site. They were literally given tips to hide real ages from profiles to keep law enforcement away.

Could you elaborate? I'm curious to read specifics.

A good place to start: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/backpage-senate-report-accuses-...

> Backpage altered up to 80 percent of their ads before posting them online “by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking.”

No. What I belive is that backpages makes trafficking massively more profitable.

With less of a signal boost, people will be less incentivized to force people into trafficking in the first place.

IE, that pimp might switch to drug dealing or some other industry, where they can make more money.

But since they already have a stable of hoes and demand hasn't really subsided they'll probably just switch to another website.

Effective demand has subsided. Some people who used Backpage will find another site, but for many finding one won't be worth the effort and they'll find another way to amuse themselves that evening.

Perhaps you're right. I didn't know Backpage was a thing until this news cycle, I guess I assumed that people who knew about it also know about other sites. Was this the only site online facilitating prostitution? Apparently not, since craigslist also shut down their personals section. Some of the stories by sex workers talk about using Backpage to network and vet Johns which implies to me that most users were regulars. I suspect regulars will not find something else to do this evening but will instead start by calling up past providers, rebuilding their connections, and likely end up on another site with even more features and less oversight operating on TOR.

> I didn't know Backpage was a thing until this news cycle, I guess I assumed that people who knew about it also know about other sites. Was this the only site online facilitating prostitution?

It was the big name. It was the only one I'd heard of other than craigslist, and I thought craigslist shut down that section years ago.

> Some of the stories by sex workers talk about using Backpage to network and vet Johns which implies to me that most users were regulars.

It implies most clients of the kind of sex worker who participates in these discussions were regulars. It wouldn't necessarily be the same for trafficked women and children which is the case we're actually trying to stop. And even if it is, presumably there's some level of turnover; making it harder for new people to get into unconsenting sex slaves is still a win even if it does nothing about the existing client population.

> likely end up on another site with even more features and less oversight

Sounds like no oversight would be better than the oversight backpage had, if all that oversight did was hide that ads for children were for children while still letting those ads run.

> operating on TOR

I very much doubt it. Tor is a massive faff to use; maybe some people will move to a hidden site but it will be a big barrier to entry if so.

I don't know enough specifics about this case or the industry to go much deeper into this. I don't know to what extent Backpage facilitated child trafficking or whether Johns are split between discerning and unconscionable groups who use different pimps. What I do know is that removing the middleman from a dark market while leaving the consumers, providers, and demand is often a high profile easy win, but rarely does much to curtail the actual problem. If Backpage execs were truly vicious scoundrels then fuck them, I'm glad to see them get theirs, but regardless it seems like a poor direction of our "stop sex trafficking" budget.

Also tor is as easy to use as downloading an installer, running it, and then using a modern browser interface. Anyone who is at the level of "installs their own software" is eligible, which may not be every last pedophile sex pervert, but likely the motivated ones.

No. Turns out that question is irrelevant, because Backpage and pimps were empirically compatible.

You're drawing a false dilemma here. The question isn't "Was it possible for pimps to go on Backpage?" but "How easy was it to work without a pimp on Backpage versus on the street?"

That's the argument people were making — not that nothing bad ever happened where Backpage was involved, but that sex workers feel more required to put themselves in bad situations in the absence of something like Backpage.

Likewise, the argument that people who support the takedown are making isn't "it was possible to use Backpage for prostitution", but "Backpage themselves were actively colluding with human traffickers".

Maybe sex workers are less safe now that Backpage is gone, and that sucks — but it doesn't mean we let people working with human traffickers slide.

If you look back a bit in the thread, the idea that I was disagreeing with is that this proves people were wrong when they said Backpage made many sex workers safer.

I'm not saying we should let the Backpage people slide, but that the ideas "Backpage was involved in some very messed-up stuff that people should go to jail for" and "Backpage was better than the streets for sex workers on the whole" can both be true simultaneously.

> I remember people here were coming out in droves to defend the company

Including this week, when someone linked either a troy hunt or krebs post about it.

Most of what I saw was "the government said they needed these new laws since they couldn't go after Backpage with existing laws, then they seized Backpage and pressed charges before the new laws were in effect, what's up with that".

But none of those charges that got him needed SESTA to exist...and he was charged with 79 felonies:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180409/18423839598/feder...

>This line is particularly condemning:

Given the scale at which Backpage operated, it really is not.

Everyone's repeating the 73% number, like it's some shocking statistic.

It's meaningless number in isolation. For example if backpage.com captured 70% of the sex ads market, I'd expect it to also capture the sex ads related crime at the similar rate.

If craigslist has 90% of ads for selling beanie babies, it will also have a hand in significant majority of beanie babies selling related crime.

So the question should be how big backapage was when it came to sex work ads, to make sense of this number.

These guys were undoubtedly sleazeballs but I find it shocking to see this sudden wave of legistlation and enforcement against prostitution and its fa cilitation regardless. Craigslist, backpages, et al have been around for decades practically and everyone knows what the deal is. I thought we'd be on the edge of legalization, not doing a 180 in 2018.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't think any of this has anything to do with the declared intent, and commentary from those in a position to actually know about the issue are virtually universally against shutting down these mediums.

Legalization of exploiting women and children? I hope I'm misinterpreting what you're saying

Legalization of sex work where consenting adult individual(s) gets paid to do things with other consenting adult individual(s).

The motivation was those held against their will, not some small percentage of victimless women with healthy psychies and great childhoods and no drug addiction who consciously chose sex work because they think it empowers them.

Hell of a false dichotomy you constructed there.

I think they mean legalization of consenting adults selling sex to each other.

frankly i think turning sex work into a profession that requires a license to operate with the requirement of being verified to be of age by the state would do far more to cull child exploitation than making a grey market greyer, more underground & dangerous for the workers involved.

make it taxable, zoneable and most importantly, give those involved the ability to find recourse and protection under the law.

> It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Wouldn't this make Backpage an incredible asset to law enforcement? I'm surprised they're taking it down, instead of cooperating.

I can imagine the site could have facilitated countless sting operations and collected user data to identify traffickers.

It says right in the article that they have been cooperating. And Backpage has been under investigation since at least 2016, so law enforcement has a ton of data to work with. Who says they haven't been using it for further arrests already?

I think OP meant leaving it up and continuing to collect data / track the players.

Its quite possible that that part of the play dried up.

More likely that the forces driving the legislation (which are very anti-sex, period), and the Congress critters willing to jump on board (who know their base), don't know and/or don't care about whether the boon it provides to law enforcement outweighs its visibility re: trafficking.

A lot of morals based legislation is driven by worldview, not by data.

What I understand is shutting down BP was all about seizing the assets of the owner, and less than about what the site was doing.

Makes you think they don’t really want to go after the buyers.

To understand the story a little more regarding Backpage and its criminal activities, I'd highly recommend watching "I am Jane Doe" on Netflix. It is a documentary exposing the child prostitution and human trafficking Backdoor facilitated.

I saw a reposted Facebook post: "I got contacted by 4-5 of my former pimps guaranteeing work safety"

This is only driving sex work underground, something that sex workers have suggested would happen years ago

"It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." If true, this is staggering.

What I don't understand is that if all of this blatant child trafficking was going on, why the authorities weren't using the information to actually hunt down the traffickers. Driving them farther underground seems like it will make them harder to find.

I doubt that losing backpage ads is going to make a big dent in the trade -- child trafficking is so abhorrent and so clearly illegal that the people involved will find other ways to connect.

> What I don't understand is that if all of this blatant child trafficking was going on, why the authorities weren't using the information to actually hunt down the traffickers. Driving them farther underground seems like it will make them harder to find.

They were trying. Backpage has a history of being completely unhelpful in investigations (for reasons which are now quantifiable), and the amount of time it takes to conduct investigations and secure convictions far exceeds the time it takes for a pimp to ditch his burner phones and set up shop the next state over. Local PD can't chase them and the FBI doesn't have time to deal with this shit parade unless it's of sufficient scale.

When there's a website that makes it as easy to buy a night with a 14-year old as it is to buy a used toaster, nuking that cesspool and making it more inconvenient for buyers and sellers alike creates chaos and denies service.

But they are selling something that has to be delivered in person, what's so hard about setting up undercover sting operations on both sides -- setting up meetings with pimps, and advertising to catch the johns? They don't even need backpage to help - like you said, the people placing ads aren't using their own phones or credit cards, so it's not even clear what help backpage could offer.

Seems like police should be able to make a steady stream of arrests just from this one website.

> what's so hard about setting up undercover sting operations on both sides

There are not enough qualified investigators or time in the day to run down every prostitute with an ad while Backpage plays shell games with the ones featuring children.

You don't need enough to catch them all in a single day. If 1 in 100 ads was a sting, in a few years all the pimps will be locked up and all the johns in the system.

The "73%" is of course a major part of only a "100%" of cases interdicted, which completely ignores all those child pandering/trafficking incidents that were not stopped or disrupted by law enforcement.

I think we only have estimates of the scale of total criminal activity.

or maybe it simply means that Backpage was the main vector that law enforcement had for finding traffickers

What’s the evidence of your claim?

It is staggering, but I feel that the # of cases reported and successfully resolved will be much less over the next few years. I feel it goes both ways, there will be less revenue for the bad actors. I’m reminded of the times in high school, the parents who would allow drinking somewhat at home, vs the parents who hardlined and drove kids away. At least they could keep an eye on them.

Wow: It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. ... and the CEO only gets 5 years...

Pot smokers go to jail longer. He'll probably get off in 6 months, I'd imagine... if he pays the right judge enough $$. He should go to prison for life without parole.

Is this different from the previous indictment? It mentioned trafficking a lot but they weren't actually charged with trafficking. http://www.businessinsider.com/backpage-executives-93-count-...

It seems to be a plea deal rather than an actual indictment.

Someone please feel free to show me the actual trafficking indictment; I didn't find one on a cursory look.

It seems odd to plead "down" to trafficking when the original charges were facilitating prostitution?

Edit: It looks like TFA might be factually wrong. Here's the DoJ's version of it: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/backpage-s-co-founder-and-ceo...

Does anyone have any more info? Did he really believe he facilitated sex trafficking?

They stripped terms out related specifically to children from the listings and still posted them.

Clearly no one is reading the Senate reports or any of the other factual detail pertaining to Backpage's conduct. They were very obviously doing everything in their power to continue advertising children. They hired staff and trained them to help posters avoid trigger words, but as you said would post the ads and basically never alert law enforcement. There are some good points in here from people quoting sex workers and people who try to help sex workers (public health officials etc) who believe that having everything centralized and public was a benefit to their efforts, but anyone defending Backpage's conduct is either willfully ignorant of their behavior and just sharing their general views about prostitution or has a seriously messed up idea of right and wrong.

It's worth remembering that when we talk about stripping things from ads, the ads included photographs, and the photographs were apparently not stripped from the ads.

Something like a dumb wordfilter? Or did they just ban words and traffickers posted ads that didn't include them?

According to the Senate report on the matter[0], Backpage would systematically help posters reword illegal ads to appear less so:

"Backpage has publicly touted its process for screening adult advertisements as an industry-leading effort to protect against criminal abuse, including sex trafficking. A closer review of that “moderation” process reveals, however, that Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of an illegal transaction."

[0] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report...

Scanned the executive summary. That does sound like they aren't good guys. As I posted above, putting down backpage as a whole puts a lot of sex workers at risk, but this gives me mixed feelings about backpage in general.

Yeah—not arguing the overall wisdom of law enforcement's approach here, but it's important to understand how much these guys were aware of the illegal activity on their platform and chose to actively facilitate it.

I can’t help but think that the lawyers and marketing team for Donald Trump struggle keeping up with this same task on a daily basis.

If they actively banned/prohibited ads/posters that used obviously illegal terms, I suspect they wouldn't be in the situation they're currently in.

Instead, someone would post an ad for a "sexy mocha l0lita 4 you", and Backpage values profit over principles so they took it upon themselves to remove the term "l0lita" and allow such ads to be posted.

So many people willing to go to bat for backpage, but why? It's supposedly a moral opposition to censorship or what not. IMHO, it's really a fear that there will be a general crackdown on sexual content online. Great in my opinion, since porn has done so much to destroy our society. The sooner we censor porn the better.

Ok, I'll bite -- what has porn done to destroy our society? Granted, I think our society is far from perfect, but pornography seems way down on the list. Then again, I'm out of my porn-buying days, so maybe the proliferation of free porn has more of an effect on the younger set.

As time goes on, I see fewer people discussing liberty, and more people discussing how to use the federal government to A/B test society for their favorite metrics.

> Backpage facilitated the sex trafficking of innocent women and children [ . . . ]

I'm surprised that the government is so exclusive of adult male victims. I'm uneducated on the subject, but I can imagine that there exist a non-zero number of male victims of human trafficking.

From what I understand many trafficked males are children.

As a buyer of commercial sex from consensual adult women, this is some background information:

* Consensual sex work doesn’t mean that they’re thrilled to be doing it. Just like you can hate your job you’re consensually employed at. Most of the women I see are doing it to simply make a lot more money in a lot less time and get to see their kids more, do other things, etc.

* Backpage was the bottom of the barrel in online sex work. More drug addicts (whom I consider borderline consensual to nonconsensual depending on the severity of their addiction) and pimped girls there than elsewhere, but also some less attractive or less put together consensual sex workers.

* Backpage was almost entirely about prostitution, unlike Craigslist.

* Post all of this, girls are harder to find for sure. The winners here are people with access to clients (pimps) as well as good escort agencies, as well as well established girls with regular clients.

* Internet prostitution brought a higher socioeconomic class of prostitute and client to the marketplace, and took some girls from street sex work to much safer online sex work.

* Likely long term impact is a big reduction in the overall volume of commercial sex work with the higher socioeconomic class women and men deciding it is not worth the risk. Markets will return to the street, with fewer participants, higher prices, and more danger for those who remain.

* From the utilitarian point of view, whether this is an improvement or not depends on how much more harm you think a pimped girl being raped in a car is compared to a college student getting fucked in a hotel room for $300 to help her pay bills rather than working 30 hours that week in the campus bookstore.

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