Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle with the Feds
wired.com
wired.com
The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.
But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July."
This kind of tactic definitely rubs me the wrong way. I am not saying that backpage should exist.
But I don't buy into ends justify the means arguments for the way the government is going about it.
There's lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren't (AFAIK) charged under SESTA.
Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner's colorful history? Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but that's the story.
I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it's an abstraction. But it does happen.
A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked for --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to "service" his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600.
The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I'm sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage helped it happen.
Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That's not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.
This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts.
I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.
But there's also this.
> Similarly, in a June 7, 2011 email, Ferrer told a Texas law enforcement official that a word found in one Backpage ad, “amber alert,” “is either a horrible marketing ploy or some kind of bizarre new code word for an under aged person.”142 He told the official that he would “forbid[]” that phrase—without explaining that, inside Backpage, this meant filters would simply conceal the phrase through automatic deletion.143 Ferrer forwarded the same email chain to Padilla and noted that he had instructed a staff member to “add [amber alert] to strip out.”144 A June 11, 2012 version of the filter word list indicates that “amber alert” was indeed deleted by the Strip Term From Ad filter.145 In short, Backpage added such terms with full awareness of their implications for child exploitation.
You'd imagine a normal person would think "we should ban this user, or report this to the authorities" instead of "we should definitely filter out that phrase".
The critical view is that this is intended to help child traffickers write clandestine ads so they can continue using the platform however that seems unlikely. The problem with any keyword-based filter is false-positives such as kink content. Such filters operating opaquely and dropping bans in other contexts such as banking and copyright draw deserved criticism. We should be no less critical here.
Indeed! Online listings are associated with less violence & other exploitive harms, compared to other ways such sex work is arranged when such listings have been shut down.
>But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously.
That's a hand-wavy, euphemistic political line like one might hear from a grandstanding Attorney-General or Senator, who really just wants to ban every kind of "safe online market for sex workers", by holding them to murky and unattainable standards.
So how, specifically, would you suggest a "safe online market for sex workers" could police their listings, other than the ways Backpage tried?
Backpage tried multiple content-based strategies for banning or discouraging advertisements for odious and exploitative practices. Terms linked to problematic practices either led to ads being blocked or bowdlerized to become less-effective. I see these as genuine ways to drive both buyers and sellers of harmful practices away from the service, by making such practices impossible (or at least much more difficult) to advertise. And yet, each of Backpage's attempts to limit bad-actors is now being portrayed as evidence of sinister intent.
Backpage isn't a law enforcement agency. It lacks the same investigative or arrest/prosecution powers of the state. Backpage had to guess what the shifting legal standards of competing jurisdictions might require of them.
The likely best policy for a listing-service, if police & politicians wouldn't crucify them for it, would be to allow all kinds of ads, but also give local enforcement agencies the most-advanced kinds of notifications and "standing searches" that any of the service's power-users or customer-support personnel have.
Then, the actually legally-empowered experts – police – could do their job, and catch & punish the worst criminals, who have conveniently described exactly their crimes in public ads with contact information! That is, the police would not just scatter criminals to other channels with half-measures while prosecuting tangentially-related middlemen.
> Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.
Both actual sex workers & studies of the effects of Backpage-like ad-boards disagree with your assertion here.
"Sex workers 'devastated,' look to alternatives after Backpage closure": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
Both sex worker advocates & police report increased trafficking & abuse in San Francisco after Backpage shutdown: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-Sex-wo...
"'People are going to die': Sex workers devastated after Backpage shutdown" : https://www.newsweek.com/people-are-going-die-sex-workers-de...
"7 Sex Workers on What It Means to Lose Backpage": https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/7-sex-workers-on-what-it-mean...
Craigslist's similar-to-Backpage "erotic services" listings, which Craigslist was pressured into discontinuing in 2010, had measurably reduced female homicide rates wherever introduced: http://scunning.com/craigslist110.pdf
Also the crooked US justice system, you don't have the right to defend yourself using your own money:
> The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.
> But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July...
I enjoyed the article, a good read. I hate the topic; government overreach.
The report makes no allegation not directly derived from internal company policies, documents, emails, and sworn employee testimony.
Backpage.com was an active participant in human trafficking.
There is and always has been a demand and (willing and consenting) supply for those services. The best you can do is to put in a framework in which they can do so legally and safely. It's not going to knock out all trafficking. But when you have a superior service that's legal, safe and reliable. You're going to lose the financial benefit of running it on the black market. (Also you'll end up having an entire framework to deal with crimes related to the work [i.e. abuse, violence related, etc])
Other countries have legalized the work, have very stringent guidelines, and have addressed the societal issues that come about with having it.
Given that axiom, I find it very hard to believe that legal sex work which is closely monitored for any signs of human trafficking would have the same amount of that associated with it as illegal prostitution which is impossible to monitor meaningfully. I suspect the amount of sex trafficking associated with illegal prostitution is grossly underestimated.
Meaningfully reduce. The only meaningful reduction is to near zero, the point where human trafficking becomes impossible to profit from. That doesn't seem to be the case even in the USA.
Has human trafficking gone down since Backpage went down? Has sex work gotten better or worse for sex workers since Backpage went down? Have pimps and other assialiants and middle men of [rougher] sex work and trafficking stopped doing their work since Backpage went down? Or been caught more?
If nothing actually changed, but now all we have are the morally bankrupt Backpage founders fighting against government overreach and abuse, why are people monsters for being against what the government is doing (and thus in a way, on the side of Backpage.com)?
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-s...
The wired article talks about culpability and most focuses on the first question where as the reply all seemed to exclusively focus on the second.
Was Backpage good for adult sex workers. Yes. Also, I don’t think prostitution between consenting adults should be illegal.
Did Backpage facilitate child trafficking- Yes. Anything that makes that harder is a win. Backpage should have worked with police to help catch the adults who were selling kids for sex.
I haven’t heard about any of the well known porn sites getting in trouble for kiddy porn. So obviously it is possible to run an adult oriented site without exploiting kids.
Here's the wikipedia page that goes into some details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_...
Well, enforcing the law is actually the job of law enforcement. It sounds like the ultimate goal is to keep the bad stuff where the general public can't see it.