Jump to content

Feds Seize Backpage.com

Viper

By Viper
in Daily Texan

 Share

Recommended Posts

Viper

Viper 12109

Posted
Posted

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/backpage-seized-fbi-article-1.3919071

https://reason.com/blog/2018/04/06/breaking-feds-seize-control-of-backpagec

Looks like we have the first victim of the bipartisan FOSTA law.

Quote

Breaking: Feds Seize Control of Backpage.com

Site had long been a target for sex work and sex trafficking advertisements.

Scott Shackford|Apr. 6, 2018 4:19 pm

Backpage.com, a site that has long been fighting with federal and state governments over online sex trafficking advertisements, was seized this afternoon by the Department of Justice.

Details are not available as yet. The Department of Justice is planning a press conference at 6 p.m. Eastern. Visitors to the site are greeted with this image:

BackpageBackpage.com

 

Elizabeth Nolan Brown has been warning that the newly passed so-called "Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" (FOSTA) that turned online sex trafficking adds a federal crime would destroy some of the legal liability protections sites had over the content posted by third parties.

It's not clear yet that there's any relationship between the passage of FOSTA and Backpage's seizure. But it's hard to ignore the timing. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, more on Backpage in Reason's archives here.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Viper

Viper 12109

Posted
  • Author
Posted
what's the deal with Backpage only taking bitcoin for payment?
 
Pimps cornering the market, eh?   No freelancing...
Some county sheriff threatened the credit card companies to stop doing business with Backpage
Link to comment
Share on other sites
woohorn

woohorn 1131

Posted
Posted
My buddy just got out of prison after 6 years a few week ago. Dropped him off at some a hotel off loop 12 to bang a hooker he found on backpage last week. Hits close to home
Drove human through traffic to a trafficked human?

I think CL cut whores out too. What's a horndog to do? Date?
Link to comment
Share on other sites
kopp0e

kopp0e 1135

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, slorch said:

what's the deal with Backpage only taking bitcoin for payment?

 

Pimps cornering the market, eh?   No freelancing...

So if I bitch-slap a playa pimp, does that mean I will then see actual bitcoins spilling all over the ground (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog)..?

Edited by kopp0e
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest

Guest

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, AngryBevo said:

interesting, why close something down that made it easy to find targets you were supposedly looking for?  I remember reading a while back and was surprised by how much money backpage was making

Finding hoes ain't even remotely challenging.

 

Making sure hoes are there of their own volition, now there's the issue, but where's the decency( revenue) in that?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
elnimo

elnimo 55

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, woohorn said:
16 minutes ago, elnimo said:
Eccie is gone too.  Now how are hoes supposed to make that money for daddy?

Didn't that just move over to another site a while back after the original founder died of super aids? Is it totes shut 4 gud?

Many years ago.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Smax

Smax 3800

Posted
Posted

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilysmith/sex-workers-sesta-censorship-free-speech?bftwnews&utm_term=.pkgzzKKg4j#.pv7XX55RLW

 

Quote

You may not have noticed, or you may be pretending you didn’t notice, but Congress last week voted to reverse decades of legal protection for free speech online, all in the name of targeting sex workers.

These type of things always start off targeting the voiceless — people whose warnings of what’s to come are rarely heard. But they never end there.

The new bill, misleadingly sold as the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (SESTA), is a disaster for our community — but not just our community. Sex workers are the canaries in the digital coal mine, and SESTA, if it isn’t fought and reversed, is a disaster for all kinds of online speech.

For sex workers, SESTA cuts to the heart of the core principle of consent. Advertising your services online means finding customers without the need to work out of “pick-up bars” — which police frequently target — or on the street, where the ability to screen clients is virtually nonexistent. If you’re a sex worker who wants to work indoors, in an environment that you control, you need the internet.

Within hours of the passage of the SESTA in late March, Reddit shut down its escort and sugar daddy communities; not long after, Craigslist deleted its personal ads. Popular industry sites also reacted: The Erotic Review closed its U.S. site, and CityVibe shuttered.

On Friday, as part of a crackdown that long predates SESTA, the country’s best known adult classifieds site, Backpage.com — a vital site for sex workers — was seized by the FBI. Without traffic from Backpage.com, the community has speculated that some will become hungry, homeless, or even dead. Professionals who serve actual trafficked victims believe the only way to track them now no longer exists.

It’s no surprise that a bill like this has manifested alongside the #MeToo movement — it challenges what it means to for sex workers to consent, and takes aim at the online speech that acts as evidence that we have.

This destruction of choices will likely widen the class division among sex workers and make it harder for those working on the street and in unsafe environments to move to more secure and better-paying models of work. And even those working in some of the sex industry’s safest and most lucrative jobs could be put at risk, given the bill’s ambiguity and the haste of its passage. Alice Little, an escort at Nevada’s Bunny Ranch, says even perfectly legal and exceptionally profitable businesses like hers — sex workers in Nevada operate legally as independent contractors — could be at risk.

SESTA “incentivizes web hosting companies, social media outlets, and any online business to simply consider that the business of legal sex workers is too risky to entertain,” Little said. “It could spell a slow death for the legal sex industry.”

Although I’m a sex worker who runs a business outside of Nevada, I still work voluntarily. And although I’ve done volunteer work with trafficked victims, I have never been one — and that puts me in a pretty good position to tell the difference.

While this radical move to limit online speech targets the sex industry for now, it’s unlikely to end there. The ambiguously written bill creates what is in effect a special loophole to target the speech of sex workers within the sweeping legal protections given to online speech. And because marginalized groups often act as Patient Zero for regressive new laws, it will be no surprise when this new approach to censorship eventually spreads across the internet.

In particular, as Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, points out, internet startups will be stifled, as the cost of potential litigation would only be manageable for giants like Facebook and Google. It’s not a coincidence that both those Silicon Valley monopolies came out in support of the bill.

Liara Roux, a sex worker and organizer focused on sex worker safety and queer issues, noted that social platforms like Twitter began silencing sex workers long before SESTA. Tech companies have always experimented with censorship, and sex workers have always been one of the first to feel the sting.

"Sex workers already have their voices minimized on social media due to shadow banning or ghettoizing entire profiles behind ‘adult content’ tags," she told me. "That means that we don't show up in tags like #MeToo, and tags we've created like #LetUsSurvive don't trend, even with widespread support in our community."

The ways this bill could wreak havoc on the internet are new, but its misleading sales pitch of protecting women is anything but. There are some vulnerable people coerced into sex work in the US, but there is also a long history of authorities using a crackdown on supposed sex trafficking as a tool used to control or “save” white women doing consensual sex work — a business that, before “sex trafficking” became the favored scare-tactic term, was once dubbed “white slavery.”

In Europe, anti-trafficking legislation in the 19th century was used to prevent European women from seeking jobs abroad; it also allowed law enforcement to beef up security at boat and train depots, and to inquire about a woman’s marital status. In the United States, the Mann Act was largely used during the Jim Crow era to discourage interracial couples, most notably between heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson and his white girlfriend.

Today, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 provides federal consequences for trafficking. Given that trafficking has been a federal crime in the United States for 18 years, it’s questionable where we need additional legislation reiterating that it is illegal. But politicians use these kinds of bills as an easy form of bipartisan work, and to sweep less popular political issues or choices under the rug. In 2015, Republicans pushed a domestic sex trafficking bill through the Senate — it gained popularity because it included a rider provision banning the use of federal funds to provide abortions. During the same year, Reuters revealed the US State Department had watered down its annual Trafficking in Persons Report — which is mandated by the TVPA — in order to pave the way for a free-trade deal with Malaysia and 11 other countries.

Legislators' puritanical obsession with sex work, at the expense of other victims, is clear in the fact that the 2000 TVPA bill explicitly excludes labor trafficking. If politicians were truly interested in saving trafficking victims, they would expand their focus beyond sex workers, to industries like construction and agriculture, where labor exploitation is rampant.

But instead, they stick with what they know. This February in New Orleans, for example, police raided strip clubs prior to Mardi Gras under the guise of busting sex trafficking rings. No such trafficking was discovered, and instead of hiring a trafficking expert to clean up Bourbon Street, the city hired Tennessee lawyer Scott Bergthold — a man who has helped officials across the country rewrite zoning laws to banish strip clubs to industrial areas, ban full nudity, and, in one case, close an adult bookstore before it even opened.

The difference between what sex workers and their advocates say — that trafficking is a relatively minor issue in their industry — and what anti-sex trafficking legislators believe reflects the country’s long held reluctance to believe women when they tell the truth, especially when it involves sex. One place where that truth is told daily is the internet communities where sex workers reside in safety and solidarity, and SESTA is designed to break up these communities.

In closing statements against this bill, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of two senators who opposed SESTA, acknowledged this fact. “We are in a fight for the Internet every day,” Sen. Wyden ominously tweeted. “Today, we take a real step backward, backward, and down a path we will regret.”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
DanRydell

DanRydell 799

Posted
Posted
19 hours ago, AngryBevo said:

interesting, why close something down that made it easy to find targets you were supposedly looking for?  I remember reading a while back and was surprised by how much money backpage was making

If the goal is reducing sex trafficking and prostitution, reducing supply and demand by shutting down craigslist, backpage, and eccie will be far more impactful than arresting individual johns and hookers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31493

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, DanRydell said:

If the goal is reducing sex trafficking and prostitution, reducing supply and demand by shutting down craigslist, backpage, and eccie will be far more impactful than arresting individual johns and hookers.

True, it is a step above that, but still relatively low-hanging fruit that does little to apprehend the perpetrators.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
RayDog

RayDog 682

Posted
Posted

If they were serious about stopping sex trafficking they would legalize  prostitution and register the prostitutes. Then they could more easily identify those that are actually being trafficked.

But they are afraid since the results would not support their narrative.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
DanRydell

DanRydell 799

Posted
Posted
If they were serious about stopping sex trafficking they would legalize  prostitution and register the prostitutes. Then they could more easily identify those that are actually being trafficked.
But they are afraid since the results would not support their narrative.
 


There was a study a few years ago that found that legalization and decriminalization increased sex trafficking. And that the effect is greater the richer the country is.

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Ragnarok

Ragnarok 103

Posted
Posted

Sex biz will survive. Probably in the form of websites out of the country accessible only thru VPNs.  Some of the ho's are threatening to out Congressional members in revenge.  Like most regulations,  you have to be concerned about unintended consequences.  Pimps and traffickers will gain power with the ho's losing access to a relatively safe way to market their services themselves.  

  • Fuck You 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Smax

Smax 3800

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, DanRydell said:

 


We’ll see. So far people are clearly deciding it’s not with the risk. Other than backpage, the closures have been voluntary, not government seizures.

you cant honestly think this will have any lasting effect on the worlds oldest profession

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
RayDog

RayDog 682

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, DanRydell said:

 


There was a study a few years ago that found that legalization and decriminalization increased sex trafficking. And that the effect is greater the richer the country is.

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

 

In studies like this they arbitrarily define anyone in the sex industry as being trafficked when that is not true. A lot of the woman decide to do it voluntarily.

An acquaintance told me about a group of 30 people who decided to offer free education to girls here in Angeles City in order to get them out of the business. After 2 months and talking with over 1000 girls they convinced 2 to leave the industry (they probably came back). Yet in any of these studies they will point to the Philippines as a terrible place for sex trafficking.

Girls arrive weekly from the provinces and they all do their job willingly, although most are shy at first. Usually they find out about the jobs from a friend or relative who goes home and talks about how fun the lifestyle is and how much money they make. The friend usually has to give them bus after since they cannot even afford the $10 por $20. Theses woman (and some men and ladyboys) will never find a way to earn more money for themselves, and many support children and help their family. Many are lucky enough to find a foreign boyfriend or husband, and will keep them as long as they are not trying to screw the guys over too badly.

In many ways it would be beneficial to all parties if prostitution in the Philippines were expanded. I fail to see it as a bad thing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
DanRydell

DanRydell 799

Posted
Posted
In studies like this they arbitrarily define anyone in the sex industry as being trafficked when that is not true. A lot of the woman decide to do it voluntarily.
An acquaintance told me about a group of 30 people who decided to offer free education to girls here in Angeles City in order to get them out of the business. After 2 months and talking with over 1000 girls they convinced 2 to leave the industry (they probably came back). Yet in any of these studies they will point to the Philippines as a terrible place for sex trafficking.
Girls arrive weekly from the provinces and they all do their job willingly, although most are shy at first. Usually they find out about the jobs from a friend or relative who goes home and talks about how fun the lifestyle is and how much money they make. The friend usually has to give them bus after since they cannot even afford the $10 por $20. Theses woman (and some men and ladyboys) will never find a way to earn more money for themselves, and many support children and help their family. Many are lucky enough to find a foreign boyfriend or husband, and will keep them as long as they are not trying to screw the guys over too badly.
In many ways it would be beneficial to all parties if prostitution in the Philippines were expanded. I fail to see it as a bad thing.


This study defined sex trafficking as,

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation includes, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or prac- tices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Viper

Viper 12109

Posted
  • Author
Posted

True, and with it gone, the work has become more dangerous

Quote

Anti-trafficking bill? My friend who was working off of backpage has gotten texts from THREE former pimps in the past FIVE hours, trying to get her back with promises of clients

— Gemma Paradise (@GemmaParadiseXO) April 7, 2018

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...