I promise you its just on to the next website... I honestly wonder if the people that work these cases get tired or disheartened by their game of whack-a-mole.
What they've learned is the more 'busts' they make; the more $$ they get in funding next year to buy new toys and employ more people 'fighting the good fight'.
Don't forget the massive amounts of money to be made by colluding with the "bad guys". Collect double the amount if you collude for geopolitical purposes.
The primary purpose of the WoD is to provide jobs to drug cops. The DEA is aware that if drugs become legal, there will no longer be a need for a Drug Enforcement Agency.
Must be a real hassle trying to shut down activities between consenting adults when there's an economic reason and no moral case. See recreational drug use.
It's only a matter of time until somebody manages to implement an easily-monetizable decentrialized CMS website that synchs the content across multiple nodes. There would be a lot of technical challenges like syncing accounts and managing decentralized moderation, but still - between piracy and prostitution and the like, there's a lot of money to be made hosting illegal content, and if law-enforcement crushes it where they find it then the obvious solution will be to develop a system that's impossible to shut down because it mirrors itself to new hosts trivially.
Why bother with decentralization when you can just put it on a Tor hidden service and get complete anonymity and protection? Only problem is your users need to pay with Bitcoin, but criminals are becoming increasingly used to that, and only the pimps pay, not the johns.
You can actually get to them without Tor via gateways, but my expectation is that sex service providers would install a Tor app on their phones to contact the hidden service.
At that point it's a matter of tapping the Onion Browser icon instead of Chrome/Safari and going to a different bookmark.
And most likely the next (or the one after that) will be run by someone outside the USA, either in a place where cooperation with US authorities is unlikely or where prostitution is legal and thus any extradition requests (if anything got that far) would be less likely to be honored.
Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the next one run out of Russia, particularly if clients had to do some form of registration to get full access. Out of all the users you might get a few interesting email addresses worth tracking long-term, and you might even get reused passwords or at least a password pattern for some of those.
That wouldn't be unheard of. There was a regional site in the SF Bay a few years back (myRedBook) registered out of Seychelles. Whole lot of good that did them though, since they still picked up their checks in the valley.
The government went after the payment processors. I suppose someone could run such site as a side hobby project, but end of the day it's a classifieds site, and it needs to accept money from those paying for classifieds.
You're missing my other point in there - if you have the technical skills, language skills, and particularly mostly user-generated content (so you don't have to push much content of your own anyway), how much would you figure a site like that might cost to run on an annual basis? Seems to me that it could probably disappear into just the annual marketing budget of Durex, Trojans, with almost no notice, just to present one set of people also related to the sex industry.
My bigger concern is that commercial entities (with their profit-driven motive and legal exposure) wouldn't be the only ones interested in the question of "Who's illegally hiring prostitutes AND do their hiring patterns indicate anything special about their interests?"
A few hosted servers or VMs, some dedicated bandwidth in a few datacenters, a few cutouts and "private investors" backing it who don't actually care about making profits, and you have a priceless intelligence source about horny people - mostly of no interest at all, but a few potentially of great interest and value. What would be the worth of a Senator or Representative with embarrassing interests? It's not like elected officials ever get caught in airport bathrooms, diapers, or sending tacky selfies on Twitter.
Good points, technical costs are fairly minimal, considering that the court case lists a grand total of 3 operators.
Considering the nature of business, Backpage likely used payments not just as a revenue source, but as a filtering mechanism protecting against excessive spam. Even if you're not in the industry, there's some motivation to post a fake ad just to prank (or shame) someone, play a bad joke on the ex, insert a URL or two to get some free Web traffic, etc. Payment requirement somewhat mitigates the spam/prank/fake threat, which happens to appeal to consumers as well.
I think the intelligence argument is overstated - communications of such nature are typically handled by phone/SMS/temp email anyways, and if someone is worried about their IP being tracked, they are likely to employ Tor or commercial VPN service.
Although the act of soliciting prostitution is illegal, what exactly is so wrong about this really? Backpage appears to have provided listings that allowed consenting adults to engage in business with one another.
Perhaps they just need to stop their mole-whacking game?
underage girls, and pimps taking advantage of drug addicted women. there are tons of "legit" agencies that operate as true businesses, the majority of the backpage listings are really sketchy.
NSFW
Check out this escort forum online, it gives some really interesting insight into the whole debacle. as you can see, most of the girls don't really care and are even glad:
"Some criminals and low-life types formerly using Backpage
will now go berserk without their money and/or their drugs.
Violent crime in the streets.
Unbelievable."
Well, of course professional escorts are happy. Backpage was, at best, competition for them, allowing "independent contractors" to offer competing services for cheaper. At worst, it was a very popular sting site for cops, effectively scaring off customers in the area.
When you're a "pro" with your own website and $600/hr price, Backpage is competition. I don't think they're happy about it because of concerns about human trafficking.
You are not thinking of this from the state AG point of view.
Some participants of law enforcement community (FBI, US Attorneys) take years to build and execute their cases. When successful, they receive commendations and continue their law enforcement careers.
State AGs are more of a "shoot from the hip" (or "sue early, sue often", since we're on HN) variety, as this elected post is viewed as a stepping stone towards another elected post, backed by the track record of "making neighborhoods safer".
In unrelated news, congratulations to California state AG Kamala Harris on becoming a US Senator from the state of California.
The buyer can not know for sure if the seller is consenting to sex; logically, it is always possible the seller is coerced into the transaction by poverty, threats, drugs, etc. Because sex isn't a human necessity, and involves the act of physically using a person (if they are not able to consent -- the term masturbation is more accurate), we can say the act of choosing to buy is highly immoral. The same argument works for buying/supporting porn too.
Those who recognize the strength of the above argument usually support forms of the Nordic model of anti-prostitution law.
I've played whack-a-mole. I got to keep hitting moles. I didn't particularly want to eliminate the moles - because then I'd have to stop hitting them.
P.S. The "massage" page currently on Backpage seems to just be veiled prostitution that suddenly got more posts starting today. So maybe it's not even on to the next site, just elsewhere on the site.
Because the owners are most likely US based. That makes them still targets for law enforcement, regardless of where the site is hosted.
There is a gap in the market for someone outside the US to offer such a service, but ideally that country has no extradition laws to the United States, nor should the owners of that website ever chose to visit the US.
> There is a gap in the market for someone outside the US to offer such a service,
There may be an even bigger gap for someone outside the US with no need to actually make a profit to offer such a service. Consider the merits of not just scanning the equivalent of the Ashley Madison database for sensitive addresses, but of actually controlling that database and being able to advertise in areas where you'd like to acquire users?
I think it'd be fascinating to see if a new service springs up and gets advertised in the DC area.
The best argument for legalizing prostitution is because then it will allow for a separation of it and child sex trafficing, effectively undercutting the black market while preventing those unscrupulous enough to promote it from hiding behind the purposefully vague adult escort services.
And because women involved have no police protection as long as this is illegal. They will always be the most vulnerable members of society afraid to get help.
The other side of this is that victims of sex trafficking are often so emotionally attached to their pimp that arrest is sometimes the only way to separate them and force them to talk to a counselor. These women are often mentally impaired or were very young when they began "dating" (working for) their pimp. Convincing them to not just leave but testify against the person clothing, feeding, and sheltering them is a tall task.
What makes you think the people posting backpages ads aren't trafficked as well? The reason we don't have "street pimps" isn't that backpages got rid of them; it's that we don't really have street anything anymore --- it's economically irrational in a world where even the poorest among us have smart phones.
The same "service" they've always provided: mafia-style protection. Sex workers didn't suddenly become less vulnerable simply because they're posting Craigslist ads.
Ceteris paribus (though remember there's a long and ugly history of the police victimizing sex workers as well).
But all things aren't equal. Most importantly: so long as prostitution is formally illegal, men and women can't be pressured by social norms to participate in sex work. Once prostitution is legalized, the stage is set for that to change: perhaps body integrity isn't nearly as important as bootstrapping oneself to self-reliance, or providing for vulnerable family members.
Usually in economic analyses we stop and ask ourselves if normal people would prefer the choice rather than having it foisted on them: for instance, maybe we'd rather allow ticket scalping because someone with a valuable ticket would probably prefer the option of being able to sell it for a steep profit and pay for health care rather than just having the experience promised by the ticket. But here we have a case where most normal people probably do not want the choice deregulation would allow.
>though remember there's a long and ugly history of the police victimizing sex workers as well
Mainly in areas where prostitution is illegal, thus the police use their power over the "criminal" to abuse them.
Sex workers have no legal method to report this abuse with out also admitting to a crime themselves.
Thus if it were legal, Abuse by police would only be as frequent for sex workers as is for other legal occupations, which much hire than it should be but....
You do know there are western countries where prostitution is legalized, right? The moral and social fabrics of these nations are not unraveling at the seams.
Could you provide some support to that statement? Since much of drug dealing went online, there has been several articles on how that activity become more safer when moved out of the street.
Just a few months ago I also read an article here in Sweden where a journalist reached out to sex workers, where the person that agreed on a interview said that they had no pimp. They did all the booking and reservations Online. While anecdotal, its enough to at least question statements like sex workers aren't safer when they can stay out of the street and do their advertisement and booking from home.
> Sex workers didn't suddenly become less vulnerable simply because they're posting Craigslist ads.
Actually, they did. With a red-light district you have to be there, exposed to the pimps, to be exposed to the customers. And the density allows pimps to control more people, enough to make the activity profitable.
With out-call services from ads you avoid the presence of the pimps in the first place, and the configuration (outcalls) makes capturing a sex-worker much harder if they try which makes the economics much less attractive. Pimping is a crime of opportunity and outcalls remove most of that.
Also, not being street-people, call-girls get much more respect from police if they need to report a crime.
Mobile phones are part of the equation! I don't think this is an either/or scenario. Sites like Craigslist and Backpages make it a lot easier for those who do sex work to do it without a pimp. Legal brothels and want-ad based sex work is a lot safer for the people involved than street trafficking. Want-ads are a part of the puzzle just like phones are.
I'm not convinced that this is doing any more good than harm to the majority of the people out there who are engaged in this sort of work.
One less intermediary for the interaction. That's my understanding of the thought on the subject. The pimp has less economic and coercive power if a girl can make her own appointments. If a girl feels she needs protection it's a lot easier to hire someone to watch outside while she goes and does her work, but that is a very different position than that of the traditional pimp.
I find the argument convincing. Unsurprisingly there's not a ton of research on the subject, at least none that comes up on quick searches other than the usual stuff about violence vs sex workers decreasing with legalization.
Backpage does not mean no street pimps. The average profile of a sex worker in the US is a young runaway who begins dating a slightly older man. He takes care of her in a way her family like never did and eventually convinces her to sell herself, becomes her pimp. It's a very rare sex worker that elected to start completely in her own.
This is from my experience consulting with the Alameda County District Attorney's office. I'm using average here less in the statistical sense and more in the ordinary sense.
Seems likely those girls were simply those you happened to encounter, possibly because that's what the local cops picked up.
From what I've read, here in NYC most prostitution is Korean immigrants trafficked to the US to work in massage parlors. They are of age, but clearly coerced. So it really is different all over.
you're trying to define an average. Last report I read said the reasons people went into the sex-trade were varied and many.
Defining the average is precisely what always skews the perception and draws the partisan lines so I'm not sure its a good idea to do this.
Also would seem that it would be a good idea to know the 'street corner' that the pimps are on (backpage) so it's easier to find, trace and prosecute them. Seems a cost effective 'lead generation' technique for law enforcement.
The California investigation which resulted in the CEO of Backpage getting arrested (along with two major shareholders, interestingly enough) "was prompted, in part, by reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children of thousands of instances of child sex trafficking through Backpage." [1]
Backpage's management was hiding behind the 3rd-party provisions of the CDA (and the usual last-defense-of-scoundrels, "free speech" absolutism) but were helping to edit and revise ads [2,3] to conceal obviously illegal activity. Thus they were complicit in it.
It's unfortunate, because there's probably a place for a responsibly-managed online clearinghouse for adult services. But there's no indication that the management of Backpage was attempting to offer that; they were hiding under a veil of 'free speech' when it suited them, while at the same time profiting from activity they should have known was illegal (and beyond illegal, morally repugnant even to those of us who take no issue with what consenting adults do between themselves and find prostitution laws outdated and sexist).
you either have free speech or you don't, there is no way to be a "free speech absolutist" If you are for censorship, of any type even "hate speech" or other speech you do not personally like you do not support freedom of speech, it really is that simple
>Backpage's management was hiding behind the 3rd-party provisions of the CDA
Following the law is not "hiding", Backpage, nor any other website should be legally responsible for the content posted by people using their platform, that is a very dangerous precedent
>It's unfortunate, because there's probably a place for a responsibly-managed online clearinghouse for adult services.
Government has shut all of these down before targeting BackPage. See myRedBook, theReviewBoard, and several others as examples
If you read the senate complaint, they were editing the ads to remove anything that looked suspicious or potentially illegal. I wouldn't necessarily attribute intent to conceal to that.
The problem is that you can't edit ANYTHING and still be protected by the CDA. And they clearly did it.
I am waiting for the legal process before coming to any conclusions. The government thinks they have a case to argue that Backpage does not receive safe harbor protections, and the only way that is possible is if they can prove Backpage was knowingly promoting sex trafficking. Which means they probably have some evidence to suggest that.
What legal process -- or specifically, what court case(s) -- are you referring to? My understanding was that the owners had beat pimping charges [1] using a CDA defense, and I didn't know what else they still have to contend with.
Thanks for the update, I was under the impression the court case was still ongoing. Looks like the judge threw it out on safe harbor (Section 230) grounds.
I know that it is currently in vogue, with the libertarian current in our society and in the tech world in particular, to ask why prostitution should be illegal. People should have control over their own bodies, shouldn't they?
Here is the answer: many of the people selling their sexual services are not in control of their bodies. Beyond the obvious example of people forced into it by violence, there is also a huge population of people that are trying to feed themselves, or their kids, or their addictions with very few options to achieve those ends. That is not liberty.
If it were true that everyone is absolutely free to choose to engage themselves in such a way with no whiff of active or passive coercion by individuals or their circumstances, sure, they should have the choice. But when the choice is 'do this thing or die, or be in pain' that is no real choice.
This industry needs to connect to customers. Sure, something else might pop up, but at least there won't be a central repository for a while. Hopefully that makes it a less viable.
> Beyond the obvious example of people forced into it by violence, there is also a huge population of people that are trying to feed themselves, or their kids, or their addictions.
Any you are exactly WHO to tell them it is not okay to do this or that with their OWN body ???
Of course, there are coherent arguments for this. Among other things, it makes organs more available to recipients. But then where do you draw the line from there? If the principle is "my body my rules", why not sell both kidneys?
Why not? You stupid to sell both kidneys you die. How is that your problem?? If I have a need to help other people to the extend that it will kill me, let it be!
Then, should people be allowed to accept money to "perform" in snuff films? Or is it only OK to sell ones life if there's some material net benefit to other people that results from it?
I think people should be able to sell their organs, too /if/ they are perfectly free to make that choice and in no way coerced, actively or passively, to do so.
But, in a world where one can sell their organs, would we refuse public assistance to people who still have both of their kidneys? Would we say to the poor "Why are you asking for help? You have $50,000 buried in your back! Come back when you are truly desperate."
Generally, we draw it somewhere south of "Permanent physical damage to one's own body" and somewhere north of "I could sit in my underwear and watch anime all day, but if I put on these pants and go sit in this cube and write this code for these people, I'll make some money, so..."
Let me pose a question to you. (Or perhaps a rephrasing of your own) Should we allow people to end their own lives?
And at the point that we do, would we disallow them from also selling their organs?
I'll openly admit I err on the side of allowing one full control over their body; as someone staring down the barrel of dementia/Alzheimer, I selfishly want that choice when the time comes.
Are you asking because you want to know what I personally think? Remember, I'm just trying to get a coherent principle out of an angry objection.
I think we should allow assisted suicide but regulate it carefully. I do not think we should sell the organs of people who end their lives this way (not that there's likely to be a market for those organs).
Was primarily curious to what the argument would be from someone taking the other side of this debate; if you think your personal opinion would build on that I'd naturally also be curious.
Regarding your second point on selling organs, for me it would heavily depend on our medical understanding of the transmission of whatever the critical condition was. If there is good science that e.g. Alzheimer patients can still be kidney donors, I'd think it'd be both impractical and unjust not to release those organs as the owner sees fit.
I don't "draw a line" with someone elses body. Why would you? This is why the government can get so deep in our lives because people want to "Care" for other people's own bodies.
If someone needs money to pay for their mother's surgery (on out of billion possible examples), then yes let them sell their kidney!
Yes. To all of that. The second kidney would be a death sentence. If they sell it, they can do it for whatever reason they want. It is theirs. Life is not something to be held on to at all costs. Perhaps selling two kidneys would end that person's suffering and the resulting funds would end their children's or their friends'.
People make calculated risks all of the time. My parents are not cool with me starting my own company that sells software services. They think that is a terrible risk. It is. I could lose everything. But I'm free to do that under the law.
People take calculated risks when logging. Dismemberment is a real threat. Yet the funds they could make are worth it to them. Who are you to tell them they can't?
I mean it when I ask, "Who are you to tell the they can't?" On what moral or ethical grounds do you restrict a person's liberty? If the worst that can happen is they die, why does that give you the authority to intervene against their wishes?
People take calculated risks when logging, but the logging industry has intensive safety requirements. There's a difference between accepting a heavily mitigated risk and exchanging money for your certain demise. This is a slippery slope argument; in a technical but real sense we accept mortal risk whenever we leave the house.
Do you think parents should be allowed to sell both kidneys in exchange for, say, fully-funded college tuition for their kids?
Do you think the mentally ill should be able to sell both their kidneys? Why or why not?
> Do you think parents should be allowed to sell both kidneys in exchange for, say, fully-funded college tuition for their kids?
Ideally no more than one parent, presuming a two parent household, but yes, I'm morally okay with that. The loss of a parent is sad. It will have an emotional impact. I think that the impact, coupled to the education the parent is seeking will probably cause the child to appreciate and succeed even more. Knowing that dad died to procure the college education will probably cause the child to work harder in HS and college.
The parents have agency. They can look at a situation to see if they can get an outcome they appreciate.
> Do you think the mentally ill should be able to sell both their kidneys? Why or why not?
No, but merely on the arbitrary like that I think agency matters. Agency underlying all things is a premise. I just state it as a fact. If that fact is wrong, all conclusions from it are at risk. I accept that philosophically. I also posit that mental illness precludes agency.
Kidneys and retinas are actually an easier case, compared to prostitution. Transplants are difficult surgeries that require hospitals and specialized labor, so they are very easy to regulate.
Of course people should be able to sell their organs if they have permission of a doctor (who would get in trouble if they authorize a coercive transplant, just like euthanasia) and the recipient (who should be decided ahead of time to discourage organ hoarders and ensure compatibility)
Removing it changes the value balance. If it is not quite so easy, the other options become relatively more desirable.
Not only that, assuming more people who would normally get by on selling their sexual services turn to public assistance for help, their problem becomes more visible and the rest of us in better positions can react rather than ignore what is not being measured.
>If it is not quite so easy, the other options become relatively more desirable.
So by your own logic, prostitution is more desirable to those who choose it than the alternatives? So you want to make it artificially less desirable so they choose a different (worse) option?
> in the long term it would lead to a better outcome
I'm not really sure I follow the argument for it leading to a better outcome.
Prostitution has been illegal for a long time, long before the existence of Backpage, and we haven't seen an outpouring of support for improved public assistance.
Indeed, people on public assistance are usually characterised as lazy scroungers who can't be bothered to get a real job. Meanwhile prostitutes are usually considered tragic victims of adverse circumstances.
So if anything, it would seem like a massive increase in the numbers of prostitutes as a result of legalisation (not to mention the increased visibility of the existing amount) would be far more likely to lead to support for change than the status quo.
Services like backpage allow sex workers to vet clients ahead of time, control the time and place of an assignation, have that indoors, and then leave. Certainly some of those sex workers are trafficked, but not all are, and driving either population out onto the street for sex work puts them in greater danger of violence, sexual assault, and/or STIs.
My assumption is that the extra risk would be taken into account and many, if not most, would decide that it is no longer worth it and choose to do something that is less lucrative in the short term but lead to better outcomes in the long term.
Ideally, I agree. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world and we have to settle for the quicker stopgap, the point of which isn't to punish prostitutes but change the value calculation of people before they go that route.
This conversation makes me realize that I don't have much data, though. How many prostitutes are doing it out of some level of desperation? I assume most since it is so risky in so many different ways (the risk of legal punishment being near the least of it). But, I'll admit, I don't know.
So, because "do this or be in pain" might be coercive, your solution is to remove the "do this or", so it's just "be in pain"?
I'm genuinely unsure how removing an option is helping the situation, if you're not going to provide a solution at the same time. It just sounds like you'd rather they suffer than do something you find distasteful.
> there is also a huge population of people that are trying to feed themselves, or their kids, or their addictions with very few options to achieve those ends.
Should we shut down strip clubs? What about coal mines? Factory jobs where people lose digits and limbs? Service industries where people are overworked and underpaid?
EDIT: I would think that libertarians would be more interested in personal sovereignty than has really been apparent in this thread? At least I thought there was more to libertarianism than boiling everything down to commercial transactions.
> At least I thought there was more to libertarianism than boiling everything down to commercial transactions.
One person's "commercial transaction" is another person's "personal choice"
So a libertarian who supports "personal choice" is being logically consistent by bristling against any limitations put on a "commercial transaction", because that's one stroke of the pen away from a ban on personal choices.
If I could snap my fingers and be granted a wish no one would have to sell anything, including their time and effort, merely to survive.
Under those conditions, those jobs would have to pay enough to /entice/ someone to do that work rather then rely on the implicit threat of pain through starvation, homelessness or what have you, to keep the price of getting those jobs done artificially low. Therefore they must provide enough value to society to justify their natural, uncoerced, price after that likely labor price increase is taken into account.
People often do things they wouldn't do if they were not paid. That's business. It is when people do things that they'd rather not else they face pain or death that we should work to minimize.
So, if someone wants to work in a mine, or a factory line, or on a stripper pole because it pays well enough knowing that if they don't they could still feed their kids, more power to them.
The approach you are advocating is incorrect because you are only targeting the symptom and not the solution to the problem. Now you have two problems, one of disenfranchised people (who are now criminals) and one of people wanting to exchange money for legitimate services who are forbidden to. If you instead permitted and regulated the industry but protected those who work in it, you'd be in a far better situation.
These people need help. They are often addicted to drugs, mentally ill or come from an abusive past (or all of the above).
The idea that making something illegal will help these people is misguided. Presently the women are offered no protection of the law, they are often harassed and targeted by police over Johns. They often face threats of violence and rape (and more than threats) with no recourse of the law.
What is needed are rational harm reduction policies and bringing sex work into the light under the framework of protection under the law.
Such advocacy groups already exist. They provide basic healthcare services, needle exchange, free condoms, food and emergency shelter.
I'm not sure if your comment is serious, but groups already exist to address the specific needs of sex workers (which aren't that different from the subset of people they come from: impoverished and drug addicted).
What is not happening, the most important part, is for the law to view sex workers as victims rather than perps. Protection of the law would go a long way in reducing the violence and trafficking involved.
When people ask for public assistance, we either give it to them or deny it. There may also be assistance for people looking for jobs, but it does not force anyone to take those jobs.
If someone denied public assistance chooses prostitution to make a living, that is not any more inherently coercive than if they choose to flip burgers.
I disagree, my opinion is based on the economics of drug prohibition [0]. I agree with your sentiments about the industry itself but the challenge is that the more prohibited a service like this is the more profit there is to be gained for providing it.
With that thought in mind it's guaranteed that new services already exist attempting to take over the abandoned space. The reason I think this is bad is because the likelihood is that these new services will be less ethical than backpage.
I'm inclined to think using backpage to identify sex traffickers, minors, and pedophiles would have been more effective at actually making a difference in the victims lives.
My belief is that actions like these just hide the behavior from public view allowing political pressure to be reduced without actually resolving the problem.
The problem with this argument is that I can compare it easily to any job a person doesn't want to do. This argument is usually formed with circumstances surrounding the action, but not the action itself (abduction, coercion, lack of choice, rapes, drug addictions).
There are also people that argue because there is a transaction of money that it is coercion.
Again, easy to compare this to any job a person doesn't want to do but has to in order to survive (no matter how well paid). Given the alternative to have the thing they want for free or working in whatever form for what they want, many would choose free. Many work to obtain what they desire or what they need to survive.
When I'm in this line of thought I wonder which is better? A pain felt acutely, physically and emotionally. Or one that the masses encourage, are numb to, accepted as way of life, dragged on for 40+ years.
Let's not pretend it is as simple as that. By your own logic, of the options "Prostitute and feed myself" and "do not feed myself", they should only be allowed the latter.
Not all states have adequate alternative options as you yourself pointed out. You don't solve coerced prostitution by banning prostitution, they are already being forced to do it so they have no choice anyway. You solve coerced prostitution by solving the various coercions. By giving them adequate alternatives. Be it food programs, housing or other state care. Be it drug rehabilitation or cracking down on pimps and traffickers.
Banning prostitution would be like punishing slaves for working for free. Similarly, banning prostitution for the sake of stopping coerced prostitution is taking away a line of work many individuals are perfectly happy and proud to do.
I would support a licensing system that would screen for people that need help and providing alternatives to those people that would rather not be doing that work.
Or, alternately, splitting the duties currently handled by law enforcement into law enforcement and societal support. Law enforcement would do what they do for crimes like murder or other crimes with victims other than the perpetrator but Support might detain someone in a questionable situation for a short time but would have a primary mission of identifying those that cannot help themselves for whatever reason, be it the addicted, the mentally ill, the people who risk starvation and getting them the help they need. Of course, that would be predicated on help actually being available.
You are making the all too common and incorrect assumption that banning an in-demand good or service is a good way to prevent it from being bought and sold.
Making prostitution illegal doesn't stop it, it just pushes it underground where it becomes a massive revenue stream for organized crime and the state is powerless to regulate the industry and protect its workers. To top it off, the increase in price caused by illegality becomes a strong incentive for human traffickers, making worse the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.
The solution is to build a system in which people who are forced into sex slavery are able to be identified and helped and their traffickers prosecuted. The current system, which assumes that every sex worker is there by force, muddies the waters heavily and ensures that people are not going to get the individual support they need to get out of sex work.
I know a number of independent sex workers as part of my communities, and for the most part they do it because they consider it less demoralising than working at McDonald's. (Sorry, but that's the truth - sex isn't sacred to some people, and being somewhat independent, being able to choose their clients, not being subject to wage slavery, and being able to keep the proceeds of most of the value they provide is appealing to them.)
Yes, there's a large amount of sex workers who are there by force, or perform sex work because they're ineligible for benefits and can't survive without it. But criminalising sex work doesn't actually help those people in the slightest, in much the same way that criminalising drugs doesn't help addicts. They're going to keep doing it because they're forced by their circumstances to, and in fact it prevents them from getting the help they need, on top of adding another socially unacceptable label which can make it difficult to access housing and other necessary services.
Criminalise pimps and traffickers all you want, they're the scum of the earth. But support sex workers.
>because they consider it less demoralising than working at McDonald's
I honestly think that people shouldn't be forced to sell their time to McDonald's for less than fair value because they are afraid of starvation, either.
Elsewhere in the thread people advocate a licensing system -- my fear of complete legitimization would be that people who need help from society will be refused that help if it seems that they could just get a job at the local brothel. BUT if that licensing system is used to screen people who are in desperate straits to give them solid alternatives before they make that decision, I think that might be a very workable solution.
> I honestly think that people shouldn't be forced to sell their time to McDonald's for less than fair value because they are afraid of starvation, either.
Sure. But solving that involves a complete overhaul of the current capitalist system, and we're not going to get that for a long time. In the meantime, allowing people to survive within the capitalist system however they need to is a necessity.
> my fear of complete legitimization would be that people who need help from society will be refused that help if it seems that they could just get a job at the local brothel
I don't think that's ever likely to be the case. It certainly isn't the case in first-world countries where prostitution, and even brothels, are legal right now. Nobody has been turned away from receiving services and benefits in the UK or Nevada, for example, because they could be performing sex work, similarly as they're not forced into a number of other things (such as the military).
>Sure. But solving that involves a complete overhaul of the current capitalist system
The current capitalist system, maybe, but I think it is perfectly workable within some flavor of capitalism. In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency. With the notable exception of the taxation to pay it people would be making transactions that are guaranteed to be a net positive. That assumes, of course, that paying for such a system isn't an overall negative which is debatable (but more and more plausible with productivity gains over the last century or two).
> In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency.
I live in the UK. We have a solid social safety net. The issue is that it exists to support a capitalist understanding of wages - i.e. that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work (except insofar as an upper limit is created) and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work.
A "safety net" which somehow ensures, in perpetuity, that people are able to work for a wage which has some relation to the value they create winds up looking a lot like certain forms of socialism. But as with all real-world politics, it winds up being blurry.
> that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work ... and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work.
That's how supply and demand works. The wages are low because the more people are looking for a particular job, the more people there are willing to do it for less than others. In a well functioning society, this is a signal saying "we have enough people doing this job, go do something else".
The problem is that our society doesn't make it easy for people to do something else. Generally people get one chance at education, and if they make a bad choice, they're screwed. And beyond that, there's nothing that ensures that there will even be enough demand for labour that everyone can earn a decent living.
Yes. Supply and demand as applied to compensation for labour is a capitalist idea of how society should work, and results in all sorts of issues, including the ones discussed in this thread and the fact that the value people create gets siphoned into the capitalist class by way of the companies they're forced to work for to survive, for less compensation than the value they create.
The solutions to this lie in the ideas of worker-led organisations of varying kinds, mutual aid, and more generally the reduction of the role a capitalist class takes in the production of value. And yes, accessible education to all.
> Beyond the obvious example of people forced into it by violence, there is also a huge population of people that are trying to feed themselves, or their kids, or their addictions with very few options to achieve those ends. That is not liberty.
There is a class of people that work their entire lives, earning less then their time and effort would be worth sans passive coercion, simply to keep their head above water, if that.
This is a disservice to them and society since, if like the rest of us, they worked because it was a good trade of their time and effort and felt like they come out of the transaction with more value rather than merely not losing everything, it would be a guaranteed net-value add and we, as a society, wouldn't be dancing on the edge of a permanent underclass all of the time.
I know many people that don't need to work to survive but do because they are continually better off for it. In fact, most of the people I know in that position work as hard or harder than anyone else. Even though, on the surface, the wealthy are making the same decision to work as someone who must work or suffer immediate negative and physically painful consequences, the frame of that decision and the outcome is very different for the two groups.
We would be better off if people of all walks of life had the choice to sell what they have without worrying about their continued existence if they don't.
Being for free speech is like being for motherhood. It's not exactly the brave stance that lots of people make it out to be. It's just that they don't have to put anything on the line to have a maximalist free speech position.
Just reading all of the libertarian pseudo-economic analysis for this post is pretty painful. It's kind of telling that prostitution keeps being described in terms of employment or work. Left out are the social and psychological implications/causes/side-effects of prostitution.
I'm actually on the side of legalizing prostitution, and I generally support any policy that makes the lives of sex workers safer or healthier...but you are spot on about Backpage.
They have been knowingly participating in and fostering this behavior but have tried to keep themselves at an arms length from a strictly legal sense. It's a lie and they have participated in spreading a great deal of misery because they couldn't find another way to make money.
I would get behind that, especially if it means screening for those that would rather not do it but feel like there is no other choice and making them aware of their options.
Backpage gives a marketplace to everyone. This is both negative and positive. It supports sex trafficking, but it also supports individuals who need sex work to survive, and provides them a small amount of security.
In the neighborhoods near mine in the upper east side of Baltimore, there are two particular regions for sex work: trans people and poor people in general.
It is obvious that trans people are a high risk population for violence, and so they often turn to online sites to help weed out potential bad actors. Without these sites they are forced to walk the streets more, where they will come into violence, either just by accident, or by individuals or gangs who control territory.
The poorer neighborhoods, and neighborhoods controlled by gangs, maintain a stranglehold on prostitution in their given territory. Online sites allow either motels or private homes to be used to avoid running afoul of restrictions by these gangs.
It is also safe to assume law enforcement will have more excuses to take advantage of sex workers now that they will be more visible & vulnerable. (If you find that suggestion offensive, my city is well known for corruption in both prisons and law enforcement)
There are organizations working to help protect sex workers in most major cities in America. Please feel free to reach out to them for detailed information on how these events affect sex workers and what you can do to help.
Backpage offered prostitution arrangements. Sugar babies, in spite of what people think, aren't prostitutes. It's just that girls that don't sleep with their sponsors tend to lose their sponsors.
Also, think about what type of men can have sugar babies vs. what type of men engage in regular prostitution and there's a class based argument that emerges.
If the girls that don't sleep with their sponsors inevitably lose their sponsors, I think there is likely a legal case to be made that that is prostitution. The same could be said of canonical prostitution: some people pay prostitutes to talk and/or cuddle, but if they don't have sex, they will surely eventually lose clients.
I'm sure they have a conversation at some point, and that conversation ends in an exchange of money for sex, even if they skirt around calling it that.
Not that there aren't men who sign up to a sugar baby site, date much younger very attractive girls, pay them, and don't have sex with them. I'm sure that exists too, but only because the client really doesn't want that service.
There's a few exchange archetypes for sugar babies:
1) Girl immediately exchanges sex for goods/cash (rarest)
2) Girl makes a sexual exchange after a courting period (most common)
3) Guy isn't interested in sex but a female companion for emotional support
4) Girl is pretending like she does #2 but actually drops off after courting period
5) Girl is actually doing #2 but the guy is too creepy
There is an element of consent involved because of the delay and indirect aspect of monetary exchange. Many sugar babies will question what differs them from traditional girlfriends other than that they are clear about how the relationship progresses.
You clearly know what you're talking about! Yep, that all reads right to me.
Prostitutes can consent. They aren't /obligated/ to have sex with you just because you have $400 in hand. If they are, they're being coerced/trafficked and that is very clearly morally not OK.
Questioning the difference is another justification for the "I'm not really a prostitute" self-deception. Anyone that can't tell the difference between a sugar and normal relationship either has never /had/ a real relationship or is deeply materialistic to their core.
can a 'John' expect his money returned if he is dissatisfied with his service?
I think not being able to expect a return of your payment is because of the illegality of the exchange, not because the exchange is for something different altogether.
> Can the sponsor expect a return of their money/goods if sex is not provided?
People can expect anything in any circumstances, but even with traditional prostitution (except, of course, where it is legal and therefore legal contract enforcement is available) you don't get your money back if the seller fails to provide sex. So you can't really use that to draw the line, since a "no" answer would make sugar babies exactly like (illegal) prostitutes.
There is no real difference, it's all optics. Sugar baby sites claim there's no direct exchange of money for sex, so they /look/ less clear-cut prostitution and thus haven't been actively prosecuted to the same degree.
But when you get a 65 year old rich dude "dating" a 22 year old bartender, that met on a sugar baby site, it's pretty clear the girl isn't with him for his rock-hard abs and winning personality.
They THINK there's a difference. That's the big con of "sugar babies". They watched 50 shades of gray and think it's romantic and edgy. They're conning themselves into thinking they aren't prostitutes when they absolutely are.
Not making a moral judgment here, I feel consensual paid sex should be legal. But call a rose a rose.
I don't really see why the price charged makes a difference. Either you're having sex for money or you aren't. Everything else is just cosmetics.
Again, I completely understand that the distinction is EVERYTHING for these girls, because they truly don't think of themselves as prostitutes. But that's simply their self-deception.
I don't disagree that sugar babies are prostitutes but to equate a $5000 entry fee sugar baby to a $200 backpage escort to a $25000 drink girl is disingenuous.
The legal circumstances surrounding these exchanges, as well as the women that get involved in these are wildly different. Calling a rose a rose is fine, but that doesn't justify disregarding nuances between subspecies.
There is a difference. A prostitute or escort is likely a transitory event. A sugar baby, generally, would be more long term.
The interesting challenge I have for people is distinguish between a sugar baby and a normal relationship. Academic surveys/studies show that ambition and wealth matter. Most women will not overtly say that they are specifically looking for money, but very few women would settle down with someone they are generally compatible with but who is constantly impoverished and reckless with their finances.
No, there really isn't. The only distinct difference is that the "sugar baby" lifestyle is just a way of dipping your toe into being a full blown prostitute.
I met a girl who had dated several guys from SA. She said in each case, it was one or two "normal" dates before the guy offered her $500-$1K for sex.
It's funny to me that "sugar babies" are treated as innocuous. In reality it is probably a lot more insidious than "real" prostitution because it serves as a gateway for girls to get into the game while lying to themselves.
Hang on. The CEO and two board members were arrested and charged with pimping three months ago, and they're just now taking down the ads? That is some dedication to free speech, I guess...
(The rationale was that, since the site has tools to help posters write their posts, the site owners were in a "conspiracy" with the authors of illegal posts. (Edit - that's not very accurate, see below))
No, if you read the senate complaint, backpage employees actually EDITED posts to make them less obvious advertisements for illegal activity. And that clearly breaks safe harbour.
Right, they're allegations and don't contain the actual evidence upon which those allegations are founded.
I would take them with a pinch of salt until seeing the actual evidence. But just a pinch; the excerpts and descriptions are very clear, non-ambiguous, and you would basically need to believe the senate was plain-faced lying to go too far down that road.
Yes it did, the Backpage executives were cleared of all charges.
And then the CA Attorney General and Senate apparently went after their credit card processors in an extra-legal way, applying pressure that forced Backpage to take down their sex services classifieds.
The employees didn't edit anything. They were just banning certain words from being posted. For example "teen" was a word not allowed to be posted. The senate was able to turn what is supposed to be a tool to censor certain types of posts into an argument that they were complicit. This is clearly ridiculous and it's why they were cleared of charges.
By definition all programmers tend to be middle class due to the job. Just because you're middle class now means you've always been there and have been insulated from the "real" world.
like it or not, most middle class people only know about crime from television. Most of them have never been victims, much less perpetrators, of crimes.
if you go on Twitter & look at people who at least claim to be either advocates of sex workers or sex workers themselves, they say mostly the same things. This isn't to say all programmer opinions are good -- see the depression thread that's on the FP now.
Please don't be fooled into believing the government had some altruistic motivator to do this. This is simply politicians and government agencies buying political capital by hurting morally-offensive sections of society which they keep illegal so they can have more sway over their real target: the moral majority.
The only reason to keep prostitution illegal (and pornography legal) is the moral argument that actually having sex is a sin (and "not classy") whereas just looking at sex is more of a minor inconvenience morally. By shutting down businesses like these they get the support (monetary and politically) of the moral majority. Business as usual.
Oh no, they shutdown a site on the internet. That'll work!
Shutting down backpage.com was obviously a mistake. It was a centralized location to advertise illegal services. Everybody knew it existed, it was hosted, owned, and financed in the US and subject to court orders and subpeonas.
Now another site will pop up shortly, either in a jurisdiction that doesn't answer to US law enforcement or, eventually, as a Tor hidden service. Prostitution and human trafficking volume won't be impacted except in the very shortest of terms. Just a stupid self-defeating response from our politicians.
The right answer would have been to leave Backpage's sex services classifieds up and pay for law enforcement to review the site on a regular basis. Control and regulate. Don't force your primary information asset to relocate to a less accessible location.
The responsible thing to do with be to legalize and regulate prostitution for the safety of the sex workers. That would be responsible thing to do. To bring what's going to happen anyway under control so you can properly police for minors, rather than worry about people who choose to sell themselves.
Thing is, even remaining constrained by current law assuming stopping prostitution is just and right, they /still/ went about it entirely the wrong way. Ultimately this will lead to a complete loss of control, more prostitution, and more trafficked/coerced people.
It isn't so simple when the voting public wants to see laws enforced. A lot of people consider it a betrayal of public trust to selectively enforce laws, or to outright ignore them.
A lot of Americans are hoping that the next federal government will crack down on states flouting federal laws regarding marijuana, for example. (No, prostitution isn't a federal crime. I know that. It's an example.)
In engineering and in governance, the "right" (optimal) solution can border on the impossible. Legalizing and regulating prostitution in the US in 2017 seems like one of those situations.
If you personally don't want to be the one to lead the culture war to make prostitution legal in all 50 states, could you explain why somebody else would find that an appealing job?
Keep in mind that leading a culture war means regular in-person harassment - in public, at home, when traveling domestically promoting your cause - until you die.
I heard a facetious comment that shutting down backpage was just a way to encourage sex workers to develop better computer skills.
One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it creates communities that are interstitially embedded in "real life" communities and there is an opportunity friction between the mores of the two. Makes it challenging to have "community driven laws".
Setting up the new prostitute classifieds site will require IT skills, particularly on the Bitcoin tumbler merchant and infosec sides.
As for pimps and prostitutes, they'll simply run Onion Browser instead of Chrome or Safari on their phones and go to a different bookmark. And they'll need to convert some cash to Bitcoin to pay for their ads. No biggie.
There were several rounds of diaspora following the Silk Road getting shut down, a couple of which essentially ripped off all their users. Last I read, there are now 2-3 major drug marketplaces on Tor hidden services rather than one central spot.
People are still getting their drugs in the exact same way. Shutting down SR had no mid or long-term effect at all.
The entire Silk Road debacle showed that law enforcement itself has become massively corrupt. The long-term effect of the case is further distrust of the government and law enforcement.
The success of the drug war is measured by body count, not achieving mission objectives; same as in the Vietnam War. Success for the drug warrior is arresting and prosecuting people and seizing assets, not decreasing the supply of drugs, which is too hard.
True enough, but Ross Ulbricht /did/ try to have someone killed. He began with the best of intentions then broke bad. It's challenging to find sympathy for him.
I have a hunch that police didn't uncover lots of child sex trafficking rings on Backpage, nor were they interested in doing so.
It was far more useful as a honeypot & revenue generator for them through John stings. Setting up a fake Backpage ad for a weekend and raking in $20k through the relatively safe act of fooling non-violent offenders is the best deal out there for police.
At the end of it all you get a nice feel-good headline about how the local PD arrested 40 sex offenders.
Given an option Cops will always knock the easier door. Cops use civil forfeiture against old grandma living on fixed income rather than a rich lawyered drug dealer.
Like bullies law enforcement is cowardly too and likes to beat up the soft target.
Does anyone know if this is another Megaupload situation?
Are there records showing the site operators willfully colluded and incentivized street pimps and sex traffickers? Or is this another "save the children" chilling effect on free speech?
It don't think the Gov doing that will make a dent in online prostitution because everything is set up so quickly online (on a smart phone). They'll (sex workers) just set up posts in local ads and continue like nothing happened.
194 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadAt that point it's a matter of tapping the Onion Browser icon instead of Chrome/Safari and going to a different bookmark.
Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the next one run out of Russia, particularly if clients had to do some form of registration to get full access. Out of all the users you might get a few interesting email addresses worth tracking long-term, and you might even get reused passwords or at least a password pattern for some of those.
My bigger concern is that commercial entities (with their profit-driven motive and legal exposure) wouldn't be the only ones interested in the question of "Who's illegally hiring prostitutes AND do their hiring patterns indicate anything special about their interests?"
A few hosted servers or VMs, some dedicated bandwidth in a few datacenters, a few cutouts and "private investors" backing it who don't actually care about making profits, and you have a priceless intelligence source about horny people - mostly of no interest at all, but a few potentially of great interest and value. What would be the worth of a Senator or Representative with embarrassing interests? It's not like elected officials ever get caught in airport bathrooms, diapers, or sending tacky selfies on Twitter.
Considering the nature of business, Backpage likely used payments not just as a revenue source, but as a filtering mechanism protecting against excessive spam. Even if you're not in the industry, there's some motivation to post a fake ad just to prank (or shame) someone, play a bad joke on the ex, insert a URL or two to get some free Web traffic, etc. Payment requirement somewhat mitigates the spam/prank/fake threat, which happens to appeal to consumers as well.
I think the intelligence argument is overstated - communications of such nature are typically handled by phone/SMS/temp email anyways, and if someone is worried about their IP being tracked, they are likely to employ Tor or commercial VPN service.
Perhaps they just need to stop their mole-whacking game?
yes, the existing laws are broken.
NSFW
Check out this escort forum online, it gives some really interesting insight into the whole debacle. as you can see, most of the girls don't really care and are even glad:
http://independentgirls.com/indiboard/index.php/topic/518200...
"Some criminals and low-life types formerly using Backpage will now go berserk without their money and/or their drugs. Violent crime in the streets. Unbelievable."
When you're a "pro" with your own website and $600/hr price, Backpage is competition. I don't think they're happy about it because of concerns about human trafficking.
Some participants of law enforcement community (FBI, US Attorneys) take years to build and execute their cases. When successful, they receive commendations and continue their law enforcement careers.
State AGs are more of a "shoot from the hip" (or "sue early, sue often", since we're on HN) variety, as this elected post is viewed as a stepping stone towards another elected post, backed by the track record of "making neighborhoods safer".
In unrelated news, congratulations to California state AG Kamala Harris on becoming a US Senator from the state of California.
Those who recognize the strength of the above argument usually support forms of the Nordic model of anti-prostitution law.
P.S. The "massage" page currently on Backpage seems to just be veiled prostitution that suddenly got more posts starting today. So maybe it's not even on to the next site, just elsewhere on the site.
There is a gap in the market for someone outside the US to offer such a service, but ideally that country has no extradition laws to the United States, nor should the owners of that website ever chose to visit the US.
Gambling sites outside the US have experienced exactly this: https://www.cato.org/blog/uk-gambling-ceo-arrested-us-airpor...
There may be an even bigger gap for someone outside the US with no need to actually make a profit to offer such a service. Consider the merits of not just scanning the equivalent of the Ashley Madison database for sensitive addresses, but of actually controlling that database and being able to advertise in areas where you'd like to acquire users?
I think it'd be fascinating to see if a new service springs up and gets advertised in the DC area.
Sigh.
But all things aren't equal. Most importantly: so long as prostitution is formally illegal, men and women can't be pressured by social norms to participate in sex work. Once prostitution is legalized, the stage is set for that to change: perhaps body integrity isn't nearly as important as bootstrapping oneself to self-reliance, or providing for vulnerable family members.
Usually in economic analyses we stop and ask ourselves if normal people would prefer the choice rather than having it foisted on them: for instance, maybe we'd rather allow ticket scalping because someone with a valuable ticket would probably prefer the option of being able to sell it for a steep profit and pay for health care rather than just having the experience promised by the ticket. But here we have a case where most normal people probably do not want the choice deregulation would allow.
Mainly in areas where prostitution is illegal, thus the police use their power over the "criminal" to abuse them.
Sex workers have no legal method to report this abuse with out also admitting to a crime themselves.
Thus if it were legal, Abuse by police would only be as frequent for sex workers as is for other legal occupations, which much hire than it should be but....
Untrue, social norms can pressure people into formally illegal acts quite easily, and that absolutely happens with sex work now.
Just a few months ago I also read an article here in Sweden where a journalist reached out to sex workers, where the person that agreed on a interview said that they had no pimp. They did all the booking and reservations Online. While anecdotal, its enough to at least question statements like sex workers aren't safer when they can stay out of the street and do their advertisement and booking from home.
Did you have something different in mind?
Actually, they did. With a red-light district you have to be there, exposed to the pimps, to be exposed to the customers. And the density allows pimps to control more people, enough to make the activity profitable.
With out-call services from ads you avoid the presence of the pimps in the first place, and the configuration (outcalls) makes capturing a sex-worker much harder if they try which makes the economics much less attractive. Pimping is a crime of opportunity and outcalls remove most of that.
Also, not being street-people, call-girls get much more respect from police if they need to report a crime.
And we still do have street pimps and street prostitutes, where police haven't flushed them out.
I'm not convinced that this is doing any more good than harm to the majority of the people out there who are engaged in this sort of work.
I find the argument convincing. Unsurprisingly there's not a ton of research on the subject, at least none that comes up on quick searches other than the usual stuff about violence vs sex workers decreasing with legalization.
From what I've read, here in NYC most prostitution is Korean immigrants trafficked to the US to work in massage parlors. They are of age, but clearly coerced. So it really is different all over.
Backpage's management was hiding behind the 3rd-party provisions of the CDA (and the usual last-defense-of-scoundrels, "free speech" absolutism) but were helping to edit and revise ads [2,3] to conceal obviously illegal activity. Thus they were complicit in it.
It's unfortunate, because there's probably a place for a responsibly-managed online clearinghouse for adult services. But there's no indication that the management of Backpage was attempting to offer that; they were hiding under a veil of 'free speech' when it suited them, while at the same time profiting from activity they should have known was illegal (and beyond illegal, morally repugnant even to those of us who take no issue with what consenting adults do between themselves and find prostitution laws outdated and sexist).
[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/07/497006100/...
[2]: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/1007/Backpage-CEO-...
[3]: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/re...
This is interesting, but unfortunately, doing so would probably be illegal, so it will likely be shady characters doing the work.
Sigh....
you either have free speech or you don't, there is no way to be a "free speech absolutist" If you are for censorship, of any type even "hate speech" or other speech you do not personally like you do not support freedom of speech, it really is that simple
>Backpage's management was hiding behind the 3rd-party provisions of the CDA
Following the law is not "hiding", Backpage, nor any other website should be legally responsible for the content posted by people using their platform, that is a very dangerous precedent
>It's unfortunate, because there's probably a place for a responsibly-managed online clearinghouse for adult services.
Government has shut all of these down before targeting BackPage. See myRedBook, theReviewBoard, and several others as examples
The problem is that you can't edit ANYTHING and still be protected by the CDA. And they clearly did it.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
[1] http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/10/backpage-leaders-beat-pimp...
I know that it is currently in vogue, with the libertarian current in our society and in the tech world in particular, to ask why prostitution should be illegal. People should have control over their own bodies, shouldn't they?
Here is the answer: many of the people selling their sexual services are not in control of their bodies. Beyond the obvious example of people forced into it by violence, there is also a huge population of people that are trying to feed themselves, or their kids, or their addictions with very few options to achieve those ends. That is not liberty.
If it were true that everyone is absolutely free to choose to engage themselves in such a way with no whiff of active or passive coercion by individuals or their circumstances, sure, they should have the choice. But when the choice is 'do this thing or die, or be in pain' that is no real choice.
This industry needs to connect to customers. Sure, something else might pop up, but at least there won't be a central repository for a while. Hopefully that makes it a less viable.
Any you are exactly WHO to tell them it is not okay to do this or that with their OWN body ???
Currently, this is illegal - people end up forming "donation chains" to spread the availability of organs.
But, in a world where one can sell their organs, would we refuse public assistance to people who still have both of their kidneys? Would we say to the poor "Why are you asking for help? You have $50,000 buried in your back! Come back when you are truly desperate."
And at the point that we do, would we disallow them from also selling their organs?
I'll openly admit I err on the side of allowing one full control over their body; as someone staring down the barrel of dementia/Alzheimer, I selfishly want that choice when the time comes.
I think we should allow assisted suicide but regulate it carefully. I do not think we should sell the organs of people who end their lives this way (not that there's likely to be a market for those organs).
Regarding your second point on selling organs, for me it would heavily depend on our medical understanding of the transmission of whatever the critical condition was. If there is good science that e.g. Alzheimer patients can still be kidney donors, I'd think it'd be both impractical and unjust not to release those organs as the owner sees fit.
If someone needs money to pay for their mother's surgery (on out of billion possible examples), then yes let them sell their kidney!
People make calculated risks all of the time. My parents are not cool with me starting my own company that sells software services. They think that is a terrible risk. It is. I could lose everything. But I'm free to do that under the law.
People take calculated risks when logging. Dismemberment is a real threat. Yet the funds they could make are worth it to them. Who are you to tell them they can't?
I mean it when I ask, "Who are you to tell the they can't?" On what moral or ethical grounds do you restrict a person's liberty? If the worst that can happen is they die, why does that give you the authority to intervene against their wishes?
Do you think parents should be allowed to sell both kidneys in exchange for, say, fully-funded college tuition for their kids?
Do you think the mentally ill should be able to sell both their kidneys? Why or why not?
Ideally no more than one parent, presuming a two parent household, but yes, I'm morally okay with that. The loss of a parent is sad. It will have an emotional impact. I think that the impact, coupled to the education the parent is seeking will probably cause the child to appreciate and succeed even more. Knowing that dad died to procure the college education will probably cause the child to work harder in HS and college.
The parents have agency. They can look at a situation to see if they can get an outcome they appreciate.
> Do you think the mentally ill should be able to sell both their kidneys? Why or why not?
No, but merely on the arbitrary like that I think agency matters. Agency underlying all things is a premise. I just state it as a fact. If that fact is wrong, all conclusions from it are at risk. I accept that philosophically. I also posit that mental illness precludes agency.
Of course people should be able to sell their organs if they have permission of a doctor (who would get in trouble if they authorize a coercive transplant, just like euthanasia) and the recipient (who should be decided ahead of time to discourage organ hoarders and ensure compatibility)
Removing it changes the value balance. If it is not quite so easy, the other options become relatively more desirable.
Not only that, assuming more people who would normally get by on selling their sexual services turn to public assistance for help, their problem becomes more visible and the rest of us in better positions can react rather than ignore what is not being measured.
So by your own logic, prostitution is more desirable to those who choose it than the alternatives? So you want to make it artificially less desirable so they choose a different (worse) option?
In the short term it would be a 'worse' option but in the long term it would lead to a better outcome for them and others.
Much like we make it artificially less desirable to do things like build a house that is not up to code.
I'm not really sure I follow the argument for it leading to a better outcome.
Prostitution has been illegal for a long time, long before the existence of Backpage, and we haven't seen an outpouring of support for improved public assistance.
Indeed, people on public assistance are usually characterised as lazy scroungers who can't be bothered to get a real job. Meanwhile prostitutes are usually considered tragic victims of adverse circumstances.
So if anything, it would seem like a massive increase in the numbers of prostitutes as a result of legalisation (not to mention the increased visibility of the existing amount) would be far more likely to lead to support for change than the status quo.
http://scunning.com/resubmission_july2016.pdf
Services like backpage allow sex workers to vet clients ahead of time, control the time and place of an assignation, have that indoors, and then leave. Certainly some of those sex workers are trafficked, but not all are, and driving either population out onto the street for sex work puts them in greater danger of violence, sexual assault, and/or STIs.
The value balance should be changed by making other options easier and more desirable, not by making the lives of prostitutes harder.
Otherwise it sounds like you actually just don't like prostitution, regardless of what freedoms prostitutes have.
This conversation makes me realize that I don't have much data, though. How many prostitutes are doing it out of some level of desperation? I assume most since it is so risky in so many different ways (the risk of legal punishment being near the least of it). But, I'll admit, I don't know.
If it is only a trivial inconvenience, it is useless. If it is a grave inconvenience, it is evil.
I'm genuinely unsure how removing an option is helping the situation, if you're not going to provide a solution at the same time. It just sounds like you'd rather they suffer than do something you find distasteful.
Should we shut down strip clubs? What about coal mines? Factory jobs where people lose digits and limbs? Service industries where people are overworked and underpaid?
Those things are different and you know it.
EDIT: I would think that libertarians would be more interested in personal sovereignty than has really been apparent in this thread? At least I thought there was more to libertarianism than boiling everything down to commercial transactions.
One person's "commercial transaction" is another person's "personal choice"
So a libertarian who supports "personal choice" is being logically consistent by bristling against any limitations put on a "commercial transaction", because that's one stroke of the pen away from a ban on personal choices.
Under those conditions, those jobs would have to pay enough to /entice/ someone to do that work rather then rely on the implicit threat of pain through starvation, homelessness or what have you, to keep the price of getting those jobs done artificially low. Therefore they must provide enough value to society to justify their natural, uncoerced, price after that likely labor price increase is taken into account.
People often do things they wouldn't do if they were not paid. That's business. It is when people do things that they'd rather not else they face pain or death that we should work to minimize.
So, if someone wants to work in a mine, or a factory line, or on a stripper pole because it pays well enough knowing that if they don't they could still feed their kids, more power to them.
The idea that making something illegal will help these people is misguided. Presently the women are offered no protection of the law, they are often harassed and targeted by police over Johns. They often face threats of violence and rape (and more than threats) with no recourse of the law.
What is needed are rational harm reduction policies and bringing sex work into the light under the framework of protection under the law.
When someone asks for public assistance, do we then tell them "Well, you can have a job over here at the brothel"?
I'm not sure if your comment is serious, but groups already exist to address the specific needs of sex workers (which aren't that different from the subset of people they come from: impoverished and drug addicted).
What is not happening, the most important part, is for the law to view sex workers as victims rather than perps. Protection of the law would go a long way in reducing the violence and trafficking involved.
If someone denied public assistance chooses prostitution to make a living, that is not any more inherently coercive than if they choose to flip burgers.
I disagree, my opinion is based on the economics of drug prohibition [0]. I agree with your sentiments about the industry itself but the challenge is that the more prohibited a service like this is the more profit there is to be gained for providing it.
With that thought in mind it's guaranteed that new services already exist attempting to take over the abandoned space. The reason I think this is bad is because the likelihood is that these new services will be less ethical than backpage.
I'm inclined to think using backpage to identify sex traffickers, minors, and pedophiles would have been more effective at actually making a difference in the victims lives.
My belief is that actions like these just hide the behavior from public view allowing political pressure to be reduced without actually resolving the problem.
[0] http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/d...
There are also people that argue because there is a transaction of money that it is coercion.
Again, easy to compare this to any job a person doesn't want to do but has to in order to survive (no matter how well paid). Given the alternative to have the thing they want for free or working in whatever form for what they want, many would choose free. Many work to obtain what they desire or what they need to survive.
When I'm in this line of thought I wonder which is better? A pain felt acutely, physically and emotionally. Or one that the masses encourage, are numb to, accepted as way of life, dragged on for 40+ years.
Not all states have adequate alternative options as you yourself pointed out. You don't solve coerced prostitution by banning prostitution, they are already being forced to do it so they have no choice anyway. You solve coerced prostitution by solving the various coercions. By giving them adequate alternatives. Be it food programs, housing or other state care. Be it drug rehabilitation or cracking down on pimps and traffickers.
Banning prostitution would be like punishing slaves for working for free. Similarly, banning prostitution for the sake of stopping coerced prostitution is taking away a line of work many individuals are perfectly happy and proud to do.
Or, alternately, splitting the duties currently handled by law enforcement into law enforcement and societal support. Law enforcement would do what they do for crimes like murder or other crimes with victims other than the perpetrator but Support might detain someone in a questionable situation for a short time but would have a primary mission of identifying those that cannot help themselves for whatever reason, be it the addicted, the mentally ill, the people who risk starvation and getting them the help they need. Of course, that would be predicated on help actually being available.
Making prostitution illegal doesn't stop it, it just pushes it underground where it becomes a massive revenue stream for organized crime and the state is powerless to regulate the industry and protect its workers. To top it off, the increase in price caused by illegality becomes a strong incentive for human traffickers, making worse the problem you were trying to solve in the first place.
I know a number of independent sex workers as part of my communities, and for the most part they do it because they consider it less demoralising than working at McDonald's. (Sorry, but that's the truth - sex isn't sacred to some people, and being somewhat independent, being able to choose their clients, not being subject to wage slavery, and being able to keep the proceeds of most of the value they provide is appealing to them.)
Yes, there's a large amount of sex workers who are there by force, or perform sex work because they're ineligible for benefits and can't survive without it. But criminalising sex work doesn't actually help those people in the slightest, in much the same way that criminalising drugs doesn't help addicts. They're going to keep doing it because they're forced by their circumstances to, and in fact it prevents them from getting the help they need, on top of adding another socially unacceptable label which can make it difficult to access housing and other necessary services.
Criminalise pimps and traffickers all you want, they're the scum of the earth. But support sex workers.
I honestly think that people shouldn't be forced to sell their time to McDonald's for less than fair value because they are afraid of starvation, either.
Elsewhere in the thread people advocate a licensing system -- my fear of complete legitimization would be that people who need help from society will be refused that help if it seems that they could just get a job at the local brothel. BUT if that licensing system is used to screen people who are in desperate straits to give them solid alternatives before they make that decision, I think that might be a very workable solution.
Sure. But solving that involves a complete overhaul of the current capitalist system, and we're not going to get that for a long time. In the meantime, allowing people to survive within the capitalist system however they need to is a necessity.
> my fear of complete legitimization would be that people who need help from society will be refused that help if it seems that they could just get a job at the local brothel
I don't think that's ever likely to be the case. It certainly isn't the case in first-world countries where prostitution, and even brothels, are legal right now. Nobody has been turned away from receiving services and benefits in the UK or Nevada, for example, because they could be performing sex work, similarly as they're not forced into a number of other things (such as the military).
The current capitalist system, maybe, but I think it is perfectly workable within some flavor of capitalism. In fact, I think that having a solid social safety net would push capitalism to even greater heights of efficiency. With the notable exception of the taxation to pay it people would be making transactions that are guaranteed to be a net positive. That assumes, of course, that paying for such a system isn't an overall negative which is debatable (but more and more plausible with productivity gains over the last century or two).
I live in the UK. We have a solid social safety net. The issue is that it exists to support a capitalist understanding of wages - i.e. that your wage is a result of a market, which is more-or-less unrelated to the value that you create through your work (except insofar as an upper limit is created) and more to do with how many people and companies you're competing with to do the work.
A "safety net" which somehow ensures, in perpetuity, that people are able to work for a wage which has some relation to the value they create winds up looking a lot like certain forms of socialism. But as with all real-world politics, it winds up being blurry.
That's how supply and demand works. The wages are low because the more people are looking for a particular job, the more people there are willing to do it for less than others. In a well functioning society, this is a signal saying "we have enough people doing this job, go do something else".
The problem is that our society doesn't make it easy for people to do something else. Generally people get one chance at education, and if they make a bad choice, they're screwed. And beyond that, there's nothing that ensures that there will even be enough demand for labour that everyone can earn a decent living.
The solutions to this lie in the ideas of worker-led organisations of varying kinds, mutual aid, and more generally the reduction of the role a capitalist class takes in the production of value. And yes, accessible education to all.
Couldn't you same the same for work => slavery?
There is a class of people that work their entire lives, earning less then their time and effort would be worth sans passive coercion, simply to keep their head above water, if that.
This is a disservice to them and society since, if like the rest of us, they worked because it was a good trade of their time and effort and felt like they come out of the transaction with more value rather than merely not losing everything, it would be a guaranteed net-value add and we, as a society, wouldn't be dancing on the edge of a permanent underclass all of the time.
I know many people that don't need to work to survive but do because they are continually better off for it. In fact, most of the people I know in that position work as hard or harder than anyone else. Even though, on the surface, the wealthy are making the same decision to work as someone who must work or suffer immediate negative and physically painful consequences, the frame of that decision and the outcome is very different for the two groups.
We would be better off if people of all walks of life had the choice to sell what they have without worrying about their continued existence if they don't.
Just reading all of the libertarian pseudo-economic analysis for this post is pretty painful. It's kind of telling that prostitution keeps being described in terms of employment or work. Left out are the social and psychological implications/causes/side-effects of prostitution.
I'm actually on the side of legalizing prostitution, and I generally support any policy that makes the lives of sex workers safer or healthier...but you are spot on about Backpage.
They have been knowingly participating in and fostering this behavior but have tried to keep themselves at an arms length from a strictly legal sense. It's a lie and they have participated in spreading a great deal of misery because they couldn't find another way to make money.
Backpage gives a marketplace to everyone. This is both negative and positive. It supports sex trafficking, but it also supports individuals who need sex work to survive, and provides them a small amount of security.
In the neighborhoods near mine in the upper east side of Baltimore, there are two particular regions for sex work: trans people and poor people in general.
It is obvious that trans people are a high risk population for violence, and so they often turn to online sites to help weed out potential bad actors. Without these sites they are forced to walk the streets more, where they will come into violence, either just by accident, or by individuals or gangs who control territory.
The poorer neighborhoods, and neighborhoods controlled by gangs, maintain a stranglehold on prostitution in their given territory. Online sites allow either motels or private homes to be used to avoid running afoul of restrictions by these gangs.
It is also safe to assume law enforcement will have more excuses to take advantage of sex workers now that they will be more visible & vulnerable. (If you find that suggestion offensive, my city is well known for corruption in both prisons and law enforcement)
There are organizations working to help protect sex workers in most major cities in America. Please feel free to reach out to them for detailed information on how these events affect sex workers and what you can do to help.
Also, think about what type of men can have sugar babies vs. what type of men engage in regular prostitution and there's a class based argument that emerges.
The answer to that is no, which is why I draw the distinction.
Not that there aren't men who sign up to a sugar baby site, date much younger very attractive girls, pay them, and don't have sex with them. I'm sure that exists too, but only because the client really doesn't want that service.
1) Girl immediately exchanges sex for goods/cash (rarest)
2) Girl makes a sexual exchange after a courting period (most common)
3) Guy isn't interested in sex but a female companion for emotional support
4) Girl is pretending like she does #2 but actually drops off after courting period
5) Girl is actually doing #2 but the guy is too creepy
There is an element of consent involved because of the delay and indirect aspect of monetary exchange. Many sugar babies will question what differs them from traditional girlfriends other than that they are clear about how the relationship progresses.
Prostitutes can consent. They aren't /obligated/ to have sex with you just because you have $400 in hand. If they are, they're being coerced/trafficked and that is very clearly morally not OK.
Questioning the difference is another justification for the "I'm not really a prostitute" self-deception. Anyone that can't tell the difference between a sugar and normal relationship either has never /had/ a real relationship or is deeply materialistic to their core.
I think not being able to expect a return of your payment is because of the illegality of the exchange, not because the exchange is for something different altogether.
People can expect anything in any circumstances, but even with traditional prostitution (except, of course, where it is legal and therefore legal contract enforcement is available) you don't get your money back if the seller fails to provide sex. So you can't really use that to draw the line, since a "no" answer would make sugar babies exactly like (illegal) prostitutes.
But when you get a 65 year old rich dude "dating" a 22 year old bartender, that met on a sugar baby site, it's pretty clear the girl isn't with him for his rock-hard abs and winning personality.
Not making a moral judgment here, I feel consensual paid sex should be legal. But call a rose a rose.
Again, I completely understand that the distinction is EVERYTHING for these girls, because they truly don't think of themselves as prostitutes. But that's simply their self-deception.
The legal circumstances surrounding these exchanges, as well as the women that get involved in these are wildly different. Calling a rose a rose is fine, but that doesn't justify disregarding nuances between subspecies.
Then we may as well call every women who's ever slept after being paid a drink a prostitute. Not that I mind but they probably do ^^
The interesting challenge I have for people is distinguish between a sugar baby and a normal relationship. Academic surveys/studies show that ambition and wealth matter. Most women will not overtly say that they are specifically looking for money, but very few women would settle down with someone they are generally compatible with but who is constantly impoverished and reckless with their finances.
I met a girl who had dated several guys from SA. She said in each case, it was one or two "normal" dates before the guy offered her $500-$1K for sex.
It's funny to me that "sugar babies" are treated as innocuous. In reality it is probably a lot more insidious than "real" prostitution because it serves as a gateway for girls to get into the game while lying to themselves.
(The rationale was that, since the site has tools to help posters write their posts, the site owners were in a "conspiracy" with the authors of illegal posts. (Edit - that's not very accurate, see below))
I would take them with a pinch of salt until seeing the actual evidence. But just a pinch; the excerpts and descriptions are very clear, non-ambiguous, and you would basically need to believe the senate was plain-faced lying to go too far down that road.
And then the CA Attorney General and Senate apparently went after their credit card processors in an extra-legal way, applying pressure that forced Backpage to take down their sex services classifieds.
The only reason to keep prostitution illegal (and pornography legal) is the moral argument that actually having sex is a sin (and "not classy") whereas just looking at sex is more of a minor inconvenience morally. By shutting down businesses like these they get the support (monetary and politically) of the moral majority. Business as usual.
Shutting down backpage.com was obviously a mistake. It was a centralized location to advertise illegal services. Everybody knew it existed, it was hosted, owned, and financed in the US and subject to court orders and subpeonas.
Now another site will pop up shortly, either in a jurisdiction that doesn't answer to US law enforcement or, eventually, as a Tor hidden service. Prostitution and human trafficking volume won't be impacted except in the very shortest of terms. Just a stupid self-defeating response from our politicians.
The right answer would have been to leave Backpage's sex services classifieds up and pay for law enforcement to review the site on a regular basis. Control and regulate. Don't force your primary information asset to relocate to a less accessible location.
Thing is, even remaining constrained by current law assuming stopping prostitution is just and right, they /still/ went about it entirely the wrong way. Ultimately this will lead to a complete loss of control, more prostitution, and more trafficked/coerced people.
A lot of Americans are hoping that the next federal government will crack down on states flouting federal laws regarding marijuana, for example. (No, prostitution isn't a federal crime. I know that. It's an example.)
If you personally don't want to be the one to lead the culture war to make prostitution legal in all 50 states, could you explain why somebody else would find that an appealing job?
Keep in mind that leading a culture war means regular in-person harassment - in public, at home, when traveling domestically promoting your cause - until you die.
One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it creates communities that are interstitially embedded in "real life" communities and there is an opportunity friction between the mores of the two. Makes it challenging to have "community driven laws".
As for pimps and prostitutes, they'll simply run Onion Browser instead of Chrome or Safari on their phones and go to a different bookmark. And they'll need to convert some cash to Bitcoin to pay for their ads. No biggie.
People are still getting their drugs in the exact same way. Shutting down SR had no mid or long-term effect at all.
http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-murder-charges-ross-...
It was far more useful as a honeypot & revenue generator for them through John stings. Setting up a fake Backpage ad for a weekend and raking in $20k through the relatively safe act of fooling non-violent offenders is the best deal out there for police.
At the end of it all you get a nice feel-good headline about how the local PD arrested 40 sex offenders.
Like bullies law enforcement is cowardly too and likes to beat up the soft target.
Are there records showing the site operators willfully colluded and incentivized street pimps and sex traffickers? Or is this another "save the children" chilling effect on free speech?