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Internet Censorship Bill Could Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation
- limeblack 9y agoI'm not a lawyer but what does this mean for apps like Signal?
- uxp 9y agoI'm not a lawyer either, but it would seem Signal would have less culpability operating a network of users knowing that they do not have any access to the contents of the messages and thus have an implicit impetus to do nothing. Then again, they could be held in contempt of court (maybe?) because sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting La La La isn't really a good defense for ignorance of a fact, if they were to be given evidence that illegal pornography was being transmitted through their servers. Basically, it seems like it probably would have less effect on them than say Tumblr, which does in fact host a lot of pornographic material in the clear, but they could still be thrown into the mix depending on circumstances.
- CurtMonash 9y agoOh crap -- not again! Holding the line against censorship is very, very nerve-wracking.
- Bartweiss 9y agoI've got a certain painful sympathy for Lovecraft characters these days. There's nothing quite like the feeling of having to win every battle ad infinitum, against an opponent whose every gain will be permanent.
- busterarm 9y agoWhat politician is going to vote against cracking down on sex trafficing though? Once they named this bill the way they did, this was a lost cause. We're well-fucked here, I imagine.
- noja 9y ago> What politician is going to vote against cracking down on sex trafficing though? A good one that doesn't vote on a law based on it's always-misleading title.
- busterarm 9y agoYou've seen how campaign ads work, right? "Congressmen X voted to enable sex trafficking online. Congressment X wants sex trafficking in your community. Vote Y and end sex trafficking for good."
- godelski 9y agoAnd the only way to combat that is to disregard it. Meaning that you have to be aware of both sides doing it and that you expect it to be misleading. Kind of like how you combat clickbait by teaching people to not click.
- protomyth 9y ago"My opponent supports sneaking a bill through that would harm you, your family, and the freedoms of true patriots by wrapping it falsely as a cure for sex trafficking, like a snake oil salesman trying to sell you sewage with perfume to cure your ills. What other things will this charlatan support?"
- JetSpiegel 9y agoGood luck with that...
- dwiel 9y ago
- protomyth 9y agoIts a constant pain in the butt. We really need a lobbying effort that makes Senators and Congresspeople afraid to even suggest something this stupid. On a side note, at least one of the Senators won't be a problem after the 2018 election.
- Bartweiss 9y agoI swear, you can predict the quality of a law as the inverse of how good the name sounds. If this law were going to limit sex trafficking, it would have a name like "Revisions to the Prosecution of Certain Interstate Crimes". But no, it's got a big, gaudy name that poisons the well on any opposition whatsoever. So, predictably, it will either endanger innocents or restrict basic rights. It's like god damn clockwork.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- boombip 9y agoBecause if you have a cool name you can sell it solely based on the name. A bill with a boring name must stand on its own two feet to pass.
- PeCaN 9y agoAlso, nobody wants to be the guy who opposed the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act”.
- wallace_f 9y agoI recall as a child a teacher telling our class, "he is a good representative. He is trying to create a law that would give hospitals and police priority to have faster internet." 'The devil doesn't come to you dressed in horns and a cape.'
- kazinator 9y ago> The two choices facing platforms would seem to be to put extremely restrictive measures in place compromising their users’ free speech and privacy, or to do nothing at all. So where is the problem again? "Do nothing at all" sounds good to me. Be the dumb pipe or host you're supposed to be.
- snsr 9y ago> So where is the problem again? Third-party liability for content hosts is a problem for all online platforms. Platforms are not dumb pipes in the way that an ISP should be.
- rayiner 9y agoThe Act is as bad as the EFF says it is. 18 U.S.C. 1591 makes illegal "participation in a venture" which financially benefits from trafficking. This bill defines "participation in a venture" to include "knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports, or facilitates the violation." That language vastly expands potential liability. If a website knows that its services are being used to somehow assist in sex trafficking,[1] the website could be as culpable as the persons getting paid to coordinate the shipping of sex slaves. It's completely bananas. Here are the sponsors: Rob Portman (R, Ohio) Richard Blumenthal (D, Connecticut) John McCain (R, Arizona) Claire McCaskill (D, Missouri) John Cornyn (R, Texas) Heidi Heitkamp (D, North Dakota) [1] It's pretty much impossible to run a website that allows people to communicate that isn't used for illegal purposes. For example, GMail is definitely used to facilitate a wide variety of illegal conduct. Up to now, for criminal liability to exist, you had to go beyond knowing that your service was used to assist criminal activity to taking special measures to assist that criminal activity. This bill basically lowers the standard from "having intent to assist the illegal activity" to "knowing that what you're doing will somehow assist the illegal activity."
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoIt might be a possible minor win for privacy - if collecting certain information might mean that you know that your service somehow assists illegal activity, then one defense against it is not collecting that information.
- rayiner 9y agoAs noted below, this bill would be an absolute (much deserved?) disaster for websites that police content. Such websites can't hope to avoid the "knowing" prong.
- bilbo0s 9y agoIt's more serious than that. Legally speaking, if the cops show up and tell you that a user is using your site for X, or Y, or Z, then from that point on... you know that your site can be used for X, or Y, or Z. How that knowledge impacts your liability in the event there are others using your service for similar ends, is not at all clear to me given the wording of the Act in question. It's kind of a "Notice, Knowledge, and Privilege" thing. And that gets really tricky in federal court.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoUnfortunately, in the desire to show that they do not support Nazis, the tech companies have already ceded the high moral ground on free speech. They have also given up the argument that they are just a neutral platform or dumb pipe. One thing that can get broad agreement from both sides of the political aisle is that actual human sex traffickers( especially if they traffic children) are more evil than neo-Nazis who go around marching and chanting hateful slogans. I see a good chance of this bill passing. After all, who wants to go on record as enabling human sex traffickers.
- woofyman 9y ago>more evil than neo-Nazis who go around marching and chanting hateful slogans They also are known for killing and brutalizing people.
- rayiner 9y agoI don’t think you can use a website to kill people, but I’m not up with the latest W3C proposals.
- mikeash 9y agoYou can't use a web site to traffic people either.
- amagaeru 9y agoYou don't have to shove a human into the internet tube to use the internet tube to help move the human. Or do we want to ignore all of the sites facilitating prostitution, human trafficking's BFF?
- mikeash 9y agoLikewise you don't need to invent a knife-over-IP protocol to use the internet to help kill people.
- the_stc 9y agoThe real way to fight trafficking is legalization and regulation, including interviews with sex workers to detect coercion, then followups to help them. Since fixing the laws is going to take a while, we've taken it upon ourselves. We're building such a superior solution for both sex providers and clients, it'll hurt trafficking like iTunes hurt music piracy.
- rxhernandez 9y agoNot that I don't support legalization, but I'm skeptical as to how much legalization would help. Put simply, can we expect new sex workers to come out of the woodwork to create the supply needed to make sex trafficking substantially less profitable? Are women and men suddenly and substantially going to start selling that service if it became legalized?
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoMoving it out of the black market itself is an effective price decrease - Johns can be expected to be willing to pay a premium to avoid the risk of prison.
- illumin8 9y agoTake a look at Rhode Island for an example of how this works in reality. The results were overwhelmingly positive: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rhode-island-accidentally-legalized-prostitution-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rhode-island-accidentally...
- the_stc 9y agoLegalization and regulation. Require a license and periodic reviews. Just having easy, legal, sex available means a lot of the revenue dries up, which makes it harder to run the illegal operations.
- ameister14 9y agoDon't the UK, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have fairly significant trafficking problems?
- notgood 9y agoDo the same Republicans did with ACA, give it another name (Obamacare) to lessen it in the eyes of the people, I suggest "Internet Censorship Act" or "Destroy Internet Act"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mjevans 9y agoKryptonite Internet Legislation Lowlifes It's another KILL bill.
- primitivesuave 9y agoThis is not some covert attack on Internet businesses, it is a well-intentioned but misguided attempt by these senators to prevent adult service websites (namely backpage.com) from enabling pimps and organized crime to traffic victims with impunity under Section 230. Backpage actively helps buyers and sellers remain anonymous specifically for adult services, and provides the means to avoid detection by law enforcement - Bitcoin payments, encouraging prepaid credit cards, not requiring phone numbers for verification, stripping metadata from images, etc. Interestingly, it requires phone number verification for other classified sections on its website like cars and boats, but for adult services it even offers a 10% discount for using Bitcoin. There could be a legal argument made that Backpage induces trafficking on its website by not requiring verification for adult services, and is therefore involved in the creation of its content and thus not protected under Section 230. Section 230 could also be amended specifically for adult content to require verification and restrict anonymous payment methods. But the EFF is absolutely correct that in its current form, this would be terrible for anyone hosting content on the Internet because this amendment could be broadly applied to illegal content posted on any content providers website, and creates an incentive to have no filtering of content. One recent development is this Washington Post article that uncovered evidence that Backpage has actually been actively promoting sex trafficking posts to its site [1]. This would make Backpage unequivocally the publisher of its content, and therefore criminally liable. So it is entirely possible that this amendment will not be needed to bring down the human filth that operate on backpage, but some legal remedy is certainly needed to combat the many existing and future websites that will enable sex trafficking. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/backpage-has-always-claimed-it-doesnt-control-sex-related-ads-new-documents-show-otherwise/2017/07/10/b3158ef6-553c-11e7-b38e-35fd8e0c288f_story.html?utm_term=.8fe1c667200f https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/backpage-...
- whipoodle 9y agoWhat the law actually says is important, not just its impetus.
- UnpossibleJim 9y agoIf those same said senators wanted to actually make a dent in sex trafficking in this country, they would take a look at legalization and regulation in a controlled environment, not unlike Nevada. This is another Band Aid to help make themselves look/feel better by exerting more control on a populace and ignoring the ways this bill will be misused, rather than taking a look at taking real steps to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the American public seems more than ready to eat a ton of BS sprinkled with a little sugar and false hope. Same way Guantanamo was pit in to make it's way against trial laws, PRISM was implemented while directly opposing constititional law and invasions of sovereign countries have taken place by using drones instead of soldiers. The road to Hell is, was and always will be paved with good intentions and politicians promises.
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- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoWithout having read the bill, I suspect the titular “sex trafficking” is just a code word for sex work in general, as is often the case with such initiatives. It's very easy to crack down on sex worker rights by claiming all of them are trafficked. Which helps nobody: driving sex work further underground only makes the women working in it more vulnerable.
- pmontra 9y agoProbably good for the incumbent social networks. They have the resources to patrol their territory and no small startups will raise to threaten their status. The extra work is a premium they pay to be safe. Probably bad for everybody else living on comments. Disqus, but also for the mid sized blog platforms that want people to post comments and talk each other, example: Medium. And how about Slack? If that part of the internet shrinks, all the products and services ecosystem will shrink too.
- jordigh 9y agoI wish I hadn't gotten so conditioned to think that free speech is nazi speech. Every time I hear someone defending free speech on the internet, they always seem to be defending the most vile opinions or someone's right to be unsympathetic or uncaring. The EFF doesn't seem to be doing that here, though, yet reading the headline puts me on guard. Why isn't anyone ever defending free speech for good, positive things? I like free speech, but the positive associations I have with it, like allowing individuals to criticise politicians or the government, never seem to be what people on the internet are trying to defend. Free speech should be used by the disenfranchised to defend against those in power, but people want to defend it being used to attack the powerless too.
- ameister14 9y agoPositive speech is rarely threatened before negative speech. The attacks on the fringes of free speech gradually enable the ability to curtail speech in any form.
- jordigh 9y agoI'm really skeptical of this slippery slope argument. Germany has very rigidly enforced anti-nazi-speech laws and it doesn't strike me as being a totalitarian dystopia.
- ameister14 9y agoGermany has been a totalitarian dystopia, though - 30 years ago. I don't think you can say anything about a society that is less than a generation or two old. It's not about a totalitarian dystopia, though. It's about limiting some people's rights in favor of other people in general. We believe that this is wrong to do, not just harmful to society.
- abecedarius 9y agoIt's funny how things go -- when I was growing up, free speech was seen as more of a left-wing issue. The classic defense of free speech is http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty1.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty1.html and I recommend it. Steven Pinker has a book coming out next year that sounds like it'll tackle some of the same themes.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- austincheney 9y agoFree speech doesn't exist online. I learned this when Brendan Eich was fired from Mozilla (even though his speech was private, non-vocal, and offline). The conclusion for me is to never use social media. Online everything is business. The most political I get is heated opinions about programming and developer incompetence. For everything else you will have to meet me in person and buy me dinner.
- narrator 9y agoI think the intent of the lawmakers here is to make a law to put people in jail or out of business who are running human trafficking websites that advertise services from victims. How exactly do they do it without trashing the whole internet?