5 ms·

Proponents of sex trafficking bill urge Silicon Valley to drop opposition

26 points by kafkaesq 9y ago

warrenm 9y ago
After reviewing parts of the bill .. I agree with Google's comments about its broad wording. Broad wording is what politicians love, because it lets government lump-under regulations & laws more things (even (especially?) things for which is was obviously not intended). Precise wording is what technically-minded people prefer: clarity, concision, and focus. Surely there is a balance that can address the problems of human trafficking without also threatening the 99.99994% of online users' free speech rights who view human trafficking to be as sickening as it is, but may happen to hold some collection of "unpleasant", "unpopular", or "sideline" views that don't jive with the majority (or, at least, the politically-correct class).
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Law has more options for interpretation. Often discussions on HN about laws will lead people to suggest 'tricks' or 'workarounds', though in the law space, judges are unlikely to side with such 'technical' responses. Personally, I think the blanket immunity platforms have gives them little reason to do more than moderate for the type of community they want, they have no legal responsibility for what their platform becomes. I would be okay seeing more of them be legally responsible. EDIT with more: Also consider that the basic concepts of law like intent for criminal law won't be done away with. Law is built around reasonable actions. SESTA will not radically make everyone operating a platform in breach of the law, it will simply mean they can no longer hide behind a blanket immunity. It will be possible to call into question whether or not a platform is doing "enough" or meeting a "reasonable" standard. It's obvious why corporations are against SESTA: It's super nice to not have to worry about it, to simply say "we're immune to this type of case". Blanket immunity is good for the company, and it is logical for any tech company to be opposed to this change. But I don't think blanket immunity is the best scenario for everyone else.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    I think the "you're committing three felonies a day because laws are overbroad" argument is incorrect and overblown. However, there are overbroad laws in specific areas that impose arbitrary injustices upon people who happen to come within their scope. Section 1001 (the "lying to the government" statute) is an example. It reaches a tremendous amount of conduct. It's cold comfort to someone in the crosshairs of a federal prosecutor that they may be able to prove that the misstatement on some random piece of paper that happens to be within federal jurisdiction is, in fact, a mistake and not an attempt to deceive the government. Until the Supreme Court reigned it in, the honest services fraud statute was also in that category. Intent doesn't help. If you're at the point where there is a debate about your intent, you're already in a pretty deep hole. Intent is an expensive basis to defend yourself on (you pretty much have to go to trial because it's so fact-based) and there is no telling what a jury will think of your story. Blanket immunity, on the other hand, is good. You can tell a prosecutor to sod off if you've got blanket immunity, because proving that you're in an immune category is something you can do easily and inexpensively, unlike proving that you didn't have the mental state needed for a crime. This particular law has the potential to be the section 1001 or honest services statute for pretty much everyone operating a website that hosts user-generated content. It's terribly drafted, overbroad, and the mens rea requirement is too low. You should be very worried.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Blanket immunity "is good" if you're the tech company that may or may not be knowingly harboring sexual predators and human traffickers. Being able to "tell the prosecutor to sod off" is not, for everyone else, a good thing. I get that blanket immunity is cheap, but when we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms, with profits soaring so high they literally don't know what to spend it on, that we ask them to occasionally spend a little of it convincing the law they're doing enough to manage their platform?
      - ianl_person 9y ago
        Should platforms be managing themselves in that way, and is that better for everyone else? With blanket immunity, law enforcement remains the responsibility of government agencies that (1) we pay to do those jobs, (2) have due process requirements, and (3) have broad immunity within the confines of their job. Without blanket immunity for platforms, we're requiring them to take on law enforcement responsibilities with none of the usual protections in place. Banking secrecy and KYC laws are, I think, a great example of how consumer-hostile this can be.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Actually, I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress. Laws didn't used to be massive 'we need to pass them to see what is in them' tomes. They used to be simple missives, written in everyday language, without umpteen dozen riders and special exemptions and funding stipulations and amendments and what-have-you. They used words and phrases like 'reasonable' or 'within reason,' rather than, 'a person shall be considered as belonging to Status B if they have retained Condition C for a length of time no less than 3 years but no more than 6, unless such a person can demonstrate Condition D...' Judges used to have leeway in how they interpreted laws and applied sentences. Yes, it gave judges the power to give ridiculously short sentences and let their buddies/'our sort of people' get off scott free. And yes, it gave judges the power to give extremely heavy-handed sentences if they felt personally slighted. But they do those things today in our current system with minimal consequences, so I'd argue...so what? I think that allowing people to act like people and reason like people is fundamental to any decent legal system. We can't try to make justice into some kind of an algorithm, because at the end of the day there's no reified reference for "Justice." There's just us.
  - stephenbez 9y ago
    This is because if a law is too vague, it is considered unconstitutional. As part of due process, it should be clear from reading the law if I'm breaking it. I shouldn't have to guess and face years in prison if I happen to be wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine
  - warrenm 9y ago
    > I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress. It is the job of the judicial branch to apply law (after the executive branch pursues lawbreakers). But look at simple, clear, concise laws vs things like the US tax code (which is annoyingly precise in some places, yet ridiculously vague in so many others) - the simpler, clearer, and - often - shorter the law, the better for everyone involved.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  One thing very few people seem to notice is that this bill doesn't just jeopardise online services with it's broad language, it jeopardises users who are not the source of the targeted content. Why? Because they too lose the CDA safe harbor, and it's easy to look at the way modern information services look (especially, e.g., social networking sites) and see ways that an enterprising lawyer might target third party users as “publishers” of, e.g., information that is visible to some other users because the targeted user interacted with the source in a particular way.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
I'm pretty torn on this. My immediate instinct is that it's yet another attempt to lock down the internet with "think of the children" histrionics. But if the investigator's report on Backpage.com is accurate--if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. I'm also bothered by this quote: > “We would support a specific amendment that would allow victims to sue for civil penalties in court to seek some form of redress for the horrible things that have happened to them,” said Slater, whose group represents tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix. Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers. If the allegations are true, these people need to be in prison. Edit: Please read my response below before downvoting. Backpage didn't block child-sex ads, they concealed and protected them, allegedly.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Keeping prostitution illegal is what makes human trafficking so profitable. Trying to heap on penalties and restricting free speech is a fools errand, it does little to nothing to help the victims. Instead we should be empowering them and treating them like real people who can actually call the police and expect help, not prosecution.
  - throwaway2016a 9y ago
    I believe that is general true with all black markets. Legislating morality doesn't make the activity stop it pushes it underground where criminals can capitalize on the black market. Same with weed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant but sunlight doesn't go underground. If the market is above ground it might actually make stopping those violating the law easier. Never mind also, in this case, improving health by mandating things like screenings and protection.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  > if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert? Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were. The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex trafficking. Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing silly solutions.
valuearb 9y ago
If only we could ban online advertising of the sex trade we could eliminate the worlds oldest profession. Lets continue to make it illegal for consenting adults to have sex with other consenting adults, so that prostitutes can't go to the cops when abused by pimps. And so the incremental penalties for pimps trafficking children are as small as possible.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  Uhhh. Sex trafficking != prostitution and involves forced sexual exploitation of unwilling or underage victims [1]. I'm not sure what you're going on about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking
  - miracle2k 9y ago
    The two are related, because one major pillar of activism around "modern slavery" is based on opposition to sex work (the others being prurient interest, a kind of western saviour syndrome, and it being lucrative). One random link I followed from the Wikipedia article is the source for the statement "Europe has the highest number of sex slaves per capita in the world". http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/ http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/ The page prominently advocates for the Nordic model.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Legal prostitution destroys the profit making potential of sex trafficking. When you already can go to prison for pimping willing adult women, you have little disincentive to not expand into using violence to procure unwilling and underage victims too.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Sex trafficking != prostitution and involves forced sexual exploitation of unwilling or underage victims There is a substantial political movement, that crosses the feminist left to the paternalistic right, that holds that all prostitution is in some manner coerced and is a subset of sex trafficking, and this group is part of the core if support for every anti-sex-trafficking law, and even moreso for laws like the proposed one that strip well-established protection and target people who aren't sex traffickers for some conduct several steps removed from trafficking. While trafficking is a real problem that needs to be combatted, it's also the new banner under which the movement seeking ever more radical legislation to combat the existence of sex work is marching.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
It seems odd to me that we've settled on the weirdly euphemistic "trafficking" to describe slavery. It sounds like a marketing word intended to take the sting out of a distasteful concept, which I don't think is anyone's intention.
- darpa_escapee 9y ago
  On one hand I agree, but on the other many people do not believe "slavery" exists anymore. It would be a hard sell to get everyone onboard to support this cause with that rhetoric. I've run into this when I've discussed sex slavery with people. The word slavery visibly doesn't sit well with some as a description for what's happening. In the end, what matters is that support is brought against trafficking and slavery.
- gozur88 9y ago
  It seems odd to me we've settled on the weirdly, well, misleading "trafficking" to describe prostitution. It sounds like people who don't like prostitution are trying to lump in a relatively small percentage of women who were forced into the trade with women who chose it over other options.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    ...Who's saying that? The article is specifically about forced sex slavery.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  I dunno. I've been thinking about this a bit, being an awkward tech-y guy in an environment where the knee-jerk reaction to that profession is face-searing hatred. Actual human trafficking, which does exist in the industry today, rules it out. It just has to; theft of agency is about as bad a crime as I can think of. But where can you stand on practical regulation? How do you draw a line that separates people who see it as a decent living all things considered, and those who detest the idea but have no other available means of affording to live? Would it even stop the issue of slavery and trafficking, if the laws were only local and on a small scale? I dunno. But it's definitely thorny, so I'm guessing I'll have moved out of this tech blast zone by the time any of it gets resolved.
erikb 9y ago
Without investigating further and just reading one paragraph from this article it is already quite clear that people try to use the moral high ground here to sell something that people usually wouldn't want to buy. kafkaesq why did you share it? *edit: And why is truth always so hard to take for people here?
dragonwriter 9y ago
It's a horribly-written law that would remove the CDA safe harbor from any civil or criminal proceeding in which conduct which would violate federal sex trafficking law is alleged, even if that conduct is not the central thrust of the law being enforced, and even if that conduct isn't actually proven in the legal action. As long as the prosecution is “targeting” conduct violating the federal sex trafficking law, the safe harbor would be removed. (It's also dishonestly framed as a “clarification” when it's a radical dismantling of one of the core pillars of the CDA.)

26 points by kafkaesq 9y ago

After reviewing parts of the bill .. I agree with Google's comments about its broad wording. Broad wording is what politicians love, because it lets government lump-under regulations & laws more things (even (especially?) things for which is was obviously not intended). Precise wording is what technically-minded people prefer: clarity, concision, and focus. Surely there is a balance that can address the problems of human trafficking without also threatening the 99.99994% of online users' free speech rights who view human trafficking to be as sickening as it is, but may happen to hold some collection of "unpleasant", "unpopular", or "sideline" views that don't jive with the majority (or, at least, the politically-correct class).

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Law has more options for interpretation. Often discussions on HN about laws will lead people to suggest 'tricks' or 'workarounds', though in the law space, judges are unlikely to side with such 'technical' responses. Personally, I think the blanket immunity platforms have gives them little reason to do more than moderate for the type of community they want, they have no legal responsibility for what their platform becomes. I would be okay seeing more of them be legally responsible. EDIT with more: Also consider that the basic concepts of law like intent for criminal law won't be done away with. Law is built around reasonable actions. SESTA will not radically make everyone operating a platform in breach of the law, it will simply mean they can no longer hide behind a blanket immunity. It will be possible to call into question whether or not a platform is doing "enough" or meeting a "reasonable" standard. It's obvious why corporations are against SESTA: It's super nice to not have to worry about it, to simply say "we're immune to this type of case". Blanket immunity is good for the company, and it is logical for any tech company to be opposed to this change. But I don't think blanket immunity is the best scenario for everyone else.
- rayiner 9y ago
  I think the "you're committing three felonies a day because laws are overbroad" argument is incorrect and overblown. However, there are overbroad laws in specific areas that impose arbitrary injustices upon people who happen to come within their scope. Section 1001 (the "lying to the government" statute) is an example. It reaches a tremendous amount of conduct. It's cold comfort to someone in the crosshairs of a federal prosecutor that they may be able to prove that the misstatement on some random piece of paper that happens to be within federal jurisdiction is, in fact, a mistake and not an attempt to deceive the government. Until the Supreme Court reigned it in, the honest services fraud statute was also in that category. Intent doesn't help. If you're at the point where there is a debate about your intent, you're already in a pretty deep hole. Intent is an expensive basis to defend yourself on (you pretty much have to go to trial because it's so fact-based) and there is no telling what a jury will think of your story. Blanket immunity, on the other hand, is good. You can tell a prosecutor to sod off if you've got blanket immunity, because proving that you're in an immune category is something you can do easily and inexpensively, unlike proving that you didn't have the mental state needed for a crime. This particular law has the potential to be the section 1001 or honest services statute for pretty much everyone operating a website that hosts user-generated content. It's terribly drafted, overbroad, and the mens rea requirement is too low. You should be very worried.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Blanket immunity "is good" if you're the tech company that may or may not be knowingly harboring sexual predators and human traffickers. Being able to "tell the prosecutor to sod off" is not, for everyone else, a good thing. I get that blanket immunity is cheap, but when we're talking about companies which make hundreds of billions of dollars operating their platforms, with profits soaring so high they literally don't know what to spend it on, that we ask them to occasionally spend a little of it convincing the law they're doing enough to manage their platform?
    - ianl_person 9y ago
      Should platforms be managing themselves in that way, and is that better for everyone else? With blanket immunity, law enforcement remains the responsibility of government agencies that (1) we pay to do those jobs, (2) have due process requirements, and (3) have broad immunity within the confines of their job. Without blanket immunity for platforms, we're requiring them to take on law enforcement responsibilities with none of the usual protections in place. Banking secrecy and KYC laws are, I think, a great example of how consumer-hostile this can be.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Actually, I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress. Laws didn't used to be massive 'we need to pass them to see what is in them' tomes. They used to be simple missives, written in everyday language, without umpteen dozen riders and special exemptions and funding stipulations and amendments and what-have-you. They used words and phrases like 'reasonable' or 'within reason,' rather than, 'a person shall be considered as belonging to Status B if they have retained Condition C for a length of time no less than 3 years but no more than 6, unless such a person can demonstrate Condition D...' Judges used to have leeway in how they interpreted laws and applied sentences. Yes, it gave judges the power to give ridiculously short sentences and let their buddies/'our sort of people' get off scott free. And yes, it gave judges the power to give extremely heavy-handed sentences if they felt personally slighted. But they do those things today in our current system with minimal consequences, so I'd argue...so what? I think that allowing people to act like people and reason like people is fundamental to any decent legal system. We can't try to make justice into some kind of an algorithm, because at the end of the day there's no reified reference for "Justice." There's just us.
- stephenbez 9y ago
  This is because if a law is too vague, it is considered unconstitutional. As part of due process, it should be clear from reading the law if I'm breaking it. I shouldn't have to guess and face years in prison if I happen to be wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine
- warrenm 9y ago
  > I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress. It is the job of the judicial branch to apply law (after the executive branch pursues lawbreakers). But look at simple, clear, concise laws vs things like the US tax code (which is annoyingly precise in some places, yet ridiculously vague in so many others) - the simpler, clearer, and - often - shorter the law, the better for everyone involved.
dragonwriter 9y ago
One thing very few people seem to notice is that this bill doesn't just jeopardise online services with it's broad language, it jeopardises users who are not the source of the targeted content. Why? Because they too lose the CDA safe harbor, and it's easy to look at the way modern information services look (especially, e.g., social networking sites) and see ways that an enterprising lawyer might target third party users as “publishers” of, e.g., information that is visible to some other users because the targeted user interacted with the source in a particular way.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

I'm pretty torn on this. My immediate instinct is that it's yet another attempt to lock down the internet with "think of the children" histrionics. But if the investigator's report on Backpage.com is accurate--if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. I'm also bothered by this quote: > “We would support a specific amendment that would allow victims to sue for civil penalties in court to seek some form of redress for the horrible things that have happened to them,” said Slater, whose group represents tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix. Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers. If the allegations are true, these people need to be in prison. Edit: Please read my response below before downvoting. Backpage didn't block child-sex ads, they concealed and protected them, allegedly.

valuearb 9y ago
Keeping prostitution illegal is what makes human trafficking so profitable. Trying to heap on penalties and restricting free speech is a fools errand, it does little to nothing to help the victims. Instead we should be empowering them and treating them like real people who can actually call the police and expect help, not prosecution.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
  I believe that is general true with all black markets. Legislating morality doesn't make the activity stop it pushes it underground where criminals can capitalize on the black market. Same with weed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant but sunlight doesn't go underground. If the market is above ground it might actually make stopping those violating the law easier. Never mind also, in this case, improving health by mandating things like screenings and protection.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
> if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert? Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were. The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex trafficking. Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing silly solutions.

valuearb 9y ago

If only we could ban online advertising of the sex trade we could eliminate the worlds oldest profession. Lets continue to make it illegal for consenting adults to have sex with other consenting adults, so that prostitutes can't go to the cops when abused by pimps. And so the incremental penalties for pimps trafficking children are as small as possible.

AlexandrB 9y ago
Uhhh. Sex trafficking != prostitution and involves forced sexual exploitation of unwilling or underage victims [1]. I'm not sure what you're going on about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking
- miracle2k 9y ago
  The two are related, because one major pillar of activism around "modern slavery" is based on opposition to sex work (the others being prurient interest, a kind of western saviour syndrome, and it being lucrative). One random link I followed from the Wikipedia article is the source for the statement "Europe has the highest number of sex slaves per capita in the world". http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/ http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/ The page prominently advocates for the Nordic model.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Legal prostitution destroys the profit making potential of sex trafficking. When you already can go to prison for pimping willing adult women, you have little disincentive to not expand into using violence to procure unwilling and underage victims too.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Sex trafficking != prostitution and involves forced sexual exploitation of unwilling or underage victims There is a substantial political movement, that crosses the feminist left to the paternalistic right, that holds that all prostitution is in some manner coerced and is a subset of sex trafficking, and this group is part of the core if support for every anti-sex-trafficking law, and even moreso for laws like the proposed one that strip well-established protection and target people who aren't sex traffickers for some conduct several steps removed from trafficking. While trafficking is a real problem that needs to be combatted, it's also the new banner under which the movement seeking ever more radical legislation to combat the existence of sex work is marching.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

It seems odd to me that we've settled on the weirdly euphemistic "trafficking" to describe slavery. It sounds like a marketing word intended to take the sting out of a distasteful concept, which I don't think is anyone's intention.

darpa_escapee 9y ago
On one hand I agree, but on the other many people do not believe "slavery" exists anymore. It would be a hard sell to get everyone onboard to support this cause with that rhetoric. I've run into this when I've discussed sex slavery with people. The word slavery visibly doesn't sit well with some as a description for what's happening. In the end, what matters is that support is brought against trafficking and slavery.
gozur88 9y ago
It seems odd to me we've settled on the weirdly, well, misleading "trafficking" to describe prostitution. It sounds like people who don't like prostitution are trying to lump in a relatively small percentage of women who were forced into the trade with women who chose it over other options.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  ...Who's saying that? The article is specifically about forced sex slavery.
leggomylibro 9y ago
I dunno. I've been thinking about this a bit, being an awkward tech-y guy in an environment where the knee-jerk reaction to that profession is face-searing hatred. Actual human trafficking, which does exist in the industry today, rules it out. It just has to; theft of agency is about as bad a crime as I can think of. But where can you stand on practical regulation? How do you draw a line that separates people who see it as a decent living all things considered, and those who detest the idea but have no other available means of affording to live? Would it even stop the issue of slavery and trafficking, if the laws were only local and on a small scale? I dunno. But it's definitely thorny, so I'm guessing I'll have moved out of this tech blast zone by the time any of it gets resolved.

erikb 9y ago

Without investigating further and just reading one paragraph from this article it is already quite clear that people try to use the moral high ground here to sell something that people usually wouldn't want to buy. kafkaesq why did you share it? *edit: And why is truth always so hard to take for people here?

dragonwriter 9y ago

It's a horribly-written law that would remove the CDA safe harbor from any civil or criminal proceeding in which conduct which would violate federal sex trafficking law is alleged, even if that conduct is not the central thrust of the law being enforced, and even if that conduct isn't actually proven in the legal action. As long as the prosecution is “targeting” conduct violating the federal sex trafficking law, the safe harbor would be removed. (It's also dishonestly framed as a “clarification” when it's a radical dismantling of one of the core pillars of the CDA.)