25 ms·

This is not surprising, but sad. Years ago, i was dragged (i was the only engineer in the local office) into a whitehouse (or maybe it was state department, i c

This is not surprising, but sad. Years ago, i was dragged (i was the only engineer in the local office) into a whitehouse (or maybe it was state department, i can't remember) sponsored working group on online sex trafficking. The non-profits dedicated to fighting this, while seemingly well-intentioned, were completely and totally unwilling to see any other perspective or try to find shared ground. It was scorched earth approach or nothing. Literally to the tune of "we should be burning down craigslist entirely, and yahoo, google, microsoft, etc should be required to be scanning your search history and reporting you to the police if they suspect you might be sex trafficking". It was frustrating enough that two of the other participants literally walked out. The only thing mildly surprising to me here is that it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it.

tptacek 9y ago
I suppose if you work directly with people on the front lines of that problem, Craigslist personals might seem pretty trivial in comparison.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  To me, the odd thing is they focus on that instead of legalization and helping people report abuses. Legalization is far from perfect but abuse in Nevada brothels is much lower than as street walkers. It seems it's more a puritanical belief system than a genuine desire to render aid.
  - sersi 9y ago
    This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem. Driving things underground is only going to cause more issues and abuse to the sex workers. It's kind of ironic when in France, for example, a law gets passed criminalizing the customers while the sex workers go in the street to protest that law saying that it will create more abuse (and one year after, they were right). Trying to stop behaviors that will always exist in human societies doesn't work, it just drives the demand underground and if things are illegal already, then other more illegal, more abusive behaviors start to surface.
    - halflings 9y ago
      > This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem. Why do we have to "believe"? There are many examples to learn from, to see what works and what doesn't. For example, this study [0]. "This paper suggests it’s the latter. Using trafficking data from 150 countries, the authors find that "countries where prostitution is legal experience a larger reported incidence of human trafficking inflows." As an example, they discuss Germany, which legalized prostitution in 2002. The minimum estimate of sex trafficking victims in the country increased from 9,870 in 2001 to 11,080 in 2002, to 12,350 in 2003." As an anecdotal example: Sweden has one of the harshest stances on prostitution, and it's working just fine [1]. [0] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/17/study-legalizing-prostitution-increases-human-trafficking/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/17/study-legalizing-prostit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Research_on_prostitution_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Researc...
      - zeth___ 9y ago
        Sweden has more rapes per capita than any country outside of sub-saharan Africa. Whatever system they have they can keep.
        intended 9y ago
        I recall this is Because their definition is far broader - if it was applied to other countries the number of rapes would increase
        IanCal 9y ago
        I think it's to do with the collection of statistics as well. They record the rape at the initial reporting to the police, no matter what any later investigation shows, and multiple rapes are counted individually (many countries do not). This is not saying which approach is correct for recording the numbers, but that you cant simply compare the numbers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372
        9y ago
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kofejnik 9y ago
    or maybe they, like any other political group, seek power to regulate and enforce
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    As I noted in another comment, all you have to do is study the laws of prostitution elsewhere in the world to understand that they have little to no influence on sex trafficking. Prostitution is legal, explicit, and even taxed in the Netherlands, but sex trafficking remains such a major problem that some large cities, like Utrecht, have outlawed prostitution locally to combat the issue.
IBM 9y ago
It's taken this long because it took until now for people to start falling out of love with the tech industry, including many politicians. Having Wyden in their pocket won't be enough anymore. The skepticism of the tech industry is surprisingly bipartisan, which bodes well on a number of fronts including antitrust scrutiny and potentially the equivalent of GDPR (if we're lucky).
SeeDave 9y ago
In defense of the "scorched earth approach or nothing" folks: from my perspective... it's a completely and totally human response to faceless, blameless, unapproachable (from their perspective) perpetrators and facilitators of systematic abuse and exploitation of innocent and vulnerable people. If you've ever felt frustrated at an IVR system for routine tasks such as banking, restaurant reservations, canceling a gym membership, checking a gift card balance, etc. then you may understand where the "scorched earth" people are coming from when it comes to advocating for dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent victims who have been raped, exploited, and brutalized. That said, I really wish that I could come forward with a solution to the online sex trafficking problem.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I'm quite annoyed about this, both because it affects numerous friends of mine who are sex workers and are now scrambling to find alternatives to working on the street, where they're far less safe, and on a more pedestrian level because I met my wife on a Craigslist date years ago. Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior.
  - at-fates-hands 9y ago
    > Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I had the same reaction to this. Shutting down one avenue, just pushes these people back into the shadows where its going to be a LOT harder to track down and find them. With CL being up, it was public, traceable and arrests could be made discretely and out of public view.
  - edraferi 9y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot this morning. I think almost every vice would be less damaging to society if it was in the open. Polite society doesn't want to see sex work or drugs, but they still exist. Hiding them makes things much worse for the people directly involved. It's trafficked kids with broken immigration status who are more scared of the cops than their captors. It's drug addicts who OD on tainted drugs. Bring it all into the open. Have the government certify providers directly. Crack down on unauthorized middlemen. Tax it. Use the taxes to pay for programs that help people leave when they realize they can have a better life without it. We need the classic American Market here: free trade enabled by regulation that ensures market quality and protects participants from fraud. Unfortunately I don't think this is politically possible. It would take a long, well funded campaign. The people who are willing to do that kind of work are motivated by stories of individual tragedy and focus on draconian solutions like this mess of a law. The people who would push for openness can make more money elsewhere, and don't want to make their name "Advocating for drugs & sex." Frustrating.
Zamicol 9y ago
What non-profits?
wwweston 9y ago
> we should be burning down craigslist entirely So, let's all be honest about something about CL personals that means these folks might not be wrong (even if, as is likely, the actual legislation is terrible policy). I've actually used CL personals to get some dates, and there are things I liked about it (primarily text-focused medium can be nice, are there any more of those?), and I'm single, so having it go away is personally a bit disappointing. But it is obvious to anyone who has used them that CL personals were utterly overwhelmed by people who are selling the other kind of Saas (Sex as a Service). This was a point of frustration for anyone looking for a connection (however unconventional) rather than a transaction. But worse, no matter your views on whether people should be able to voluntarily do sex work, with the majority of the w4m traffic being prostitution, it seems all but inevitable that there was some coerced trafficking regularly associated with it. This was at least nominally against the terms of the personals section, but nobody selling cared at all (and in some cases, were cheeky enough to flag legit not-selling-anything ads), and if craigslist mounted any serious effort to fix the problem, it wasn't one I noticed. This legislation sounds like thoughtless single-dimension policy, but I'm not sure it burns down CL entirely on its own so much as it does forces CL to reckon with the fact that its personals section was already set on fire by pushers much earlier and that they didn't care enough to do anything about it. (Which is fine, they obviously never derived revenue from it and are under no obligation to divert resources there or let that drag down the rest of their successful classifieds offering.)
- jxramos 9y ago
  just googling `w4m` now brings up a ton of prostitution trash >< I don't even want to know what it stands for.
  - cft 9y ago
    Then shut down Google too.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Nothing bad, just "woman (looking) for man". I used to see ads in the local free paper with people looking for relationships. Naturally, m4m, w4w, mw4m etc are also understood.
n4r9 9y ago
> it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it Interesting. I wonder if the timing has anything to do with a recent particularly shocking case of sexual exploitation involving Craigslist: http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/15601265.Sadistic_paedophile_scientist_who_called_himself__666devil__on_dark_web_admits_to_137_charges_involving_sickening_images/ http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/15601265.Sadistic_paedoph...
pweissbrod 9y ago
:%s/sex trafficking/mass shooting/g :%s/gun control laws/internet control laws/g
- paublyrne 9y ago
  There can be various degrees of hysteria around both those topics, but the equivalency you seem to be suggesting is false, for me. The internet doesn't enable trafficking as directly as guns enable shootings.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    People are using Craigslist and Backpage to advertise sex trafficking victims for sale and using other internet services to engage in the communications to coordinate those sales and sometimes even to process the payments for those sales. Seems pretty direct to me.
  - pweissbrod 9y ago
    paulblyne fair enough I see your point. but what i find interesting is the willfulness americans will _permanently relinquish_ their rights and the rights of their descendants to the government in one case vs the other in the name of safety in reaction to current events.
  - gnode 9y ago
    It's a tautology and irrelevant to say guns enable shootings. Guns make murder convenient, just as the Internet makes certain crimes convenient. But in both cases, the majority of the user base is benign and law abiding, and legislation would negatively affect them, arguably more than it would affect the bad actors.
DanBC 9y ago
They tried asking nicely with Backpage, and it failed entirely.
rayiner 9y ago
This is true, unfortunately, of many public interest groups. They’re staffed by true believers, often people who have been strongly affacted by whatever cause they’re fighting for. Dealing with sex abuse victims all day destroys your objectivity.
Noos 9y ago
There is no "shared ground." Prostitution is illegal in all but one state of the USA, and that under very specific conditions. Craigslist should self police and remove posts that more or less are openly illegal in a way defined by the laws of the land. It's not like they are just discussing it or using free speech, its openly advocating the sale of illegal services and should be against Craiglist's own TOS. I mean hell, if they were facilitating the illegal sale of guns this site would be up in arms to ban them.
- sykh 9y ago
  In general the public does not treat all forms of illegal activity facilitation the same and this is a good thing. Some forms of illegal activity facilitation are much worse than others in the eyes of the public. It’s reasonabke and natural that one instance of this evokes outrage and another a nonchalant attitude.
ekiru 9y ago
> The only thing mildly surprising to me here is that it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it. Some of the non-profits dedicated to fighting this opposed the bill!
- tfuop 9y ago
  Hail drumpf!!!
stevenwoo 9y ago
They had to wait 10 years to get a GOP majority in the House and Senate and a nominally conservative President to rubber stamp it. It's conceivable had the same technology hypothetically existed before that Reagan/Bush/Bush 2/Clinton would signed it as well.
rrcaptain 9y ago
It's kind of ridiculous considering the original bill wasn't intended to protect tech companies from this type of shit.
djsumdog 9y ago
Was that during the 1994 Child Safety Protection Act?
ianamartin 9y ago
Well in the case of this particular bill, at least some of the advocates for sex workers had some sense and spoke loudly and clearly about the bad consequences of this law. https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-celebrity-psa https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-cele... https://survivorsagainstsesta.org/about-sesta/ https://survivorsagainstsesta.org/about-sesta/ https://survivorsagainstsesta.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/sesta_fosta_letter-3-9.pdf https://survivorsagainstsesta.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/se... https://injusticetoday.com/proposed-federal-trafficking-legislation-has-surprising-opponents-advocates-who-work-with-bf418c73d5b4 https://injusticetoday.com/proposed-federal-trafficking-legi...
UrukParthian 9y ago
"seemingly well-intentioned" After dealing with a few non-profits, I'm utterly convinced about this maxim. "Intention is nothing. Intelligence is everything." Ask a toddler to solve world peace and he/she might say something like "Go boom boom the bad people!". That's what it's like dealing with certain non-profits. Full or people with good intention but without the intelligence to choose effective courses of action. Example: Homeless days in shelter. Got prescribed Ritalin for the first time in my 30 years of life (up 'till then). It was a life changer... After I moved out of the shelter. Was told by the head "you can't take stimulants here. I mean look at it, it has meth in its' name!" People with good intentions but unable to make good use of it because they had no natural curiosity about the world. Only curiosity in meeting limited sets of metrics that can always be shuffled around and gamed.
CyberDildonics 9y ago
For every problem worth solving there is an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong.

tptacek 9y ago

I suppose if you work directly with people on the front lines of that problem, Craigslist personals might seem pretty trivial in comparison.

AFNobody 9y ago
To me, the odd thing is they focus on that instead of legalization and helping people report abuses. Legalization is far from perfect but abuse in Nevada brothels is much lower than as street walkers. It seems it's more a puritanical belief system than a genuine desire to render aid.
- sersi 9y ago
  This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem. Driving things underground is only going to cause more issues and abuse to the sex workers. It's kind of ironic when in France, for example, a law gets passed criminalizing the customers while the sex workers go in the street to protest that law saying that it will create more abuse (and one year after, they were right). Trying to stop behaviors that will always exist in human societies doesn't work, it just drives the demand underground and if things are illegal already, then other more illegal, more abusive behaviors start to surface.
  - halflings 9y ago
    > This is key. I strongly believe that legalization is the only answer to the problem. Why do we have to "believe"? There are many examples to learn from, to see what works and what doesn't. For example, this study [0]. "This paper suggests it’s the latter. Using trafficking data from 150 countries, the authors find that "countries where prostitution is legal experience a larger reported incidence of human trafficking inflows." As an example, they discuss Germany, which legalized prostitution in 2002. The minimum estimate of sex trafficking victims in the country increased from 9,870 in 2001 to 11,080 in 2002, to 12,350 in 2003." As an anecdotal example: Sweden has one of the harshest stances on prostitution, and it's working just fine [1]. [0] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/17/study-legalizing-prostitution-increases-human-trafficking/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/17/study-legalizing-prostit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Research_on_prostitution_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Sweden#Researc...
    - zeth___ 9y ago
      Sweden has more rapes per capita than any country outside of sub-saharan Africa. Whatever system they have they can keep.
      - intended 9y ago
        I recall this is Because their definition is far broader - if it was applied to other countries the number of rapes would increase
        IanCal 9y ago
        I think it's to do with the collection of statistics as well. They record the rape at the initial reporting to the police, no matter what any later investigation shows, and multiple rapes are counted individually (many countries do not). This is not saying which approach is correct for recording the numbers, but that you cant simply compare the numbers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19592372
      - 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kofejnik 9y ago
  or maybe they, like any other political group, seek power to regulate and enforce
- hellofunk 9y ago
  As I noted in another comment, all you have to do is study the laws of prostitution elsewhere in the world to understand that they have little to no influence on sex trafficking. Prostitution is legal, explicit, and even taxed in the Netherlands, but sex trafficking remains such a major problem that some large cities, like Utrecht, have outlawed prostitution locally to combat the issue.

IBM 9y ago

It's taken this long because it took until now for people to start falling out of love with the tech industry, including many politicians. Having Wyden in their pocket won't be enough anymore. The skepticism of the tech industry is surprisingly bipartisan, which bodes well on a number of fronts including antitrust scrutiny and potentially the equivalent of GDPR (if we're lucky).

SeeDave 9y ago

In defense of the "scorched earth approach or nothing" folks: from my perspective... it's a completely and totally human response to faceless, blameless, unapproachable (from their perspective) perpetrators and facilitators of systematic abuse and exploitation of innocent and vulnerable people. If you've ever felt frustrated at an IVR system for routine tasks such as banking, restaurant reservations, canceling a gym membership, checking a gift card balance, etc. then you may understand where the "scorched earth" people are coming from when it comes to advocating for dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent victims who have been raped, exploited, and brutalized. That said, I really wish that I could come forward with a solution to the online sex trafficking problem.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I'm quite annoyed about this, both because it affects numerous friends of mine who are sex workers and are now scrambling to find alternatives to working on the street, where they're far less safe, and on a more pedestrian level because I met my wife on a Craigslist date years ago. Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  > Great, like the trade is going to suddenly end. All they've achieved is 'out of sight, out of mind.' I had the same reaction to this. Shutting down one avenue, just pushes these people back into the shadows where its going to be a LOT harder to track down and find them. With CL being up, it was public, traceable and arrests could be made discretely and out of public view.
- edraferi 9y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot this morning. I think almost every vice would be less damaging to society if it was in the open. Polite society doesn't want to see sex work or drugs, but they still exist. Hiding them makes things much worse for the people directly involved. It's trafficked kids with broken immigration status who are more scared of the cops than their captors. It's drug addicts who OD on tainted drugs. Bring it all into the open. Have the government certify providers directly. Crack down on unauthorized middlemen. Tax it. Use the taxes to pay for programs that help people leave when they realize they can have a better life without it. We need the classic American Market here: free trade enabled by regulation that ensures market quality and protects participants from fraud. Unfortunately I don't think this is politically possible. It would take a long, well funded campaign. The people who are willing to do that kind of work are motivated by stories of individual tragedy and focus on draconian solutions like this mess of a law. The people who would push for openness can make more money elsewhere, and don't want to make their name "Advocating for drugs & sex." Frustrating.

Zamicol 9y ago

What non-profits?

wwweston 9y ago

> we should be burning down craigslist entirely So, let's all be honest about something about CL personals that means these folks might not be wrong (even if, as is likely, the actual legislation is terrible policy). I've actually used CL personals to get some dates, and there are things I liked about it (primarily text-focused medium can be nice, are there any more of those?), and I'm single, so having it go away is personally a bit disappointing. But it is obvious to anyone who has used them that CL personals were utterly overwhelmed by people who are selling the other kind of Saas (Sex as a Service). This was a point of frustration for anyone looking for a connection (however unconventional) rather than a transaction. But worse, no matter your views on whether people should be able to voluntarily do sex work, with the majority of the w4m traffic being prostitution, it seems all but inevitable that there was some coerced trafficking regularly associated with it. This was at least nominally against the terms of the personals section, but nobody selling cared at all (and in some cases, were cheeky enough to flag legit not-selling-anything ads), and if craigslist mounted any serious effort to fix the problem, it wasn't one I noticed. This legislation sounds like thoughtless single-dimension policy, but I'm not sure it burns down CL entirely on its own so much as it does forces CL to reckon with the fact that its personals section was already set on fire by pushers much earlier and that they didn't care enough to do anything about it. (Which is fine, they obviously never derived revenue from it and are under no obligation to divert resources there or let that drag down the rest of their successful classifieds offering.)

jxramos 9y ago
just googling `w4m` now brings up a ton of prostitution trash >< I don't even want to know what it stands for.
- cft 9y ago
  Then shut down Google too.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Nothing bad, just "woman (looking) for man". I used to see ads in the local free paper with people looking for relationships. Naturally, m4m, w4w, mw4m etc are also understood.

n4r9 9y ago

> it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it Interesting. I wonder if the timing has anything to do with a recent particularly shocking case of sexual exploitation involving Craigslist: http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/15601265.Sadistic_paedophile_scientist_who_called_himself__666devil__on_dark_web_admits_to_137_charges_involving_sickening_images/ http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/15601265.Sadistic_paedoph...

pweissbrod 9y ago

:%s/sex trafficking/mass shooting/g :%s/gun control laws/internet control laws/g

paublyrne 9y ago
There can be various degrees of hysteria around both those topics, but the equivalency you seem to be suggesting is false, for me. The internet doesn't enable trafficking as directly as guns enable shootings.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  People are using Craigslist and Backpage to advertise sex trafficking victims for sale and using other internet services to engage in the communications to coordinate those sales and sometimes even to process the payments for those sales. Seems pretty direct to me.
- pweissbrod 9y ago
  paulblyne fair enough I see your point. but what i find interesting is the willfulness americans will _permanently relinquish_ their rights and the rights of their descendants to the government in one case vs the other in the name of safety in reaction to current events.
- gnode 9y ago
  It's a tautology and irrelevant to say guns enable shootings. Guns make murder convenient, just as the Internet makes certain crimes convenient. But in both cases, the majority of the user base is benign and law abiding, and legislation would negatively affect them, arguably more than it would affect the bad actors.

DanBC 9y ago

They tried asking nicely with Backpage, and it failed entirely.

rayiner 9y ago

This is true, unfortunately, of many public interest groups. They’re staffed by true believers, often people who have been strongly affacted by whatever cause they’re fighting for. Dealing with sex abuse victims all day destroys your objectivity.

Noos 9y ago

There is no "shared ground." Prostitution is illegal in all but one state of the USA, and that under very specific conditions. Craigslist should self police and remove posts that more or less are openly illegal in a way defined by the laws of the land. It's not like they are just discussing it or using free speech, its openly advocating the sale of illegal services and should be against Craiglist's own TOS. I mean hell, if they were facilitating the illegal sale of guns this site would be up in arms to ban them.

sykh 9y ago
In general the public does not treat all forms of illegal activity facilitation the same and this is a good thing. Some forms of illegal activity facilitation are much worse than others in the eyes of the public. It’s reasonabke and natural that one instance of this evokes outrage and another a nonchalant attitude.

ekiru 9y ago

> The only thing mildly surprising to me here is that it took them ~10 years to get the house to do it. Some of the non-profits dedicated to fighting this opposed the bill!

tfuop 9y ago
Hail drumpf!!!

stevenwoo 9y ago

They had to wait 10 years to get a GOP majority in the House and Senate and a nominally conservative President to rubber stamp it. It's conceivable had the same technology hypothetically existed before that Reagan/Bush/Bush 2/Clinton would signed it as well.

rrcaptain 9y ago

It's kind of ridiculous considering the original bill wasn't intended to protect tech companies from this type of shit.

djsumdog 9y ago

Was that during the 1994 Child Safety Protection Act?

ianamartin 9y ago

Well in the case of this particular bill, at least some of the advocates for sex workers had some sense and spoke loudly and clearly about the bad consequences of this law. https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-celebrity-psa https://www.allure.com/story/sesta-sex-trafficking-bill-cele... https://survivorsagainstsesta.org/about-sesta/ https://survivorsagainstsesta.org/about-sesta/ https://survivorsagainstsesta.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/sesta_fosta_letter-3-9.pdf https://survivorsagainstsesta.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/se... https://injusticetoday.com/proposed-federal-trafficking-legislation-has-surprising-opponents-advocates-who-work-with-bf418c73d5b4 https://injusticetoday.com/proposed-federal-trafficking-legi...

UrukParthian 9y ago

"seemingly well-intentioned" After dealing with a few non-profits, I'm utterly convinced about this maxim. "Intention is nothing. Intelligence is everything." Ask a toddler to solve world peace and he/she might say something like "Go boom boom the bad people!". That's what it's like dealing with certain non-profits. Full or people with good intention but without the intelligence to choose effective courses of action. Example: Homeless days in shelter. Got prescribed Ritalin for the first time in my 30 years of life (up 'till then). It was a life changer... After I moved out of the shelter. Was told by the head "you can't take stimulants here. I mean look at it, it has meth in its' name!" People with good intentions but unable to make good use of it because they had no natural curiosity about the world. Only curiosity in meeting limited sets of metrics that can always be shuffled around and gamed.

CyberDildonics 9y ago

For every problem worth solving there is an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong.