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This is really one of those stealth acts that tries to eliminate basic freedom in the name of "save the children". We saw this same thing with the War on Drugs,

This is really one of those stealth acts that tries to eliminate basic freedom in the name of "save the children". We saw this same thing with the War on Drugs, where in the name of saving the children innocent people were killed in no knock raids against the wrong address. In this case they're using these laws to supposedly protect underage children from being trafficked, in fact once the sites are taken down it will take considerable intelligence resources to track this activity on the street level compared to using the web. The web's value to intelligence as a giant honeypot goes away and ironically the web starts to become worthless as a tool for intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Once you drive these things offline it takes far more resources to track activity the old fashioned ways.A parent can't just keep searching on craigslist until their kid pops up and then call the police they will have to get out in their car and search the streets and hope the kid was not moved out of state. It actually makes the problem far worse and shows that DC doesn't understand the value of the internet to law enforcement. When you give the web the freedom to exactly mirror society as it is it enables them to pull intelligence that used to be hidden. Hide it again and ironically you make their job incredibly more difficult.

DanBC 9y ago
> tries to eliminate basic freedom in the name of "save the children". You really really need to read the backpage documents, because that company knew children were being kidnapped, drugged, raped, and sold for sex, and backpage didn't turn a blind eye, backpage actively helped the traffickers and actively hindered the victims. People tried saying "please stop running ads that sell drugged kidnapped children available to be raped for money", and backpage ignored them. > It actually makes the problem far worse and shows that DC doesn't understand the value of the internet to law enforcement. This is the line backpage used. But if you read the documents backpage would edit the ads before running them, and so law enforcement was unable to use the ads to trace criminal gangs.
- swinginthrowin 9y ago
  why do we all need our freedom curtailed because of a few bad actors in a specific situation?
- arthur_pryor 9y ago
  To me, it seems clear that Backpage was well outside of the safe harbor of section 203. They knew full well what they were doing, and knowingly helped facilitate a lot of illegal (and in my opinion immoral) activity. EDIT: the part that i find immoral is the slavery and trafficking. i have zero problem with genuinely consensual sex work.

DanBC 9y ago

> tries to eliminate basic freedom in the name of "save the children". You really really need to read the backpage documents, because that company knew children were being kidnapped, drugged, raped, and sold for sex, and backpage didn't turn a blind eye, backpage actively helped the traffickers and actively hindered the victims. People tried saying "please stop running ads that sell drugged kidnapped children available to be raped for money", and backpage ignored them. > It actually makes the problem far worse and shows that DC doesn't understand the value of the internet to law enforcement. This is the line backpage used. But if you read the documents backpage would edit the ads before running them, and so law enforcement was unable to use the ads to trace criminal gangs.

swinginthrowin 9y ago
why do we all need our freedom curtailed because of a few bad actors in a specific situation?
arthur_pryor 9y ago
To me, it seems clear that Backpage was well outside of the safe harbor of section 203. They knew full well what they were doing, and knowingly helped facilitate a lot of illegal (and in my opinion immoral) activity. EDIT: the part that i find immoral is the slavery and trafficking. i have zero problem with genuinely consensual sex work.