8 ms·

Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle with the Feds

85 points by gok 7y ago

kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
Anyone who sits down and reads the Senate report (not mentioned in the article until about 75% of the way though) and is still on the side of Backpage.com is probably a monster. The report makes no allegation not directly derived from internal company policies, documents, emails, and sworn employee testimony. Backpage.com was an active participant in human trafficking.
- Miner49er 7y ago
  I skimmed it, and maybe I didn't see the worst stuff, but based on what I saw it doesn't seem as clear cut as you make it out to be. A lot of what they did seemed to be to help sex workers. This had the unfortunate side effect of also helping traffickers. Again, maybe I didn't see everything.
- Glyptodon 7y ago
  No matter how terrible Backpage is, legal chicanery isn't befitting and not what we should hope for from federal agencies.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Don't worry - I have it on good authority that it will only be used against Bad Guys.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Agreed, but in the US much of our legal process protections are made in cases with the most heinous defendants because they are the ones that test the system the most.
- Fins 7y ago
  Oh sure, a report created to justify a massive assault on both speech and rights of (possibly unsympathetic, but still) sexworkers makes the chose scapegoat look bad. Not exactly surprising. Just as the absence of any significant numbers of,you know, actual sex traffickers being caught anywhere either before or after BP's shutdown.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- monksy 7y ago
  The only thing that is supporting the human trafficking "industry" (let's face it.. it's organized and it's filling a demand in the market) is having that kind of work made illegal. It forces the demand and supply into the black market. There is and always has been a demand and (willing and consenting) supply for those services. The best you can do is to put in a framework in which they can do so legally and safely. It's not going to knock out all trafficking. But when you have a superior service that's legal, safe and reliable. You're going to lose the financial benefit of running it on the black market. (Also you'll end up having an entire framework to deal with crimes related to the work [i.e. abuse, violence related, etc])
  - anbop 7y ago
    So the solution to trafficked 14 year olds is to legalize 14 year old prostitutes?
    - monksy 7y ago
      Never said that. Illegal activities would still be considered illegal, it's just the industry would be legal within a set of regulations. Take a baseline for the age of consent for the entire nation, maybe go conservative about who can work in that industry. (Say 18, or 21, etc) Other countries have legalized the work, have very stringent guidelines, and have addressed the societal issues that come about with having it.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      No. Is there a good reason we don’t have a well regulated set of laws and enforcement for legal sex work for people 18 (or 21) and up?
      - anbop 7y ago
        Because legalizing sex work has empirically not reduced the amount of sex trafficking / nonconsensual sex work that occurs. That’s what happened in Amsterdam and why they reduced the size of their brothel economy.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  You make it sound so clear cut and yourself as such a virtuous person knowing who is a monster and who isn’t. Has human trafficking gone down since Backpage went down? Has sex work gotten better or worse for sex workers since Backpage went down? Have pimps and other assialiants and middle men of [rougher] sex work and trafficking stopped doing their work since Backpage went down? Or been caught more? If nothing actually changed, but now all we have are the morally bankrupt Backpage founders fighting against government overreach and abuse, why are people monsters for being against what the government is doing (and thus in a way, on the side of Backpage.com)?
- zokula 7y ago
  Stop the hyperbole. I'll be on backpages side way before I'm on some puritan's law enforcement side.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    If it were just about consenting adults I would agree. While I’m the last person to preach “think about the children” in most cases, I draw the line at child sex trafficking.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  The report is 53 pages, mind pointing out the damning pages?
devoply 7y ago
Someone must not have hired a lobbying team and lined some pockets in Washington. Also the crooked US justice system, you don't have the right to defend yourself using your own money: > The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid. > But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July...
tptacek 7y ago
I don't understand the thru-line of this Wired story. It effectively concedes the government's case: Backpage built a system that coached users to post trafficking ads without setting off its controls. If you posted an ad containing “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” or “little girl” (the article's examples), the system would alert the user so they could use different terms, and then accept their new ad. There's lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren't (AFAIK) charged under SESTA. Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner's colorful history? Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but that's the story. I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it's an abstraction. But it does happen. A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked for --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to "service" his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600. The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I'm sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage helped it happen. Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That's not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.
- baoha 7y ago
  >>Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts. I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.
- mindgam3 7y ago
  Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would do drive exploitation and child abuse more underground. This claim would have merit if Backpage hadn’t been explicitly enabling a market for this terrible stuff via those keyword suggestions. I’m not going to shed any tears for the poor site owners having to face penalties for this.
module0000 7y ago
Well, if you take away a website were bad things happen, all the bad guys will magically disappear...right? I enjoyed the article, a good read. I hate the topic; government overreach.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zadkey 7y ago
"Since March 2018, federal prosecutors have seized more than $100 million in cash, real estate, and other assets from Lacey and Larkin. The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED. The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid. But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July." This kind of tactic definitely rubs me the wrong way. I am not saying that backpage should exist. But I don't buy into ends justify the means arguments for the way the government is going about it.
upofadown 7y ago
>“I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? ... " Well, enforcing the law is actually the job of law enforcement. It sounds like the ultimate goal is to keep the bad stuff where the general public can't see it.
JamesBarney 7y ago
For those who are interested, this reply all goes into the effects of backpage's closure on sex workers. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-safe-harbor https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-s...
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’ve listened to the episode before, but after reading the Wired article and seeing the comments here, the Reply All episode now feels very one sided. I don’t remember them mentioning the underage aspect.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    Yeah but I also don't think the question "is Carl Ferrer a scumbag?" and "was the closing of Backpage good for sex workers and at risk youth" have to have the same answer. The wired article talks about culpability and most focuses on the first question where as the reply all seemed to exclusively focus on the second.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      There are two parts to your second question. Was Backpage good for adult sex workers. Yes. Also, I don’t think prostitution between consenting adults should be illegal. Did Backpage facilitate child trafficking- Yes. Anything that makes that harder is a win. Backpage should have worked with police to help catch the adults who were selling kids for sex. I haven’t heard about any of the well known porn sites getting in trouble for kiddy porn. So obviously it is possible to run an adult oriented site without exploiting kids.
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        From the little I've researched into it, it seems like there is more teen prostitution that is due to coercion from circumstance as opposed to force. Basically kids who ran away from or don't have a home and are trying to survive as opposed to trafficking at gun point.(which has been incredibly hard to find numbers for). And it seems like backpage made it safer for the former and but increased the risk of the latter. Here's the wikipedia page that goes into some details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_States#Commercial_sexual_exploitation_of_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_...

85 points by gok 7y ago

Anyone who sits down and reads the Senate report (not mentioned in the article until about 75% of the way though) and is still on the side of Backpage.com is probably a monster. The report makes no allegation not directly derived from internal company policies, documents, emails, and sworn employee testimony. Backpage.com was an active participant in human trafficking.

Miner49er 7y ago
I skimmed it, and maybe I didn't see the worst stuff, but based on what I saw it doesn't seem as clear cut as you make it out to be. A lot of what they did seemed to be to help sex workers. This had the unfortunate side effect of also helping traffickers. Again, maybe I didn't see everything.
Glyptodon 7y ago
No matter how terrible Backpage is, legal chicanery isn't befitting and not what we should hope for from federal agencies.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Don't worry - I have it on good authority that it will only be used against Bad Guys.
gamblor956 7y ago
Agreed, but in the US much of our legal process protections are made in cases with the most heinous defendants because they are the ones that test the system the most.
Fins 7y ago
Oh sure, a report created to justify a massive assault on both speech and rights of (possibly unsympathetic, but still) sexworkers makes the chose scapegoat look bad. Not exactly surprising. Just as the absence of any significant numbers of,you know, actual sex traffickers being caught anywhere either before or after BP's shutdown.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
monksy 7y ago
The only thing that is supporting the human trafficking "industry" (let's face it.. it's organized and it's filling a demand in the market) is having that kind of work made illegal. It forces the demand and supply into the black market. There is and always has been a demand and (willing and consenting) supply for those services. The best you can do is to put in a framework in which they can do so legally and safely. It's not going to knock out all trafficking. But when you have a superior service that's legal, safe and reliable. You're going to lose the financial benefit of running it on the black market. (Also you'll end up having an entire framework to deal with crimes related to the work [i.e. abuse, violence related, etc])
- anbop 7y ago
  So the solution to trafficked 14 year olds is to legalize 14 year old prostitutes?
  - monksy 7y ago
    Never said that. Illegal activities would still be considered illegal, it's just the industry would be legal within a set of regulations. Take a baseline for the age of consent for the entire nation, maybe go conservative about who can work in that industry. (Say 18, or 21, etc) Other countries have legalized the work, have very stringent guidelines, and have addressed the societal issues that come about with having it.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    No. Is there a good reason we don’t have a well regulated set of laws and enforcement for legal sex work for people 18 (or 21) and up?
    - anbop 7y ago
      Because legalizing sex work has empirically not reduced the amount of sex trafficking / nonconsensual sex work that occurs. That’s what happened in Amsterdam and why they reduced the size of their brothel economy.
skinnymuch 7y ago
You make it sound so clear cut and yourself as such a virtuous person knowing who is a monster and who isn’t. Has human trafficking gone down since Backpage went down? Has sex work gotten better or worse for sex workers since Backpage went down? Have pimps and other assialiants and middle men of [rougher] sex work and trafficking stopped doing their work since Backpage went down? Or been caught more? If nothing actually changed, but now all we have are the morally bankrupt Backpage founders fighting against government overreach and abuse, why are people monsters for being against what the government is doing (and thus in a way, on the side of Backpage.com)?
zokula 7y ago
Stop the hyperbole. I'll be on backpages side way before I'm on some puritan's law enforcement side.
- scarface74 7y ago
  If it were just about consenting adults I would agree. While I’m the last person to preach “think about the children” in most cases, I draw the line at child sex trafficking.
JamesBarney 7y ago
The report is 53 pages, mind pointing out the damning pages?

devoply 7y ago

Someone must not have hired a lobbying team and lined some pockets in Washington. Also the crooked US justice system, you don't have the right to defend yourself using your own money: > The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid. > But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July...

tptacek 7y ago

I don't understand the thru-line of this Wired story. It effectively concedes the government's case: Backpage built a system that coached users to post trafficking ads without setting off its controls. If you posted an ad containing “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” or “little girl” (the article's examples), the system would alert the user so they could use different terms, and then accept their new ad. There's lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren't (AFAIK) charged under SESTA. Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner's colorful history? Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but that's the story. I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it's an abstraction. But it does happen. A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked for --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to "service" his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600. The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I'm sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage helped it happen. Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That's not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.

baoha 7y ago
>>Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts. I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.
mindgam3 7y ago
Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would do drive exploitation and child abuse more underground. This claim would have merit if Backpage hadn’t been explicitly enabling a market for this terrible stuff via those keyword suggestions. I’m not going to shed any tears for the poor site owners having to face penalties for this.

module0000 7y ago

Well, if you take away a website were bad things happen, all the bad guys will magically disappear...right? I enjoyed the article, a good read. I hate the topic; government overreach.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zadkey 7y ago

"Since March 2018, federal prosecutors have seized more than $100 million in cash, real estate, and other assets from Lacey and Larkin. The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED. The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid. But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July." This kind of tactic definitely rubs me the wrong way. I am not saying that backpage should exist. But I don't buy into ends justify the means arguments for the way the government is going about it.

upofadown 7y ago

>“I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? ... " Well, enforcing the law is actually the job of law enforcement. It sounds like the ultimate goal is to keep the bad stuff where the general public can't see it.

JamesBarney 7y ago

For those who are interested, this reply all goes into the effects of backpage's closure on sex workers. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-safe-harbor https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-s...

scarface74 7y ago
I’ve listened to the episode before, but after reading the Wired article and seeing the comments here, the Reply All episode now feels very one sided. I don’t remember them mentioning the underage aspect.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Yeah but I also don't think the question "is Carl Ferrer a scumbag?" and "was the closing of Backpage good for sex workers and at risk youth" have to have the same answer. The wired article talks about culpability and most focuses on the first question where as the reply all seemed to exclusively focus on the second.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There are two parts to your second question. Was Backpage good for adult sex workers. Yes. Also, I don’t think prostitution between consenting adults should be illegal. Did Backpage facilitate child trafficking- Yes. Anything that makes that harder is a win. Backpage should have worked with police to help catch the adults who were selling kids for sex. I haven’t heard about any of the well known porn sites getting in trouble for kiddy porn. So obviously it is possible to run an adult oriented site without exploiting kids.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      From the little I've researched into it, it seems like there is more teen prostitution that is due to coercion from circumstance as opposed to force. Basically kids who ran away from or don't have a home and are trying to survive as opposed to trafficking at gun point.(which has been incredibly hard to find numbers for). And it seems like backpage made it safer for the former and but increased the risk of the latter. Here's the wikipedia page that goes into some details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_States#Commercial_sexual_exploitation_of_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_...