Senators Propose Bill Targeting Websites That Facilitate Sex Trafficking (usatoday.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday that aims to make it easier to sue and criminally prosecute operators of online classified sites like Backpage.com that have been used to advertise sex workers. The proposed bill would amend the Communications Decency Act to eliminate a provision that shields operators of websites from being liable for content posted by third-party users. In addition to removing liability protections for websites that facilitate "unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims," lawmakers are seeking to amend the CDA to allow state prosecutors -- not just federal law enforcement -- to take action against individuals and businesses that use websites to violate federal sex trafficking laws. "For too long, courts around the country have ruled that Backpage can continue to facilitate illegal sex trafficking online with no repercussions," said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. "The Communications Decency Act is a well-intentioned law, but it was never intended to help protect sex traffickers who prey on the most innocent and vulnerable among us. This bipartisan, narrowly crafted bill will help protect vulnerable women and young girls from these horrific crimes."

Comments

Yeah, that'll work

[Locke2005]

Backpage.com has already been pressured into eliminating their escort/massage section. "Escorts" just moved their ads to the "Women seeking Men" dating section. All websites need is positive deniability and you can't touch them. "What, you expected us to READ everything that anybody posts? Even slashdot doesn't do that!"

Re:Yeah, that'll work

[slew]

Backpage.com has already been pressured into eliminating their escort/massage section. "Escorts" just moved their ads to the "Women seeking Men" dating section. All websites need is positive deniability and you can't touch them. "What, you expected us to READ everything that anybody posts? Even slashdot doesn't do that!"

FWIW, you can read the proposed change here... Basically the bill is proposing to remove the CDA's safe harbor provisions for specifically enforcing sex trafficking laws. I suppose the theory is simply to allow the state (and the victim) to hit the websites in the pocketbook to modify their behaviour. But as you speculate, their behaviour is likely modified in a direction to promote more elaborate deniability, not elimination...

Yes, for heaven's sake let's do something useful

[Ensign_Expendable]

Let's forget about improving healthcare in the U.S.

Don't eliminate valuable data!

[Locke2005]

Ever have one of those days when you google the number the cute girl gave you in a nightclub, and it shows up in an ad on backpage.com? I have. At least now I understand why she gave me her number!

What ?

[psergiu]

"For too long, courts around the country have ruled that Backpage can continue..."

So ... multiple judges and juries have decided that it's nothing wrong with it but and they want to change that ?

So, after this law is passed, if a AC posts an unlawful comment to a story on /. - will the editors be sent to prison ?

Re:What ?

[aardvarkjoe]

So ... multiple judges and juries have decided that it's nothing wrong with it but and they want to change that ?

The judges have determined that it's not against the law, not that there's "nothing wrong with it." The proposal is to change the law.

Not that I necessarily agree with this proposal, but it's not really correct to conclude that something is "right" or "wrong" based simply on court decisions. I'm sure we can all come up with cases where we think that the law should be written differently than how it now stands.

sexually-repressed fake christian prudes

[PopeRatzo]

"For too long, courts around the country have ruled that Backpage can continue to facilitate illegal sex trafficking online with no repercussions," said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

Why don't you mind your own goddamn business? Thank goodness the "family values conservatives" are in charge, amirite? Sessions cracking down on marijuana, Trump encouraging police to brutalize suspects and Portman making sure it's illegal for two consenting adults to enter into a personal contract.

If Portman cares about human trafficking, maybe he should look into Trump's "model agency" or his relationship with Melania.

http://www.inquisitr.com/43971...

Re:sexually-repressed fake christian prudes

[lactose99]

This makes less and less sense the more I try to read it

Re:sexually-repressed fake christian prudes

[PopeRatzo]

This makes less and less sense the more I try to read it.

It made more sense in the original Russian.

prudish tone

[Anonymous Coward]

unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims

The whole article sort of subtly conflates the two-- unlawful sex acts, and sex trafficking victims, as though they are one and the same. i.e. prostitution == victim

Thank you

[bagofbeans]

Came here to make exactly that point.

Let's also ban kitchen knives because they have been used in horrifying acts of domestic abuse, and will continue to be used unless we act now!

No chance this'll be abused.. riiiiight, suuuure..

[Rick Schumann]

Sounds to me while this may (or may not) be well-intentioned, it'll be abused to censor online discussions, having a chilling effect on peoples freedom of speech.
Furthermore, as others in this discussion have already pointed out, sex traffickers will just learn to hide their posts better. The net effect will then be infringement on the rights of people who are doing nothing wrong, and sex trafficking will continue unabated.
Really sounds to me like they just need to enforce the laws already on the books with regards to this sort of illegal activity, and nevermind creating new legislation.

Bipartisanship

[SeattleLawGuy]

It's possible to do more than one thing at a time. Sex Trafficking is and should always be a bipartisan issue not beholden to the usual contest of opposing political forces coming from sources of legitimate disagreement. People being held in slavery in the modern United States is not a partisan issue. Children getting raped multiple times per day is not a partisan issue. People knowingly profiting off of that without making at least reasonable efforts to prevent it and refusing to be reasonably responsive to law enforcement in preventing it should absolutely be prosecuted and should be civilly liable. While there are legitimate reasons to refuse or insist on narrowing a request made from law enforcement if one is overbroad, this is not one of those grey areas where there is a lot of room for legitimate debate.

There is room to talk about the best way of fixing the problem, but again, this isn't and really shouldn't be a heavily partisan debate. Leaders on both sides of the aisle have spoken out against trafficking, for example. (Bush and Clinton come to mind.)

If someone wants to set up a bulletin board fine, but if it gets misused they should either step up and deal with the misuse or they should take it down, because seriously, kids are being raped.

Newspapers shut down comments sections because of racist comment threads and doxxing; this is worse. There are bounds to moral relativism. Raping kids is crossing those bounds.

Safe Harbor...

[thesupraman]

Great.

So, are they going to remove safe harbor for newspapers? The postal service? Phone companies? Hell, you see such adds posted on library community noticeboards! All of those mediums can and do have an involvement in the sex trade. Are they going to shut down strip bars? or do we just keep pretending that they have nothing to do with the sex trade.

Or just perhaps it is time to grow up out of the 1800s and accept that pushing these things deeper and deeper into hidden markets actually makes things much worse for the women involved, and that they should legalise and regulate - as many countries have done - with a matching reduction in drugs, violence, disease and abuse in that inevitable industry? The way things stand, a girl going to the police because of abuse is more likely to end up in trouble herself than get any protection - is that the way things should be?

Interestingly you will find, just like the drug 'industry' the lawless 'big players' running most of these things are actually strongly against legalisation - because it reduces their own control and profitability. They would need to clean up their act a lot, would face competition, and would need to treat their workers much, much better than many do.

But no, the US will continue burying its head (like many other countries) in an 'us and them' view of the world where the women caught up in such situations are bad and the people passing laws to punish them for their situation are good, and a blid eye is turned to the fact that many of the people passing the laws are violating them themselves, with impunity..

Sad, really.

Re:Stop It

[nukenerd]

Stop making bull shit special laws that are purposely broad in scope. Sex trafficking is illegal already so enforce that fucking law.

It is the law against sex trafficking that is broad in scope. This law is meant to target a mechanism of it (whether any good at it is another matter). It is like having no road traffic laws except one that just says "Drive safely" and saying fucking enforce it.

Re:Yes, for heaven's sake let's do something usefu

[currently_awake]

Government run single payer health insurance is cheaper (1/2 the price per capita) than the American system, and gives better results. The government is accountable to the voters, a corporation is only accountable to the share holders.

Why not arrest the traffickers?

[AnotherBlackHat]

If they're advertising online, that means they're providing contact information.
Are the police so inept that they can find someone who's advertising that they're doing something illegal?
A thing that by it's nature requires them to come into physical contact with you?

Re:Yes, for heaven's sake let's do something usefu

[audiokat]

Most people will point back to this report http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective claiming that we spend more than 2x everyone else on our health care. But look carefully at the numbers as it's divided into public (e.g. the government pays) and private spending (a citizen pays out of pocket) and they note that 34% of the us citizens are on public programs - and the public number would be higher if they counted employer-mandated health care.

What does that mean? It means that the US is actually spending $4,000 per capita, either publicly or privately, NOT the $9,000 claimed by the report. Our cancer outcomes are much better than anyone in the world, but we get dinged by the report for having lower quality of life and worse outcomes with obesity-related diseases.

But I would argue that's often not a health system failure, but a cultural failure. We don't slow down enough to sit and eat our meals, we eat them on the go or in our cars or while writing emails on our personal devices and cope by drinking sugar and caffeine to keep us going.

About the "government is accountable" claim, it's bunk when the citizens won't hold them accountable, in fact it's worse as a company needs to be lean enough to turn a profit where the government can play the shell game to just reach further into our pockets. Judging by how medicare is going, once single-payer comes into play, there will be mainly large corporate players who are the medical providers as they'll be able to absorb the cost via volume rather than your neighborhood doctor who won't be able to afford the cut rates and high paperwork overhead that will be demanded.

We need real solutions - single payer may be one, but we need to have an honest discussion about what that means and what we will be willing to both pay for in tax increases and take in cuts to our current level of care.

It's a trap!

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Re: "The proposed bill would amend the Communications Decency Act to eliminate a provision that shields operators of websites from being liable for content posted by third-party users." -- In other words, they've used trafficked women and sex workers as a premise for whatever hidden agenda they may have. Can we have a look at the bill's .docx metadata? Perhaps written by lobbyists for... whom?

Re:No chance this'll be abused.. riiiiight, suuuur

[Sassinak]

You do realize they use words like "Sex trafficking" as inflammatory rhetoric to goad people. It tends to conjure up images of women (and sometimes boys) in incapacitated by various means and used for the pure purpose of sex.. when in reality, 99% of the time, its just pure regular prostitution initiated by the women themselves as a source of revenue. Are there sex traffickers?.. well, that depends on your definition of sex trafficking in the first place.

The term is most often used when it crosses state/county/city jurisdiction for the purposes of sex.. Your own self can be accused of sex trafficking by crossing state/county/city boundaries for the purpose of sex. Heck, there are still laws on the books that ANY interracial couple (married or not) that crosses state/city/county boundaries can be accused of sex trafficking.

So are there problems?.. Of course.. (much of which can be alleviated legalization and moving it into the light as opposed to driving it further underground, which means victims have no one to turn to when there are problems.) But that of course, requires everyone to be an adult and stop attempting to be the moral police and let people use their own bodies in their OWN way.