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FBI Seizes Backpage.com, a Site Criticized For Sex-Related Ads (reuters.com)
The FBI has reportedly seized the sex marketplace website Backpage.com, according to a posting on its website on Friday. "The posting said the U.S. Justice Department would provide more information at 6 p.m. EDT," reports Reuters. "It said U.S. attorneys in Arizona and California, as well as the Justice Department's section on child exploitation and obscenity and the California and Texas attorneys general had supported the work in shutting down the website." From the report: Lawmakers and enforcement officials have been working to crack down on the site, the second largest classified ad service in the country after Craigslist that is used primarily to sell sex. The U.S. Senate passed legislation last month making it easier for state prosecutors and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep sex trafficking and other exploitative materials off their platforms. The Supreme Court in January 2017 refused to consider reviving a lawsuit against backpage.com filed by three young women alleging the site facilitated their forced prostitution. But the site has since then faced a slew of other lawsuits alleging child sex trafficking. According to AZCentral, local FBI officials have confirmed "law enforcement activity" Friday morning at the Sedona-area home of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of Backpage.com. The raid comes amid what appears to be a shut-down of the website.
Backpage had plenty of legitimate advertising, when does google and twitter and Facebook get shut down for the same reasons?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Americans need to learn sex is bad, if you have sex you will have babies, and no one wants americans to have babies.
When they no longer feed their congress critters money.
SESTA isn't in effect yet. It hasn't been signed into law yet.
They've stated this siezure is the result of prior laws, they have been investigating this under already existing legislation for a while now.
Which means SESTA wasn't even necessary to begin with.
"sex marketplace website"?? Really?? That's likes saying "Google, the pedophile search engine". Just because someone posted something inappropriate does not mean the entire website is devoted to only that.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
This makes me uneasy at some level, just due to the nature of overreach. Nor does it necessarily deal with the root problem—those that seek to exploit children. Although I suppose it makes the "shopping" portion of that transaction harder.
Also, I just had such a massive shart that I'm probably going to have to throw these pants away. Which sucks because they're my favorite jeans.
Laws only get enforced when you piss off someone important.
> Backpage had plenty of legitimate advertising, when does google and twitter and Facebook get shut down for the same reasons?
When they help the pedos edit their adds to hide what they're doing, because that's essentially what Backpage was accused of.
Corrupt FBI won't investigate people threatening to shoot up kids in school, but they will spend all this effort on a "sex marketplace website". Not even sure why I'm surprised the FBI is so worthless.
More services that you are allowed to give away, but not sell.
Yeah in some areas backpage was better than craiglist for selling second-hand items because craigslist was blocking everything.
Because FREEDOM........
OLD PEDO SKUNT
Hasn't backpage already shutdown their adults section last year?
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-backpage-shutdown-20170109-story.html
This is about punishing adult prostitution full stop. And it's going to make both providers and clients less safe (as every organization actually representing sex workers makes clear), and make it harder to track down the very small number of coerced women and slightly underage teenagers (they deliberately use language to make you think of actual children, not the 16-17 year olds doing it themselves, who are already legal for non-paid sex in 31 states, that make up 99.9999% of 'child sex trafficking victims' on backpage-- it's not that this is ok, but it's hardly the same as under 12 as the language implies), where Backpage was very helpful in assisting LE.
But that's the point. To the right, selling sex is an immoral sin. To the left, any woman that chooses prostitution is suddenly without agency, and therefore being exploited, her opinion on it being irrelevant. Either way, it's not a decision that an adult should be free to make. So they punish these human moral failures by increasing suffering all around, all while grandstanding about how they're "saving" people when in fact they're doing the opposite. It's the same exact thing as the drug war. You take a dangerous activity that's conducted among consenting adults, prohibit it by force of law, and in doing so "send the message" that you stand against it and are fighting it, but you're actually greatly increasing the harm instead of decreasing it.
It's called sadomoralism, and the left and right are both guilty of it, just with different justifications and trappings around the edges. No matter how many people you lock up, you're never going to stop it, and by going that route, you maximize the harm. But of course, regulating such things in a manner that actually reduces the harm means accepting that some people can then engage in the activity without being able to punish them for it-- and that's too high a price to pay no matter how devastating the alternative, whether it's hard drugs or prostitution, and whether you're talking about team (R) or team (D); because a utopia where drug abuse and prostitution vanish from the earth forever can always be achieved if we just refuse to give in and punish a little more.
FBI picking winners and losers apparently.
FBI kowtows now all the nonparty members have been pushed out. BIGLY.
See: James Bay Residential School of the 1960s & 70s. The government abducted children en mass and put them in a Cathlolic Church run hellhole of sexual and physical torture. Then we en mass blamed the Indians for not fitting in and being alcoholics.
Cultural genocide. Within many of our lifetimes. Yeah Canada is AWESOME bro!!
they would rather the bad actors go somewhere else so that they can ignore them...
I was looking for some sci-fi videos and the ad volume was way lower than Craigslist.
To be fair backpage had a explicit section called "erotic massage". So it's not like someone posting that kind of stuff in the wrong place.
Bs, there ain't any pedos" , just feminists trying to ban sexual acts. Welcome to Saudi America.
Hey....this looks familiar....
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/03/23/205203/craigslist-personals-some-subreddits-disappear-after-fosta-passage
"In the wake of this week's passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) bill in both houses of Congress on Wednesday, Craigslist has removed its "Personals" section entirely, and Reddit has removed some related subreddits, likely out of fear of future lawsuits. FOSTA, which awaits the signature of President Donald Trump before becoming law, removes some portions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The landmark 1996 law shields website operators that host third-party content (such as commenters, for example) from civil liability. The new bill is aimed squarely at Backpage, a notorious website that continues to allow prostitution advertisements and has been under federal scrutiny for years."
"In a bizarre turn of events, the Department of Justice also warned the House in February 2018 that the bill "raises a serious constitutional concern," as it would apply retroactively -- a seeming violation of the Constitution's ex post facto clause. Congress passed it anyway."
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post: "It's easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion -- and what sorts of users -- they allow, censoring innocent people in the process."
We all knew that this was coming....the big question is, are they trying to exploit the ex post facto clause of the law. If they are, this is going to be one hell of a court case. If Backpage continued to allow these ads after the passage of the new law, they are likely going to be in some serious trouble.
Backpage (Sporting Goods section) also happened to be the most common place to post local ads of For Sale or Trade Guns, Parts, and Ammo since Craigslist is a bunch of Freedom hating hippies. But it probably doesn't have anything to do with that.
JFK! don't they have something serious to investigate?
A lot has been said about the Puritanism of this.
Some might be interested in knowing that the co-founders of Backpage were previously arrested and charged years back for printing the home address of Sherriff Joe Arpiao of Arizona. Yes, THAT Arpaio. At the time, this information was already public.
The Sherriff's arrest for which he and fellow New Times founder received awarded 3.75 million dollars.
Make of this info what you will.
That was the 60s and 70s in Canada.
The US sent kids to "youth centers" (basically like prisons) for minor crimes like mocking school officials less than 10 years ago. Judges responsible were eventually jailed, but don't think that such atrocities are only a Canadian thing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hey, you know a better place to find a sexy clown makeup face in a Santa costume to get your jollies, do tell. Yeah, try unseeing that in your head.
"Hey FBI, here's this website that is like a honey pot for sickos so you can easily identify them and weed them out!"
FBI: "No thanks, shut it down. We'd rather only find out about horrible exploitation after it has gone on for years and the victim finally gets away."
A quick Google reveals at least five alternatives to BackPage.com ... What does the FBI really think it's accomplishing except driving these sites further underground and out of their reach?
Time for someone to set up a hidden service marketplace for consensual adult sex work, and for sex workers and their clients to learn about Tor
That's exactly what a pedophile would say you fucking pedophile.
It was therapeutic massage and did list some legit providers. Some. I think the rest were Asian.
Yes but theyâ(TM)re kids section is thriving.
Trump is not that bad after all.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Without Craigslist, how much crap will end up in landfills instead of transferring between homes? I would sue the federal government over this just for the environmental harm they are causing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure, "accused of" is the point. As in, the FBI, House Committees, etc spend a considerable amount of time claiming further and further "code words" meant there was some sort of underage conspiracy to thwart Backpage's censors, and when Backpage was found to continue to censor clearly underage ads and to filter out "code words", they're accused of merely aiding pedos by hiding what they're doing by, you know, making it impossible to use "code words" to attract clients? Yea, obviously what should have been done is the FBI makes a list of "code words" and then Backpage is require to censor out all posts with them. Anything less and they're working for the communists^W terrorists^W pedophiles.
The Puritans didn't found the US, nimrod. It was already an established British colony when they headed out for it. That's why they went. The major product of the American colonies was TOBACCO. The major population center at that time was Virginia.
To add to your point - this seizure is global, backpage and its affiliates (cracker etc) have a global presence, including in countries where prostitution is legal ( e.g. New Zealand), and now those sites, escort categories and *everything* else, are gone.
People here on Slashdot constantly rail against EU laws being enacted globally, and here we have a US law being enacted in just that fashion.
BS on your BS, read this:
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage%20Report%202017.01.10%20FINAL.pdf
Yeah yeah, lets allow the puritan grannies to set the age of consent and see which number they will come up with.
Nothing wrong with sex as it is, matey, as long as it is a sane and consensual affair. Especially ok when the affair is between the opposite sexes.
Well, since the actual article was about forced prostitution of kids, I think the article was about have sex >with babies.
I guess you don't have a problem with that either?
>People here on Slashdot constantly rail against EU laws being enacted globally...
NEWSFLASH. People here on Slashdot are morans.
Their descendants founded the US as we know it. Also, doesn't change the fact that the world would have been a better place had they ended up as fish food, or if they were simply burnt at the stake as heretics.
The complaints mentioned new evidence of Backpage's participation in the ads selling access to sex slaves. They survived previous challenges based on the CDA prior to that new evidence.
Backpage and other sites took a lot of sex out of the alleys and off the streets and made it safer than it was. This allowed more to actually be able to make an independent living without having to become some rich old fogies mistress or wife, a fate somewhat worse than prostitution to the middle class. This increased the cost of mistresses and wives for the rich old fogies. Now you see the backlash because guess who's in control.
But we all know that drunk people can not consent. Similarly mentally handicapped people can't give consent. Similarly female s with their smaller brains and hysterics are just not responsible enough to give consent. Therefore all heterosexual acts are by definition rape. Only homosexual sex is encourage in the Western world
Nah, we complained about the Megaupload seizure, and about the TPP being shoved down other countries' throats. The situation with Assange looks pretty sketchy as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
They originally had both, but when they shut down their adult section the erotic massages moved to the therapeutic section.
The only thing sketchy about "the situation with Assange" is Assange himself. If he'd shown up for his day in court then he'd be a free man by now rather than holed up in an increasingly unhappy embassy.
There are plenty of other (and better) websites in NZ to find prostitutes. Some of them even make some small effort to validate the photos, unlike Backpage.
'ER' not datamining like FBI datamining. Why seize Backpage, not so much what they did but their collection of data about what other people did. Even if they can not get the conviction to stick, they can still go on a fishing expedition through Backpage servers and find who did what with whom for direct prosecutions or FBI level extortions or to add to other investigations.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Banning toilets around America, because "your mom" has been offering her services via phone number there for the past 40 years.
Definately, the legal age for americans to have sex should be at least 35: any younger and they are still fertile.
The only questions is who are the we. As long as we are not the old lesbo hags fighting competition from younger feminine women, we (as a human race) are ok.
Someone planted this evidence, which is extremely easy on an ad website.
Like, someone can find that little packet of heroine in your car at any convenient moment.
The crackdown on independent websites is going on, everyone should use Facebook so that you can be blackmailed with convenience by the deep state. Like, what, you thought you can buy used car direct, without paying the dealership tax? Or you could just buy sex just like that, without the harlot being a registered police informant?
Sex should not be for sale on the internet; it should be constrained to public streetcorners as it has been for centuries. The internet is only for moral and ethical business people, with products like guns and pharmaceuticals. Gadzooks, what is the internetwork coming to these days!!
There was no "Day in court". There was a demand by Swedish prosecutors that Assange answer questions about unconsensual sex but ONLY in Sweden and ONLY if he flew there.
He thought he was being setup to be kidnapped by U.S. Black ops.
he was correct.