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Backpage Founders Charged With Money Laundering, Aiding Prostitution (theverge.com)
Federal authorities have charged the two founders of classified site Backpage.com, along with five other employees, with laundering money and facilitating prostitution. According to The Washington Post, the Justice Department claims Backpage took "consistent and concerted action" to knowingly allow ads for illegal sex work. The indictment alleges that "virtually every dollar flowing into Backpage's coffers represents the proceeds of illegal activity." The Verge reports: Law enforcement agencies seized Backpage's servers last week, and co-founder Michael Lacey was charged in a sealed 93-count indictment, which has now been revealed. Lacey, as well as his co-founder James Larkin, were already charged with violating California money laundering laws, although a judge threw out state-level pimping charges. Beyond Lacey and Larkin, the Backpage indictment includes charges against the site's chief financial officer, operations manager, assistant operations manager, and marketing director. It also charges the executive vice president of one of Backpage's parent companies. Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, who was previously charged with pimping in California, was not charged in this indictment. The Justice Department claims Backpage's owners tried to cover up the fact that most of its "adult services" ads involved prostitution, and that Backpage allowed child sex traffickers to keep ads on the site as long as they deleted age-related keywords. The indictment also claims that Backpage disguised payments for illegal services by having customers funnel money to foreign bank accounts or apparently unrelated companies, or by transferring funds into cryptocurrency. These federal chargers are reportedly unrelated to the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, a bill that would make website operators liable for illegal content posted to their sites. The bill is currently awaiting Trump's signature.
better plea down, because at least one of the indicted will 'turn', and examples will be made.
Money laundering: bad
Child sex trafficking: bad
Prostitution: not bad. Get with the times USA, It's legal elsewhere.
The prosecutors want to claim that the Back Page people were enabling the exploitation of children, but it is regressive laws on prostitution that allow abuse of sex workers in the black market.
When is our society going to crawl out of the dark ages and provide a safe workplace for sex workers? It is only when the trade is out in the open that people who exploit others can be removed through laws that protect sex workers instead of marginalizing them.
Back Page was actually providing a way for sex workers to operate without criminals managing them.
They also forced down Preferred411, the site that reviewed sex workers and verified the johns. The site kept things safer for everyone - the customers got to avoid scams and muggings, while the girls could verify their clients weren't psychopaths or serial killers.
Now it's much worse for everybody, don't be surprised if violent crime goes up. Thanks for saving us politicians.
I suppose such confessions are properly meant to be reported to the FBI. That will teach brothels to remove age-related words anyway and then BackPage won't know that underage prostitutes are advertised on their site.
This propaganda, commonly used in the USA, is another way of saying it's Backpage's fault their customers committed a crime.
So they've charged them with various crimes, and a jury may or may not convict them. But the trial hasn't happened yet - what right does the government have to take down their website and business just in case they get a conviction? Isn't the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty" that you get your day in court before any punishment happens?
Michael Lacey ran the Phoenix New Times when it grew from a kitty-litter liner to a nation-wide progressive news source that eventually purchased the Village Voice
He is an accomplished journalist, skilled editor and adept businessman. This trial should be interesting once that you realize that it is really an attack on a progressive news source.
A moral-panic axe to grind? Never underestimate the power of do-gooders on a mission from G-d.
Only if it persists for more than four hours, or if you already have an affair with the doctor.
Ezekiel 23:20
One of my favorite quotes seems appropriate here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
He won the electoral college vote fairly. You need to get over it, snowflake.
Wait, who are we talking about?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sorry to differ, but having grown up in Phoenix and read the rag for decades, I find your opinion to be inaccurate.
Look at the investigations into Governor Symington (eventually jailed on fed charges), or any of the republican state representatives involved in raiding the state's Clean Air monies (to big stories in the '90s) and you will see how they rose to prominence, and probably why they were singled out by this administration, while Sinclair (a right wing media outlet) is allowed to grow grotesquely
The fact is, these people are individually human scum. They don't keep their word. They don't respect others. They connive, cheat, and otherwise mess up lives.
Yet we allow cable companies to keep their websites running.
This case is a big fuck you to the first amendment. Yea their business model involved allowing a site where prostitutes could advertise their services. But that's called free speech, either we have it or don't. To try to force on them the charges for people posting on the site is a broad overreach and attempt to punish a website owner for the actions and speech of others.
I hope to god these guys can afford good lawyers and get this case thrown out for the broad overreach that it is. Talk about a political prosecution, congress punched a hole in the law to target these guys, a hole that's going to be used to go after a hell of a lot more site operators.
Everyone should be shocked by what the Trump administration and Congress is doing here.
It's more like the feds raid some organized crime boss' Italian restaurant and shut it down because gangsters hung out there. The business itself hasn't been declared illegal.
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How bogus can this be? Whaddya think the republican and democrat national committees do? In fact that is their singular function. What bullshit! Every goddamn 503(c) is a money laundering operation. That's what 503(c) means!
Remember when Americans used to *value* freedom? I do...
it's not free speech when it's a crime. That's called 'aiding and abetting'.
That said, Trump was elected partly by the evangelicals. This is him doing the bidding of those folks. So you're right, we shouldn't be surprised. Though I am a bit surprised how much power evangelicals wield in 2018, especially given how small a percentage of the population they are...
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I don't really understand the motivation of deranged anti-sex Progressives... but I don't believe God is a part of it.
What they have been charged with is facilitating consensual acts between adults. Not enabling pedophiles (whom they appear to have been reporting to authorities) or "human trafficking." Congratulations idiots, you've really struck a blow against actual pedophiles and child traffickers by pushing their activities outside the margins of visibility where the Bill's and Hillary's (and Epsteins) can operate unimpeded by public scrutiny.
Earth is a single point of failure.
.. the way it is today, this is it. This is what a theocracy looks like in its infancy. Be afraid, my fellow humans, and fight while you have the opportunity.
30 years passes in the blink of an eye.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Can't. Be serf, must plow field for landlord.
So where is the first amendment protection exactly?
The first amendment has never applied much to commercial speech. There are laws against false advertising, restrictions on advertising cigarettes and booze, etc.
the basic idea that you own your body,
Self ownership has never been part of American law. We have always had laws against prostitution, and have long had drug laws, laws against suicide, laws against self-harm, restrictions on informed consent, etc. The AMA is trying to ban people from sequencing their own DNA. Congress unanimously banned human cloning, even though the constitution gives them no authority to do so.
Remember when Americans used to *value* freedom? I do...
When was that?
Prostitution isn't illegal everywhere so try again.
This is an attack on free speech using a site that people won't defend because "politically incorrect".
It is hardly over the top to point out that individual freedoms to do whatever consenting adults want to do is dead and buried. Hope your happy in your prison.
the intuitive belief that it is better to have ten guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to prison. Effectively, we have a very strong belief that people should never be sent to prison unless they are actually guilty.
When DNA sequencing first became admissible, the Innocence Project used DNA to show that about 10% of people convicted couldn't possibly have committed the crimes. That doesn't mean the other 90% were all guilty, just that the floor on false convictions was 10%. There is little reason to believe that we are doing much better today. Plenty of innocent people go to prison, and Americans accept and tolerate that.
... but with 93-counts ...
93 counts for things that should have never been illegal in the first place.
I don't really understand the motivation of deranged anti-sex Progressives... but I don't believe God is a part of it.
Anti-sex is a conservative thing, mostly stemming from the Christian fundamentalism the same as anti-gay, anti-anything-not-like-me which is the call sign of the Christian conservative movement. I'm not sure how anyone could get that so wrong.
I work as a high class escort in the UK. I'm somewhat puzzled by the US as it is a very appearance and sex driven country while being incredibly puritanical.
The UK legal position is that Parliament lacks the power in common law, on which the authority of Parliament is based, to pass a law outlawing prositution. The worst Parliament can do is outlaw lots of activities relating to prostitution. The evidence is mounting that not only are current laws harmful but serve no real purpose other than to make a lawful activity more difficult.
UK sex trafficking law is incompatible with EU single market law because it bans a prosititute offering services across borders.
One of the advertising sites I am signed up with is UK owned and actually based in Russia of all places simply to avoid prosecuting abuses. To avoid impersonation and sex trafficing the site has identity and age verification measures in place. While the majority of escorts are UK citizens a proportion are American or Asian.
If a client abused me there is nothing stopping me visiting the police and reporting this, and there are community produced alert systems in place to warn of abusive clients.
I am more than happy to take Americans money, and generally enjoy the company of American men, so if Americans visit the UK on holiday or business and decide on the spur of the moment they want to fuck me I'm not protesting. I live close to motorway and rail and airport links and can get to your hotel within half an hour or quicker if need be, or you can visit for tea before we make our way to the bedroom and I spread myself semi-naked on my bed for you. For the right client we can negotiate reasonable rates for a special traveller package of a few days or even a week of intimacy.
If this tickles your fancy gimme a call.
There is some bleedover. The former Morality in Media rebranded a few years ago into the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and switched the political alignment of their rhetoric - dropped the religion and all the talk of family and morality, and started talking about protecting women from objectification. None of their actual positions changed - they still campaign to force racy TV programs out of production and demand the government do more to imprison distributors of pornography. The leadership just decided that they could better achieve their goals if they sought allies on the left rather than the right, and rebuilt their facade accordingly.
Have you been living under a rock the past decade? And did your rock have no internet service?
Phoenix new times was one of the sharpest papers in the country. Steve Lemons investigation of the almost comically corrupt sherif arpaio is the stuff of legends.
To call it a hack paper frankly betrays a very poor understanding of what the press actually is supposed to do
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Excuse me, but I'm management. I get $0.75, plus an extra $0.25 whenever I can trigger an Anonymous Coward.
And that's not counting quarterly bonuses or benefits.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." C.S. Lewis
Hmm. Schrödinger's Christianity?
From wikipedia:
On October 6, 2016, Harris announced the arrest of Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer on felony charges of pimping a minor, pimping, and conspiracy to commit pimping. The arrest warrant alleged that 99% of Backpage's revenue was directly attributable to prostitution-related ads, many of which involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.[107]
On December 9, 2016, a superior court judge dismissed all charges in the complaint.[108] On December 23, 2016, Harris filed new charges against Ferrer and former Backpage owners Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin for pimping and money laundering.[109] In January 2017, Backpage announced that it was removing its adult section from all of its sites in the United States due to many years of harassment and extralegal tactics.[110][111] ... I wonder if they've learnt from the takedown and prosecution of sfredbook about how to "get these guys"?
One of my favorite quotes seems appropriate here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
Pretty sure that Lewis was against legal prostitution. Just sayin. He wasn't libertarian.
One of the key points is that the site serviced a broad base of sex workers, the majority of which were not children nor being trafficked. The claim that the site worked to help child sex slavers is a bit like claiming uber is helping uber drivers assault passengers. It happens, and the company should probably be doing more to stop it, but it isn't something they are trying for.
Past decade? The anti-sex wing of progressives is mostly a left over from the mid 19th century and has been slowly dying off. They are having a bit of a last-hurrah as their membership are now getting close to the peak of their political power and end of careers, but their support has been dwindling among progressives for decades now.
If sex trafficking on Backpage was so rampant, why was the back page founder not actually charged with sex trafficking?
What sources do you have to prove this? Yes there were a lot of ads for sex on Backpage, but how many of them were really trafficking? There are a lot of perfectly independent sex workers these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Prostitution among consenting adults should be legal.
93 counts for things that should have never been illegal in the first place.
Then change the laws. Until then, they are illegal.
To be logically more precise, you don't need to have a god to live forever (or strictly speaking, to have morals).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please enlighten me! Lets set the live forever thing aside for moment and just to to justify using logic the any moral system - besides "might makes right".
See I don't think there is one without God. All arguments and philosophies which argue for morals without God boil down to "I am important because I say so."
If my response is "I don't agree and I don't care" then YOU don't matter. On there other hand if there is a creator God who does care, things are very different.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
They will be heros in prison.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The world has always been 'freedom for those with the most power to restrict the freedom of lesser people.
Fixed that for you.
No matter the failings, American freedom is unique. I know that disgusts you but it is a fact that can be easily proven. I wonder why people in forums get so worked up in their hate of American principles and values that, despite the interference from the people who ignore and complain about them, continue to live on. So pessimistic, and it is really getting old. To people like you there is nothing good in the world.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"There are laws against false advertising"
You really have to bone something up or be an underdog to garner that charge. It is pretty much laissez-faire for advertising in America.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"Juries don't always pay attention."
Then society (jurors) have decided that the crimes you are accused of by the government are not that important. This is the role of the jury and is really our only hope of a decent judicial system. Juries are allowed to free anyone they wish for any reason. Judges and the judicial system in general totally lose their shit when the jury does this and juries are often berated by judges for not ruling the way they were told to rule. The really cool thing about our western judicial system is that citizens are allowed to ignore the law when in a jury box. Thank god.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
There are no do-gooders here. Political entities are always on the hunt for justification of their existence. If people stopped committing crime today, tomorrow would not be pretty as law enforcement and government in general thrashed around looking for the next boogie man.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
This rubbish has been invented by modern theologists when they ran out of arguments for converting people to their respective faith. It's a well-known fact that those values of Christianity that we consider positive nowadays come from enlightenment and the humanist ideas that started in the 18th and 19th Century. Before that, it was fine to have slavery, commit genocide, support feudalism and absolutism, burn witches, and so forth. The values preached by your particular cult, whatever it may be, are changing every century and you're deluding yourself if you believe that there is any correlation between our modern enligthenment values and religious prescriptions.
Congress unanimously banned human cloning, even though the constitution gives them no authority to do so.
And which part of the constitution does it violate?
Or other way around: what special extra authority would be necessary in the constitution?
What is next? Requirements of driving licenses are unconstitutional?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh, enlighten you? For one thing, "there are no deities in Zen" as a Zen priest once said. If you choose to be an awful person, karma will still get you though. In another way no man is an island and "you are me and I am you" so if you hurt me, you are also hurting yourself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Would this be the law that makes it illegal to use federal funds to pay for cloning, but are mute when it comes to private funding?
Ken
Because, really, who could come up with 93 baseless accusations?
Ken
No idea.
Why would the constitution forbid to make laws that forbid private funding for cloning?
As long as a law is not contradicting the constitution it is valid, so what is your point?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The constitution is not a restriction on the Federal Government. It is the basis of it. Therefore, the Feds have no legal power that is not specified by the Constitution. The Supreme Court has made some decisions I disagree with on implementing this, but that's the idea. There is nothing in the Constitution to suggest that the Feds can ban human cloning, as long as it isn't interstate commerce.
Congress does have the power to tax and spend for the general welfare, and a lot of Federal laws are related to that. The Feds get most of the tax money, so that gives them a lot of power to influence the states.
Most of the specific laws area passed by States, which are limited only somewhat by the US Constitution. (They can't favor a particular religion, abridge free speech, etc.) I believe the requirements to have a license to drive on public roads are state laws, and I believe they're in place in all states. A lot of criminal law is fairly common between states. We can talk of first-degree murder because all states have similar murder laws. There's no requirement that a state make murder illegal, but all do.
That's how it works in this country, and some people like it that way. Other people would rather have more uniformity in their law.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Why do you think there is a moral system with God? Isn't "morality is handed down from God" an unsupported moral statement? Doesn't it suffer from the problem that God doesn't clearly outline to each and every one of us what God wants us to do, and so most of us have to get our moral systems from one of a number of people who claim to know God's will, but disagree with each other?
All statements about morality ostensibly based on God's will boil down to "I am right because I say so". We can't even agree whether there is a God (whatever definition we use), and atheists appear to act about as morally as theists.
Moral theories like utilitarianism don't claim that anyone is particularly important.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In which I suggest that you broaden either your philosophical education or your imagination, or both. You're taking a particularly limited view of morality, and automatically rejecting that which you don't understand. In fact, lots of atheists act morally by what your standards probably are. Why?
Don't worry, I don't believe your excursions into moral philosophy, so we're even. The only way you're going to convince me is with good arguments, and your lack of understanding or belief don't constitute a good argument.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Have you been living under a rock the past decade? And did your rock have no internet service?
Nothing you say here adds anything to the discussion so can only assume you have no point...
Redundant comment is redundant.
Call me when your start contributing anything at all, progtard.
The constitution is not a restriction on the Federal Government. [...] Therefore, the Feds have no legal power that is not specified by the Constitution.
The congress can do any law that is not explicitly forbidden by the constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However they mostly gladly do let the states do their own thing ...
After all they attempted to ban human cloning several times on federal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Your first cites doesn't support what you claim. Yes, there are federal crimes. No, there are things that can't be federal crimes.
Your second refers to a potential ban on research using federal funding. It mentions that any law banning cloning entirely would face difficult constitutional questions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Empirically, atheists act morally about as much as other people do. This is a general observation, and shows that arriving at a conclusion that theists are moral and atheists aren't is untenable.
Free Will is a very slippery concept. We know from psychological studies that people sometimes make decisions before they're aware that they're making decisions.. Its relationship to determinism is more complicated than it looks. Suppose I'm offered two entree choices. Depending on what they are, someone who knows me well enough would be certain that I'd pick the fried chicken over the stuffed green peppers, for example. This is pretty much certain. I'm predictable that way. Am I exercising free will in asking for the chicken? I don't feel any outside force pressuring me one way or another. Studies have also shown that willpower is a limited resource in individuals.
The problem with "free will" is that people toss it around like it meant something specific. We all feel like we have free will (most of us, anyway), whether or not we're right. We typically act as if we do.
The moral issue is that some people think that determinism preempts morality, that, unless there is free will, everyone is acting as they're preprogrammed to do, and everyone is therefore amoral.
The most obvious contradiction is that it implicitly assumes that we have a moral requirement or a free choice to consider someone not evil by means of determinism, and that doesn't make sense unless I'm assumed to have free will and that serial killer over there is assumed to lack it. (I've seen this sort of reasoning far too often, in various forms.) If we're all amoral because of determinism, then it is the laws of physics that dictate I write about morality.
So, if we assume we have free will of some form or another, we still don't necessarily assume that there is a God (and that's also a slippery concept). We can assume that we have free will and agree that some form of utilitarianism is the theoretical definition of morality, although very difficult to use in practice. There's no contradiction there.
Also, if a feeling of altruism isn't a justification for moral behavior, how about instructions from God? Doing something under a threat of eternal torture is not actual moral behavior.
I'm not sure I've explained what you want, since I don't fully understand what you want. Feel free to ask more questions or ask me to expand on some topics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
the most devoutly religious person on slashdot - who rarely writes a single message here that is not an attempt to bring more people to his religion and more people to worship his chosen savior - is again trying to tell us he's an atheist. why do you keep trying to sell us this lie?
you can haz downmod, sir. you make a solid argument for slashdot adding a "nonfactual" down mod; in this case "offtopic" will have to do as your lying about being an atheist is certainly offtopic.