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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.
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.
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?
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
Like SESTA being passed 97-2 in the Senate, this is a massively bipartisan attack on liberty. The campaign against Backpage in particular was predominantly led by Kamala Harris, the (D) CA AG (now Senator), who is a hero to the progressive left, who fully supports this nonsense just as strongly as the religious right (for different reasons, but the outcome is the same: women are not permitted to make this choice). There's a laundry list of things to pin on the right, but like the surveillance state and war on drugs, this massive violation of liberty is brought to you by bipartisan consensus because both (D) and (R) are branches of the Authoritarian Party.