There is no evidence of a lack of probable cause though. The problem is that there was still an illegal post made from that ip address which was assigned to a physical address and specific people. You still have probable cause to look for evidence that it was made from a computer at the physical address or through the TOR node. Nothing about the node changes that other than possibly clearing the person when the evidence doesn't exist.
The Node highly changes the likelihood that there is evidence of the crime there. Tor exit nodes are designed not to know anything about the sender. This was about posts made from that node. While it is hypothetically possible for a research institution or government agency to modify an exit node, add sniffers, etc..., there is no reason to expect a civilian running an exit node to be doing that. While it is also possible for someone who owns a machine at that address to be the guilty party, the fact that an exit node is present makes it much, much, much less likely. It has a direct impact on the totality-of-the-circumstances analysis someone should use in determining whether PC exists.
Evidence tending to show a lack of probable cause must be included in making a determination of whether PC exists. It's a "totality of the circumstances" test. The TOR exit node tends to show a lack of PC--it is much less likely that there will be evidence there of any kind.
This is pretty much standard operating procedure. They can't outlaw anonymizing services, but they can make running them so much hassle that very, VERY few people want to get involved.
Things that backfire include pissing off judges. If they knew about the Tor exit node then they almost certainly lacked probable cause. Probable cause requires considering all of the facts, not *just* the ones favoring guilt. If, in fact, they knew about the exit node but failed to include it in the warrant application, they are going to have (1) pissed off a judge who finds out about it, and (2) they have probably opened up their department to a lawsuit for violating the constitutional rights of the people whose home they invaded. While they obtained a warrant, they did it by withholding information they knew to be relevant to the PC determination.
If they did not know, of course, that analysis changes.
There are some better arguments for allowing discrimination here than in most other cases, but ultimately those arguments will fail. While there is danger in taking an Uber, there is danger in *walking*, and the danger of taking an Uber is not very high. They are a "common carrier" and make themselves available to the public; they will not be permitted to discriminate in either employment (sex of drivers) or in who they are willing to transport.
You have no clue. The entire procedure is open records. The whole process is documented. NO ONE helped Watson once the game started. The entire team that created and set up Watson were in the audience. Watson had the ability to buzz in on its own - no help. This is a matter of public record. There is zero evidence that anything remotely shady was done for Watson to win. Educate yourself.
I'm sorry, you misinterpreted my comment. I indicated "Others knew the answers" but followed this phrase with a colon (indicating a connection to the next phrase) and then "Watson was just set up to buzz in faster than the other contestants."
This was not a statement that Watson did not produce the answers; it is a statement that he was engineered with an advantage (and the questions were too easy) such that the outcome of the game dependent not on scope of knowledge, but on the speed of buzz-in. The humans were all clicking in frustration as the machine was given the first chance to answer almost every question. It was an obviously faulty experimental design.
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). The Supreme Court held that a law (specifically, a state constitutional amendment) preventing protected status from being granted based on homosexuality or bisexuality was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
While of course you can attempt to distinguish the case, there's no way this survives the appeals process.
Some friendly advice. Stop believing that people care about the world the same way you do. The ultra wealthy didn't become ultra wealthy because of their high moral standards. They became ultra wealthy at the expense of everyone else in society. Trying to threaten the 200 or so people that hold 99% of the worlds wealth with bankruptcy is a laughable tactic.
That's what big tobacco said until they started losing lawsuits.
Six of the ten biggest companies in the world are in the Oil & Gas Industries. The costs of global warming--literally, one planet--would bankrupt them if they ever actually had to pay for the damage in a lawsuit or under a new law.
It turns out that the dregs of those trillions of dollars buys not only protection from lawmakers, but that the lawmakers and related armies of talking heads will espouse the theories your pet "scientists" prepare as talking points, until even they no longer remember that you started those rumors. The stories about how good you are or how natural global warming is or about how government regulation of environmental protection is bad make it into the press (and your perspective jury pool) free of your fingerprints.
As a result, plenty of good people--even intelligent people who share the political beliefs of your army of lobbied lawmakers--come to believe that it's not your fault.
Poof, the anthropogenic nature of global warming and the needs for action and environmental regulation start going up in smoke. And you can keep burning your oil.
You do realize that most of the South is going to pass these laws, right? And having locations in the South is much cheaper. So you're going to find that most corporations will just move from one state to another. Sorry, but that's corporations for you. Fine taking a stand until they have to lose money and explain it to the stockholders.
No they're not--or at least if they do, the laws won't last long. The laws are blatantly unconstitutional and there's a 90%+ chance they won't survive a challenge at the appellate level in a federal court anywhere in the country.
Not really. The internet was designed to route around damage, not deliberate breakage. It's taken decades to get more secure, and it's still not really there. Any serious network routing guys here want to speculate about how easy deliberate breakage would be? What if you cut all the big pipes and used all the satellite connections to send bad routing updates all the time, for example? I haven't looked at this stuff in years, but vaguely remember stories of small BGP misconfigurations taking most of a country offline.
It's not easy, but it's certainly possible to mostly do that. It's just that it hurts more than it helps in most cases, because it hurts the legit stuff going on. You want to change this, you have to actually incentivize the leaders in those countries to crack down in an effective way.
It's an accusation of a conflict of interest tied to a banking collapse. Kind of a political hot potato that doesn't necessarily reflect a functioning democracy. If HRC had been tied to mortgage-backed securities or investing in sub-prime loans pre-2008, she would be polling much worse with independents here.
The parliamentary system's no-confidence system allows for political squabbles that come up *between* elections to remove a sitting PM. For us there's a delay... and we're a bit less responsive because we're so much bigger. But they're both highly political systems.
The question is whether it is truly random or not. If they spent $1.4M and got a truly random result, fine. It's absurdly pricey, but it works. If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches.
99% of people in tech--EVERYBODY who does not work with law enforcement and understands the issues--was against the FBI.
This is an appeal to an authority that doesn't exist. 99% of "people in tech" were against the FBI? Really? When we're they polled? How we're "people in tech" and "understands the issues" defined? What you are saying simply isn't true. It is a blatent attempt to appeal to an authority that doesn't exist.
What I am saying is not confirmed by a poll, which is not the same as saying it "simply isn't true." It's an estimate based on having seen only one guy in tech favor the FBI, and he *worked with law enforcement regularly*. Everyone else I've seen or heard from in Tech favors apple. "People in tech" is an obviously somewhat ambiguous group, but changing the scope isn't going to change the support percentages to significantly favor the FBI until you start including a lot of people who really have little or no experience in tech--and the percentage probably goes up as you get to people who know more about electronic security.
I provided a substantive argument why I believed Apple was wrong, with sources to other cases. You provided nothing but a logical fallacy. As a matter of law, the FBI is required to present their evidence to a judge and obtain a warrant. Apple is required to follow the orders of a warrant issued by a judge, unless the warrant is unlawful. This is the argument. If you have something substantive to offer, I'd be glad to accept it for consideration.
Your "substantive" argument fails to take into account a host of issues, both legal and technical, and I don't want to spend my day restating positions anyone who is following the issue can find easily. Most obviously, though, a substantive argument that they complied with a law before that was like a requested order and therefore their challenge to the requested order is somehow invalid is absurd. I can get fifty-nine tickets for speeding, pay them, and still argue that the sixtieth was unconstitutional. And just because free speech rights can be revoked in certain circumstances doesn't mean they can be in all circumstances, or that they should be here, or even that that is the right lens to think of this through, or that it is the only issue discussed in Apple's brief, or in the DOZENS of amicus briefs from the ENTIRE tech industry.
Also, you cited cnet, the LA times, and slashdot. You didn't make a citations to *cases*. In fact, the LA Times article you cite on going to jail for denying an employer access to his network by withholding passwords is woefully inadequate for use to support a generalized gutting of the First Amendment. Your argument on free speech law alone is, at best, overbroad and underinformed. Free speech law is actually fairly complicated with dozens of overlapping doctrines.
And that's even before you approach the tech or practical issues.
Yes, this might work, as long as you know exactly where the aliens are observing your transit from. If you didn't know their location then they could be anywhere in the sky and the transit would be at different times, so you wouldn't know just when to hide the transit or where to point the highly directional laser beam. I take this as another admission that we know about the aliens and this time we know where they are watching from. However, they likely have already visited us (or we wouldn't know about them) and so they know we are here and are not going to be fooled by our laser trick.
Even if they haven't visited, if they have their own data showing worlds transiting stars in fifty systems, and suddenly one of the worlds disappears...
Try listening to human trafficking survivors some time.
I would buy one if one was for sale, but the only "survivors" you see are prostitutes whose income dropped as they got old, and who moved on to second careers hustling suckers who pay for not having sex
You really have no idea what the HELL you are talking about.
And attention seeking self righteous moralizers trying to put people in jail solves what, exactly?
Let's assume for a minute that everyone who works as a prostitute does so unwillingly (which is bullshit). The people committing the crimes of slavery, violence, etc. are not the ones caught up in this vigilante's stupid campaign.
OK, let's assume for the sake of argument that everyone who works as a prostitute did so unwillingly (which is untrue, but not nearly as rare as the people on slashdot who have never studied the field seem to think).
For resulting arrests, your effects include: (1) making Johns less likely to buy, which decreases demand and affects market, (2) getting Johns to go to John school, where they learn some of what happens behind the scene and are less likely to reoffend and more likely to know something about the field if it comes up, (3) sometimes getting the trafficked women some part of the assistance they need to get out of a coerced life, although some police departments are much better about this than others. Oh, and btw, sometimes they do capture people committing the crimes of slavery and violence.
Nice appeal to authority. I see you win the argument.
The appeal to authority as a logical fallacy exists when you appeal to the authority of someone unqualified. This is identifying a consensus among qualified people who are unbiased.
While this can certainly be defeated logically, dismissing it out-of-hand as an appeal to authority is childish and fails to recognize that the world is complex and fields have experts. They can certainly be wrong--but simply saying "The FBI had a warrant" is not even close to a logical argument defeating the concerns of almost every expert in the free world. At most it is an answer to one constitutional concern that does not really apply in this particular case but will in the next one.
It is common for men to purchase sex with trafficking victims and never have a clue the person is coerced.
Not true, unless by "common", you mean something that almost never happens.
Entirely true. Try listening to human trafficking survivors some time. Or any of the many people who work with them. Or answer the Polaris Project's human trafficking hotline. There's plenty of evidence disproving your belief; you just don't want to hear it.
It is incorrect to conflate prostitution and human trafficking. Even if every street-prostitute could be shown to be willingly engaged, that does not mean that there isn't a separate market for people kidnapped against their will. I doubt I could back this up with statistics because of the nature of the crime. People get estranged from their families and disappear into cults like scientology and EST/landmark-education never to be heard from again. I lived in a house where the owners were involved in EST and one of them went missing, abandoning her dog and belongings in Texas. She was spotted in NM and the only evidence afterward was cryptic blog post about "finding her new home". Case unsolved. http://www.inquisitr.com/50063... There are reports about attempted kidnappings of children every couple days in LA. What do you think the purpose of those kidnappings is?
I have run into 'traveling magazine sales vans' since I was a teenager hanging out in places that I probably shouldn't have. I once told them I would join up and had them give a ride across town. I just jumped out and bolted into the woods instead of going to pick up my stuff like I had told them. I knew it was some scammy shit but I thought I was invincible at the time, so I was just trying to get a free taxi ride. These people learn to spot victims that have fallen through the cracks of society. http://america.aljazeera.com/a... http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_s...
The most valuable thing for a good portion of humanity is sex, especially for people who already have plenty of money. I have heard stories from Mexican girls in East LA about being sold back and forth between gang members for thousands of dollars. They don't even try and report it to the police because they think no one will believe them. Gangs or cults have made it into a profession to control every aspect of a person's life. The street term for someone marked for sale is a "barbie doll". There is a lot more to the criminal underworld than what makes it to the police blotter.
They are conflated--trafficking is a source of women who are prostituted against their will and don't see a way out. It is common for men to purchase sex with trafficking victims and never have a clue the person is coerced.
Most prostitutes these days are virtually, or literally, slaves.
Not true. Most prostitutes work because they need the money, and are not otherwise coerced.
"Most" isn't really the question. The question is whether it happens enough that it is a problem. It does. The figures for the US are relatively low, in the tens of thousands. In-country trafficking is also a problem--abusing an at-risk use and offering them attention and the illusion of caring and then putting them on the corner and telling them to earn money.
They are often kidnapped or trafficked into the US.
False. Only a near-zero number of sex workers are "trafficked" into the US. "Sex trafficking" is mostly hysteria used by law enforcement to justify bloated budgets. It is nearly non-existent in America.
Not true at all. Law enforcement budgets have nothing to do with it--most law enforcement agencies don't even recognize human trafficking when they encounter it. Statistics are hard to get because it's a crime--you don't do a lot of gallup polls identifying drug users either. People who encounter it often don't know they do, because men seeking sex tend to not be the most observant people in the world.
They are then beaten into submission by their pimps
Wrong again. Prostitutes with pimps are less likely to be victims of violence. They also make more money, even after paying their pimp, than women working solo. Some groups of prostitutes will team up and hire a pimp, boosting both their safety and income. Source: SuperFreakonomics.
Coercion, violence, trafficking, etc. are not reasons to make prostitution illegal. They are the result of making it illegal.
Hahahahahaha. Parts of what you are saying are almost true. If someone teams up and hires someone to be their security or agent, that's one thing--if they are being coerced, it is another. Coercion, violence, and trafficking are NOT the result of making prostitution illegal. They are the result of demand exceeding supply and of the very high ROI you can get from trafficking in women. Even if you legalize, demand still exceeds supply, and demand grows more because you've just *legalized* it.
There are absolutely cases where prostitution is a victimless crime. But let's not pretend they're unrelated.
If you were only talking about prostitution, you might have a point.
But you're not. You're talking about violence, pimping, and human slavery. You're also talking about underage prostitution.
The Johns don't always realize that, and the sex workers who voluntarily do sex work don't always realize that, but it's still what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no evidence of a lack of probable cause though. The problem is that there was still an illegal post made from that ip address which was assigned to a physical address and specific people. You still have probable cause to look for evidence that it was made from a computer at the physical address or through the TOR node. Nothing about the node changes that other than possibly clearing the person when the evidence doesn't exist.
The Node highly changes the likelihood that there is evidence of the crime there. Tor exit nodes are designed not to know anything about the sender. This was about posts made from that node. While it is hypothetically possible for a research institution or government agency to modify an exit node, add sniffers, etc..., there is no reason to expect a civilian running an exit node to be doing that. While it is also possible for someone who owns a machine at that address to be the guilty party, the fact that an exit node is present makes it much, much, much less likely. It has a direct impact on the totality-of-the-circumstances analysis someone should use in determining whether PC exists.
Evidence tending to show a lack of probable cause must be included in making a determination of whether PC exists. It's a "totality of the circumstances" test. The TOR exit node tends to show a lack of PC--it is much less likely that there will be evidence there of any kind.
This is pretty much standard operating procedure. They can't outlaw anonymizing services, but they can make running them so much hassle that very, VERY few people want to get involved.
Things that backfire include pissing off judges. If they knew about the Tor exit node then they almost certainly lacked probable cause. Probable cause requires considering all of the facts, not *just* the ones favoring guilt. If, in fact, they knew about the exit node but failed to include it in the warrant application, they are going to have (1) pissed off a judge who finds out about it, and (2) they have probably opened up their department to a lawsuit for violating the constitutional rights of the people whose home they invaded. While they obtained a warrant, they did it by withholding information they knew to be relevant to the PC determination.
If they did not know, of course, that analysis changes.
There are some better arguments for allowing discrimination here than in most other cases, but ultimately those arguments will fail. While there is danger in taking an Uber, there is danger in *walking*, and the danger of taking an Uber is not very high. They are a "common carrier" and make themselves available to the public; they will not be permitted to discriminate in either employment (sex of drivers) or in who they are willing to transport.
You have no clue. The entire procedure is open records. The whole process is documented. NO ONE helped Watson once the game started. The entire team that created and set up Watson were in the audience. Watson had the ability to buzz in on its own - no help. This is a matter of public record. There is zero evidence that anything remotely shady was done for Watson to win. Educate yourself.
I'm sorry, you misinterpreted my comment. I indicated "Others knew the answers" but followed this phrase with a colon (indicating a connection to the next phrase) and then "Watson was just set up to buzz in faster than the other contestants."
This was not a statement that Watson did not produce the answers; it is a statement that he was engineered with an advantage (and the questions were too easy) such that the outcome of the game dependent not on scope of knowledge, but on the speed of buzz-in. The humans were all clicking in frustration as the machine was given the first chance to answer almost every question. It was an obviously faulty experimental design.
Let me know when it picks the winning lottery numbers. Then I'll be interested in purchasing.
It did not "Win" the jeopardy game. Others knew the answers; Watson was just set up to buzz in faster than the other contestants.
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996). The Supreme Court held that a law (specifically, a state constitutional amendment) preventing protected status from being granted based on homosexuality or bisexuality was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
While of course you can attempt to distinguish the case, there's no way this survives the appeals process.
Some friendly advice. Stop believing that people care about the world the same way you do. The ultra wealthy didn't become ultra wealthy because of their high moral standards. They became ultra wealthy at the expense of everyone else in society. Trying to threaten the 200 or so people that hold 99% of the worlds wealth with bankruptcy is a laughable tactic.
That's what big tobacco said until they started losing lawsuits.
Six of the ten biggest companies in the world are in the Oil & Gas Industries. The costs of global warming--literally, one planet--would bankrupt them if they ever actually had to pay for the damage in a lawsuit or under a new law.
It turns out that the dregs of those trillions of dollars buys not only protection from lawmakers, but that the lawmakers and related armies of talking heads will espouse the theories your pet "scientists" prepare as talking points, until even they no longer remember that you started those rumors. The stories about how good you are or how natural global warming is or about how government regulation of environmental protection is bad make it into the press (and your perspective jury pool) free of your fingerprints.
As a result, plenty of good people--even intelligent people who share the political beliefs of your army of lobbied lawmakers--come to believe that it's not your fault.
Poof, the anthropogenic nature of global warming and the needs for action and environmental regulation start going up in smoke. And you can keep burning your oil.
You do realize that most of the South is going to pass these laws, right? And having locations in the South is much cheaper. So you're going to find that most corporations will just move from one state to another. Sorry, but that's corporations for you. Fine taking a stand until they have to lose money and explain it to the stockholders.
No they're not--or at least if they do, the laws won't last long. The laws are blatantly unconstitutional and there's a 90%+ chance they won't survive a challenge at the appellate level in a federal court anywhere in the country.
Not really. The internet was designed to route around damage, not deliberate breakage. It's taken decades to get more secure, and it's still not really there. Any serious network routing guys here want to speculate about how easy deliberate breakage would be? What if you cut all the big pipes and used all the satellite connections to send bad routing updates all the time, for example? I haven't looked at this stuff in years, but vaguely remember stories of small BGP misconfigurations taking most of a country offline.
It's not easy, but it's certainly possible to mostly do that. It's just that it hurts more than it helps in most cases, because it hurts the legit stuff going on. You want to change this, you have to actually incentivize the leaders in those countries to crack down in an effective way.
It's an accusation of a conflict of interest tied to a banking collapse. Kind of a political hot potato that doesn't necessarily reflect a functioning democracy. If HRC had been tied to mortgage-backed securities or investing in sub-prime loans pre-2008, she would be polling much worse with independents here.
The parliamentary system's no-confidence system allows for political squabbles that come up *between* elections to remove a sitting PM. For us there's a delay... and we're a bit less responsive because we're so much bigger. But they're both highly political systems.
The question is whether it is truly random or not. If they spent $1.4M and got a truly random result, fine. It's absurdly pricey, but it works. If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches.
99% of people in tech--EVERYBODY who does not work with law enforcement and understands the issues--was against the FBI.
This is an appeal to an authority that doesn't exist. 99% of "people in tech" were against the FBI? Really? When we're they polled? How we're "people in tech" and "understands the issues" defined? What you are saying simply isn't true. It is a blatent attempt to appeal to an authority that doesn't exist.
What I am saying is not confirmed by a poll, which is not the same as saying it "simply isn't true." It's an estimate based on having seen only one guy in tech favor the FBI, and he *worked with law enforcement regularly*. Everyone else I've seen or heard from in Tech favors apple. "People in tech" is an obviously somewhat ambiguous group, but changing the scope isn't going to change the support percentages to significantly favor the FBI until you start including a lot of people who really have little or no experience in tech--and the percentage probably goes up as you get to people who know more about electronic security.
I provided a substantive argument why I believed Apple was wrong, with sources to other cases. You provided nothing but a logical fallacy. As a matter of law, the FBI is required to present their evidence to a judge and obtain a warrant. Apple is required to follow the orders of a warrant issued by a judge, unless the warrant is unlawful. This is the argument. If you have something substantive to offer, I'd be glad to accept it for consideration.
Your "substantive" argument fails to take into account a host of issues, both legal and technical, and I don't want to spend my day restating positions anyone who is following the issue can find easily. Most obviously, though, a substantive argument that they complied with a law before that was like a requested order and therefore their challenge to the requested order is somehow invalid is absurd. I can get fifty-nine tickets for speeding, pay them, and still argue that the sixtieth was unconstitutional. And just because free speech rights can be revoked in certain circumstances doesn't mean they can be in all circumstances, or that they should be here, or even that that is the right lens to think of this through, or that it is the only issue discussed in Apple's brief, or in the DOZENS of amicus briefs from the ENTIRE tech industry.
Also, you cited cnet, the LA times, and slashdot. You didn't make a citations to *cases*. In fact, the LA Times article you cite on going to jail for denying an employer access to his network by withholding passwords is woefully inadequate for use to support a generalized gutting of the First Amendment. Your argument on free speech law alone is, at best, overbroad and underinformed. Free speech law is actually fairly complicated with dozens of overlapping doctrines.
And that's even before you approach the tech or practical issues.
Yes, this might work, as long as you know exactly where the aliens are observing your transit from. If you didn't know their location then they could be anywhere in the sky and the transit would be at different times, so you wouldn't know just when to hide the transit or where to point the highly directional laser beam. I take this as another admission that we know about the aliens and this time we know where they are watching from. However, they likely have already visited us (or we wouldn't know about them) and so they know we are here and are not going to be fooled by our laser trick.
Even if they haven't visited, if they have their own data showing worlds transiting stars in fifty systems, and suddenly one of the worlds disappears...
Try listening to human trafficking survivors some time.
I would buy one if one was for sale, but the only "survivors" you see are prostitutes whose income dropped as they got old, and who moved on to second careers hustling suckers who pay for not having sex
You really have no idea what the HELL you are talking about.
And attention seeking self righteous moralizers trying to put people in jail solves what, exactly?
Let's assume for a minute that everyone who works as a prostitute does so unwillingly (which is bullshit). The people committing the crimes of slavery, violence, etc. are not the ones caught up in this vigilante's stupid campaign.
OK, let's assume for the sake of argument that everyone who works as a prostitute did so unwillingly (which is untrue, but not nearly as rare as the people on slashdot who have never studied the field seem to think).
For resulting arrests, your effects include: (1) making Johns less likely to buy, which decreases demand and affects market, (2) getting Johns to go to John school, where they learn some of what happens behind the scene and are less likely to reoffend and more likely to know something about the field if it comes up, (3) sometimes getting the trafficked women some part of the assistance they need to get out of a coerced life, although some police departments are much better about this than others. Oh, and btw, sometimes they do capture people committing the crimes of slavery and violence.
Nice appeal to authority. I see you win the argument.
The appeal to authority as a logical fallacy exists when you appeal to the authority of someone unqualified. This is identifying a consensus among qualified people who are unbiased.
While this can certainly be defeated logically, dismissing it out-of-hand as an appeal to authority is childish and fails to recognize that the world is complex and fields have experts. They can certainly be wrong--but simply saying "The FBI had a warrant" is not even close to a logical argument defeating the concerns of almost every expert in the free world. At most it is an answer to one constitutional concern that does not really apply in this particular case but will in the next one.
99% of people in tech--EVERYBODY who does not work with law enforcement and understands the issues--was against the FBI.
It is common for men to purchase sex with trafficking victims and never have a clue the person is coerced.
Not true, unless by "common", you mean something that almost never happens.
Entirely true. Try listening to human trafficking survivors some time. Or any of the many people who work with them. Or answer the Polaris Project's human trafficking hotline. There's plenty of evidence disproving your belief; you just don't want to hear it.
It is incorrect to conflate prostitution and human trafficking. Even if every street-prostitute could be shown to be willingly engaged, that does not mean that there isn't a separate market for people kidnapped against their will. I doubt I could back this up with statistics because of the nature of the crime. People get estranged from their families and disappear into cults like scientology and EST/landmark-education never to be heard from again. I lived in a house where the owners were involved in EST and one of them went missing, abandoning her dog and belongings in Texas. She was spotted in NM and the only evidence afterward was cryptic blog post about "finding her new home". Case unsolved.
http://www.inquisitr.com/50063...
There are reports about attempted kidnappings of children every couple days in LA. What do you think the purpose of those kidnappings is?
I have run into 'traveling magazine sales vans' since I was a teenager hanging out in places that I probably shouldn't have. I once told them I would join up and had them give a ride across town. I just jumped out and bolted into the woods instead of going to pick up my stuff like I had told them. I knew it was some scammy shit but I thought I was invincible at the time, so I was just trying to get a free taxi ride. These people learn to spot victims that have fallen through the cracks of society.
http://america.aljazeera.com/a...
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_s...
The most valuable thing for a good portion of humanity is sex, especially for people who already have plenty of money. I have heard stories from Mexican girls in East LA about being sold back and forth between gang members for thousands of dollars. They don't even try and report it to the police because they think no one will believe them. Gangs or cults have made it into a profession to control every aspect of a person's life. The street term for someone marked for sale is a "barbie doll". There is a lot more to the criminal underworld than what makes it to the police blotter.
They are conflated--trafficking is a source of women who are prostituted against their will and don't see a way out. It is common for men to purchase sex with trafficking victims and never have a clue the person is coerced.
Most prostitutes these days are virtually, or literally, slaves.
Not true. Most prostitutes work because they need the money, and are not otherwise coerced.
"Most" isn't really the question. The question is whether it happens enough that it is a problem. It does. The figures for the US are relatively low, in the tens of thousands. In-country trafficking is also a problem--abusing an at-risk use and offering them attention and the illusion of caring and then putting them on the corner and telling them to earn money.
They are often kidnapped or trafficked into the US.
False. Only a near-zero number of sex workers are "trafficked" into the US. "Sex trafficking" is mostly hysteria used by law enforcement to justify bloated budgets. It is nearly non-existent in America.
Not true at all. Law enforcement budgets have nothing to do with it--most law enforcement agencies don't even recognize human trafficking when they encounter it. Statistics are hard to get because it's a crime--you don't do a lot of gallup polls identifying drug users either. People who encounter it often don't know they do, because men seeking sex tend to not be the most observant people in the world.
They are then beaten into submission by their pimps
Wrong again. Prostitutes with pimps are less likely to be victims of violence. They also make more money, even after paying their pimp, than women working solo. Some groups of prostitutes will team up and hire a pimp, boosting both their safety and income. Source: SuperFreakonomics.
Coercion, violence, trafficking, etc. are not reasons to make prostitution illegal. They are the result of making it illegal.
Hahahahahaha. Parts of what you are saying are almost true. If someone teams up and hires someone to be their security or agent, that's one thing--if they are being coerced, it is another. Coercion, violence, and trafficking are NOT the result of making prostitution illegal. They are the result of demand exceeding supply and of the very high ROI you can get from trafficking in women. Even if you legalize, demand still exceeds supply, and demand grows more because you've just *legalized* it.
There are absolutely cases where prostitution is a victimless crime. But let's not pretend they're unrelated.
If you were only talking about prostitution, you might have a point.
But you're not. You're talking about violence, pimping, and human slavery. You're also talking about underage prostitution.
The Johns don't always realize that, and the sex workers who voluntarily do sex work don't always realize that, but it's still what you're talking about.
Step 1: Walk into closest building
Step 2: Tell them you will pay them $5K/year for adding a public hotspot
Step 3: Profit!