Small ads sex trafficking: the battle against Backpage(theguardian.com) |
Small ads sex trafficking: the battle against Backpage(theguardian.com) |
Backpage was focused on getting as many ads posted as possible. It instructed moderators to edit ads and strip out the code words used by pimps to indicate that the person in the ad was a child.
Words such as “Lolita”, “fresh” and “amber alert”... were edited out and the ads posted.
In one subpoenaed email believed to be from Backpage management, moderators were instructed: “If in doubt about underage: the process for now should be to accept the ad”
(I added formatting for clarity)
See the photo caption: "In court: (from left) Carl Ferrer, James Larkin, Andrew Padilla and Michael Lacey are sworn-in prior to testifying before the Senate earlier this year. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP" -- these people knew Backpage was being used to traffic children to be raped, and they fought in court to be allowed to continue to do so.
The I am Jane Doe film is a good documentary that covers the events.
Eghh, I literally had a chill go down my spine while reading that. Yeah, screw Backpage.
This is basically a PR piece for the puritan/radfem lobby that hates sex workers on principle and has allied itself with NGOs whose budgets depend on vastly inflating the problem and ignoring the fact that under the current system law enforcement are usually more dangerous to the workers than anybody else :(
The trafficker was caught and given five years in jail,
but the explicit photos of MA remained online. “I called
Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those
photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what
had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They
refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t
take it down. In the end they just stopped returning
my calls.”Given the article's blatantly a hit piece, and doesn't offer a second side to the story whatsoever, I'm unwilling to assume that that's a complete and accurate rendition of what happened.
Too many software companies these days operate as "dumb pipes" and are allowed to wash their hands of their responsibilities as middle-men for unthinkable crimes. Whether it's Amazon selling lead-laden baby-toys (and then blame ephemeral Chinese companies for the problem) or classified pages being a storefront for child-prostitutes, or social media being a vector for harassment and threats:
If you own the venue and you profit off of its use, you have a responsibility to not facilitate crime.
For example, think about what YouTube would be like if every video had to be manually vetted by a real person before it was uploaded.
That said, if someone points out illegal things happening on your site (e.g. the mother pointing out the photos of her 13-year-old daughter), and you still do nothing, that is an issue.
Finally, letting child sex traffickers post ads online seems like a very easy way for the police to find them. Why are we ignoring the fact that, by doing nothing, Backpage would have made the rescue of the kids easier?
And when you build open source then people can install it and do whatever they want. That's the price of decentralization.
And yeah, escorts should be free to advertise their services on the internet and pretty much every law relating to consensual prostitution should just plain be ripped up. But I'm not going to shed a tear over Backpages.
Maybe backpage fumbled handling it, but their track record for helping in such cases is rather better than the article implies. See also, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/10/backpage-adu... where opinions are divided and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/backpage-sex-workers... which suggests backpage is actually a tool for supporting workers.
Assuming backpage is exactly as bad as a single lawsuit against them claims is not, IMO, a particularly good way to form an opinion.
I agree with your point in general terms: people who hate freedom will always latch onto this sort of thing to shut down activity that they don't like that isn't harmful. At the same time, people who do like freedom shouldn't defend those who abuse their freedom. There are things, like child prostitution, that society just won't stand for. Chalking it up to "collateral damage" is not a viable response. If we want a society where the Internet is free, we're going to have to accept that when someone does cross the line from providing a neutral platform to actively facilitating unacceptable activity, the there will have to be tremendous consequences.
These articles always have some anecdotal stories to tug at our heartstrings (as children suffering should make us sad about how evil some humans can be), but they always blatantly refuse to provide accurate statistics and lead us on to believe that problem is massive.
For example, they give credence to a completely made up number in the article that a responsible journalist would never cite: "Some campaigners believe that up to 100,000 children like MA are exploited for profit across the country every year." - especially when they can find real statistics (see links below).
Read these articles for fact-based reporting on this subject:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/06/29/real-men-get-their-f...
http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/jun/10/joyce-...
(edited for formatting)
The system forces them underground and to take more risks, but I'm pretty sure that the cops aren't usually the ones abusing them (though this obviously depends on locality, I guess).
There were tens of thousands of children involved here.
(I'm simply pointing out the foolishness of this argument, not offering an opinion on this case)
Man, I get the argument for free speech, but at least donate the profit from those listings to charity, and respond with empathy & take listings down when the actual mother calls you. He's already been arrested - literally nobody benefits from it staying up.
That's still a place I wouldn't want to be in, but at least you can argue a couple benefits like e.g. being able to catch some of the traffickers that would otherwise have gone deeper underground.
> Kubiiki’s anger at Backpage grew and grew.
Historically, creating Warmaiden mothers whose life goal is to take you down ends badly. It's the only reason the Senate even cared about the issue.
"...But the thing that shocked me most about making this film was that those guys who ran Backpage, back in the day they were rabble-raising libertarians, yet, at some point, my view is that maybe the money became so outrageously intoxicating, perhaps there was this notion that the sale of children was simply collateral damage.”
I'm a little unclear about what she was expecting. To my knowledge, libertarians are not find of enforcing their morals on others.
The major problem in our society is that police and detectives cost us a lot of money but basically do nothing. The only thing really saving us is that people of XXI century are unbelievably benign.
This should not - in my opinion - stop at a fine or some kind of slap on the wrist but should be factored under aiding and abetting and should come with jail time for those involved. If that's what it takes to get people to take this stuff serious then so be it.
I think policing should fall 100% on the police. If something is illegal to upload or illegal to download - that's the responsibility of the end user - not the ISP, or the router manufacturer, or the SSL issuer, or the OSS contributors.
Indeed.
> If someone built a P2P classifieds app - should the developer be responsible for everything listed?
No, but that is not the case here. I don't see how you could monetize a p2p system so that the creator of the software would profit of it but would not have a way to shut down illegal content, either requires some central system.
However, it was not through Backpage that their child was abducted. Instead, without Backpage, they might have never gotten their child back.
As a father, if Backpage is closed, I wouldn't feel any safer for my kid.
I've never heard of backpage as anything but prostitution. Are there regions where it won out over Kijiji and CraigsList for buy and sell classifieds?
I'm not a Libertarian myself, but wanting to reduce the power of the state doesn't mean you believe in slavery.
Being made a child sex slave is a pretty major violation of your liberty.
But I could definitely see a Libertarian deciding something along the lines of, "we should err on the side of being permissive." But come on, you don't see big casinos systemically looking the other way on backroom games of Russian Roulette.
Women with few choices who need help? Proactive arrest. ESPECIALLY if they're women of color.
Free, safe people who are willingly selling a service to customers? Why, that's a crime!
But pimps? Well that's just way too much work. I still remember an Oakland cop I talked to telling me, "The best way to stop a pimp is to arrest his girls, and then he has no money and gets in trouble with his boss."
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the literal slavers are the people law enforcement feels least inclined to catch, instead focusing on punishing people who for the most part are harmless (often with profound racial biases in enforcement, e.g., the "black women in a parked car with one man is suspicious" policy in many major cities).
Most anti-pimping laws ban any kind of profiting from the proceeds of prostitution. So if a prostitute tries to arrange an apartment to work out of, or hire a legitimate bodyguard, the law sees those people as pimps. As a result, she ends up having to work with a criminal that offers protection and a workplace: IE a pimp.
Said busy work often concerns imaginary crime, like going after weed consumers or "computer pirates".
Often the system is either dysfunctional, and avoids crime, or crooked, and works to cover up crime.
I had a file upload service for a while (files.ww.com) and in spite of the very clearly worded warning pedophiles would attempt to use the service and a couple of them (and their buddies) found themselves in more trouble than they ever wished they had. I still got sick of it though and shut the whole thing down but it worked just dandy as a honeypot. The guy at the Dutch vice squad that was my contact died, I'm full of respect for people that will step into this junk to combat it, that can't be easy on the senses. He was called in to deal with the case of a childcare center in Amsterdam where a bunch of sub-humans had been abusing children as young as 19 days old (I wish I was making that up) to make videos in order to sell online.
Disgusting doesn't begin to describe it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_sex_crimes_case
Please be warned that this is not a pleasant page to read.
1. If the police catch every child sex trafficker selling on Backpage, then there won't be anymore posting to Backpage. The ones left will either get more savvy, or already more savvy and weren't using Backpage.
2. If they don't catch a large enough percentage of the traffickers, then the ease and reach/audience that Backpage provides will still entice people to use it.
Sure, you can use it while it exists (to find and catch traffickers), but it either won't exist for long, or continuing to operate will still allow some amount of trafficking to successfully happen.
Which is why you have comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695515#14696098
Remember, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally about a guy who robbed a bank without a mask in broad daylight that had cameras. Police showed up at his house the next day and arrested him.
When the owners of the company approve that policy, and spend years in repeated court cases to defend the ads, claiming that they're powerless to stop the ads and even if they weren't powerless to stop the ads they don't need to because that's the law: that's a completely different level if evil.
I find it hard to believe that such a policy could ever be created without the managers buy in or tacit consent (maybe to create plausible deniability).
If it proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they all knew of this and allowed it then I'm all for piercing the corporate veil and going after all their assets, including private ones and shareholder assets unless it is totally clear that they did not know about this to compensate the victims.
Just some bits from the linked article:
"“I called Backpage dozens of times asking them to take down those photos, that my daughter was just a child and that what had been done to her was a crime,” says Kubiiki. “They refused and said if I didn’t pay for it, they couldn’t take it down. In the end they just stopped returning my calls.”"
That alone makes them complete scumbags, the rest of what's documented in the article should make a good basis for a criminal case against them.
I know. This is where it goes to almost cartoonish villainy.
I'm honestly bewildered how this even happens. This must have escalated up the support levels and involved several people, and one individual listing that isn't even applicable anymore can't be a huge revenue source for them. Even assuming that it's a company led by amoral psychopaths, why push back for so little gain? how did nobody in the chain of information say "what the hell are we doing"?
I could see an argument for criminalizing decentralized architectures because "think of the children".
I'm simply making the point that creators have no moral obligation to police how people abuse their creation.
So here's what will happen: BP will be shut down. The service providers and clientele will move to system that's more distributed and harder to track down. LE will chalk this up to a win, BP execs will get punished, and children will continue to be abused except tracking them down will be more difficult.
Damn, don't we put people in prison whose sole crime is having jpgs with nude photos of said girls? And then we turn a blind eye to men who actually do the pimping and raping of such girls on industrial scale. I call bulshit on this one.
To me this system seems deliberately broken and we should bring people who broke it to justice.
You want to know where the resources are going, instead of being used to catch people raping 13 year old girls...
Just look where the most money is MADE in the justice system to find out where the manpower is directed.
It's a tough choice but rewarding the enabling of crimes like these is entirely the wrong signal, it makes it seem as if this is normal and acceptable which it never should be.
The other side of the coin is that the operators probably already use multiple sources for their 'customers' (I use the word loosely, you might as well read co-criminals for it), and that shutting this one down will only cut off a portion of the hydra that has visibility in the otherwise respectable part of the world. Punishing the customers of child prostitution while at the same time legalizing the regular form goes another step in the right direction, but may not be acceptable in all political climates.
If this is proven, all their claims of neutrality should go out the window.
And then in court: it's 3rd party content, we only publish, we only remove when required by law, posters are responsible for everything.
Of course this cover is busted if they really edited those ads.
> “At first I didn’t see the nakedness or what she was wearing or the poses she was in, but then it began to sink in, what the ad was for, and everything just fell apart.”
This does seem to imply actual nudity, which makes it even more surprising they didn't immediately take it down when it was pointed out to them.
Not 100% sure but I'm under impression that there are ways in the US to legally take down any CP. I haven't yet seen a single semi-legit website which allows it, even 4chan etc. Maybe I'm wrong, in such case just disregard this point - the rest still stands.