
Proponents of sex trafficking bill urge Silicon Valley to drop opposition - kafkaesq
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/19/proponents-of-sex-trafficking-bill-urge-silicon-valley-to-drop-opposition
======
warrenm
After reviewing parts of the bill .. I agree with Google's comments about its
broad wording.

Broad wording is what politicians love, because it lets government lump-under
regulations & laws more things (even (especially?) things for which is was
obviously not intended).

Precise wording is what technically-minded people prefer: clarity, concision,
and focus.

Surely there is a balance that can address the problems of human trafficking
without also threatening the 99.99994% of online users' free speech rights who
view human trafficking to be as sickening as it is, but may happen to hold
some collection of "unpleasant", "unpopular", or "sideline" views that don't
jive with the majority (or, at least, the politically-correct class).

~~~
leggomylibro
Actually, I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits
of a law based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress.

Laws didn't used to be massive 'we need to pass them to see what is in them'
tomes. They used to be simple missives, written in everyday language, without
umpteen dozen riders and special exemptions and funding stipulations and
amendments and what-have-you. They used words and phrases like 'reasonable' or
'within reason,' rather than, 'a person shall be considered as belonging to
Status B if they have retained Condition C for a length of time no less than 3
years but no more than 6, unless such a person can demonstrate Condition D...'

Judges used to have leeway in how they interpreted laws and applied sentences.
Yes, it gave judges the power to give ridiculously short sentences and let
their buddies/'our sort of people' get off scott free. And yes, it gave judges
the power to give extremely heavy-handed sentences if they felt personally
slighted. But they do those things today in our current system with minimal
consequences, so I'd argue...so what?

I think that allowing people to act like people and reason like people is
fundamental to any decent legal system. We can't try to make justice into some
kind of an algorithm, because at the end of the day there's no reified
reference for "Justice." There's just us.

~~~
warrenm
> I think that hashing out the intent and reasonable/practical limits of a law
> based on its language is a job for the judicial branch, not Congress.

It is the job of the judicial branch to apply law (after the executive branch
pursues lawbreakers).

But look at simple, clear, concise laws vs things like the US tax code (which
is annoyingly precise in some places, yet ridiculously vague in so many
others) - the simpler, clearer, and - often - shorter the law, the better for
_everyone_ involved.

------
PhasmaFelis
It seems odd to me that we've settled on the weirdly euphemistic "trafficking"
to describe slavery. It sounds like a marketing word intended to take the
sting out of a distasteful concept, which I don't think is anyone's intention.

~~~
gozur88
It seems odd to me we've settled on the weirdly, well, misleading
"trafficking" to describe prostitution. It sounds like people who don't like
prostitution are trying to lump in a relatively small percentage of women who
were forced into the trade with women who chose it over other options.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
...Who's saying that? The article is specifically about forced sex slavery.

------
valuearb
If only we could ban online advertising of the sex trade we could eliminate
the worlds oldest profession. Lets continue to make it illegal for consenting
adults to have sex with other consenting adults, so that prostitutes can't go
to the cops when abused by pimps. And so the incremental penalties for pimps
trafficking children are as small as possible.

~~~
AlexandrB
Uhhh. Sex trafficking != prostitution and involves forced sexual exploitation
of unwilling or underage victims [1]. I'm not sure what you're going on about.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking)

~~~
miracle2k
The two are related, because one major pillar of activism around "modern
slavery" is based on opposition to sex work (the others being prurient
interest, a kind of western saviour syndrome, and it being lucrative).

One random link I followed from the Wikipedia article is the source for the
statement "Europe has the highest number of sex slaves per capita in the
world". [http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/](http://realstars.eu/for-fair-sex/)
The page prominently advocates for the Nordic model.

------
dragonwriter
It's a horribly-written law that would remove the CDA safe harbor from any
civil or criminal proceeding in which conduct which would violate federal sex
trafficking law is alleged, even if that conduct is not the central thrust of
the law being enforced, and even if that conduct isn't actually proven in the
legal action. As long as the prosecution is “targeting” conduct violating the
federal sex trafficking law, the safe harbor would be removed.

(It's also dishonestly framed as a “clarification” when it's a radical
dismantling of one of the core pillars of the CDA.)

------
erikb
Without investigating further and just reading one paragraph from this article
it is already quite clear that people try to use the moral high ground here to
sell something that people usually wouldn't want to buy.

kafkaesq why did you share it?

*edit: And why is truth always so hard to take for people here?

------
PhasmaFelis
I'm pretty torn on this. My immediate instinct is that it's yet another
attempt to lock down the internet with "think of the children" histrionics.
But _if_ the investigator's report on Backpage.com is accurate--if they
_knowingly_ facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it up--then
it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it. I'm also
bothered by this quote:

> _“We would support a specific amendment that would allow victims to sue for
> civil penalties in court to seek some form of redress for the horrible
> things that have happened to them,” said Slater, whose group represents tech
> giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix._

Civil penalties are not sufficient for slavers. If the allegations are true,
these people need to be in prison.

Edit: Please read my response below before downvoting. Backpage didn't block
child-sex ads, they concealed and protected them, allegedly.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
> if they knowingly facilitated child sex slavery and then tried to cover it
> up--then it's genuinely fucked up that they can't be prosecuted for it.

By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert?

Okay, lets think about this, your product team happens to be looking at the
system logs and sees an uptick in keywords like rape. The company's internal
chat goes abuzz with this company wide emergency because some of the people
are uncomfortable that their platform is being used for this, after an all
hands meeting a simple solution is made to simply programmatically make a word
filter. Phew, now the logs won't be polluted anymore and some underrepresented
people "in tech" won't go to the NY Times, Washington Post and other esteemed
outlets like Twitter about how triggered they were.

The whole thing had nothing to do with senators and law enforcement or what
people were actually searching for, but this law would connect the dots in a
completely different way and say that was criminal intent to cover up sex
trafficking.

Even in this backpage example, searching with those key words wouldn't have
helped anyone use the site? That part of the indictment made no sense thats
why it got dismissed, the Senate is being steered by emotions and proposing
silly solutions.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _By adding a word filter to keywords like rape and amber alert?_

Read that section carefully. They didn't make a filter to _block_ ads with
words like "rape" and "little girl"; they hid the keywords to make them harder
to find _while leaving the ads up,_ and they did not report them to law
enforcement. That's not keeping out abusers, that's _protecting_ abusers.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
even though blocking ads is not what I suggested, there were still parts of
that section that were unclear

were the ads saying "here's the vulnerable child you might have seen in the
amber alert, in case you were searching for missing persons to rape" or
something along those lines? How did you interpret it, and where could I find
the truth of the matter

~~~
PhasmaFelis
From the article: "Desiree Robinson, a 16-year-old girl who was brutally
murdered in a Chicago-area garage last December, was sold through
Backpage.com. Her mother, Yvonne Ambrose, testified at the hearing that her
daughter was advertised on the website and purchased for sex by a 32-year-old
man who killed her when she resisted."

In another story, a 13-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, beaten, drugged,
and put up for sale on Backpage, with pictures of her naked and battered. The
girl was recovered alive and her kidnapper went to prison, but Backpage
repeatedly refused to remove the ad and its pictures unless they were paid to
do so. This was also linked directly from the article:
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-
ceo...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/06/backpage-ceo-arrested-
sex-ads-forced-prostitution)

