Campaign against Craigslist reaches absurd heights

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_16015269

by grellas • 16 years ago

32 41 16 years ago

bherms• 16 years ago

Does this remind anyone else of Atlas Shrugged? The government forces someone to bend to their will, then tries to also force that person/business to also speak out on the oppressors behalf. Sickening IMO, but sadly, it's just another tactic used to fool people into thinking they're doing something worthwhile here. I'd like to hear Clist speak out and say that they're shutting Adult down because they were forced to, but that the issue still remains and, if anything, having it publicly available on Craigslist probably made the "industry" safer.

wmeredith• 16 years ago

Yes, there's an Atlas Shrugged correlation there. However, I'm pretty sure that a governing body forcing the oppressed to make erroneous public statements on their behalf has been a non-fiction occurrence for far longer than Atlas Shrugged has been in print.

sabat• 16 years ago

In this context, Rand was merely acting as a reporter.

tptacek17• 16 years ago

Give me a break. craiglist picked a fight. They disabled the adult ads, and replaced them with a "fuck you" to the state AG's.

They have every right to do that, and I'm glad they did; it's more honest that way. However, nobody has any business feigning outrage that the AG's then questioned their step. Most of the time, when people stamp "censored" over content on their site, they do in fact intend to put it back.

You can break out the Ayn Rand when someone passes a law requiring craigslist to genuflect, instead of just issuing a sharply worded press release in an ongoing pissing match.

joe_the_user9• 16 years ago

"They have every right to do that, and I'm glad they did; it's more honest that way. However, nobody has any business feigning outrage that the AG's then questioned their step."

Well, unless you're outraged the AG ever began their campaign to begin with. Then you might feel outrage that they're following it to its conclusion.

I suppose you have a point that claim should have been "AG's campaign stays as stupid as it ever was ..."

tptacek17• 16 years ago

Is Blumenthal's crusade against craigslist a shameless pandering PR stunt from a (popular) politician running for higher office? Yes.

Is the underlying concern nonsensical? No.

Did craigslist take a real step to ameliorate the concern of AG's around the country over trafficking ads? Yes.

Did craigslist eliminate trafficking ads (and ads for prostitution in general) from the site? No.

Is the Internet changing the game for the illicit sex industry? Yes. Is craigslist assuming a central role in that transformation? Yes. Is craiglist actively pursuing that role? Probably not.

Is it fair that they're bearing the brunt of public outrage over the Internet's role in making the illicit sex market more efficient? I don't know. Maybe.

Articles taking the piss out of CT Gov candidate Blumenthal for making a campaign issue out of craigslist: peachy keen.

Articles suggesting that public outrage against craiglist is intrinsically wrong, or articles that don't say that directly but form arguments clearly premised on that notion: not so great.

jobu• 16 years ago

Going after Craigslist over the adult content was a short sighted political move that will make it harder to fight prostitution in the long run. To some extent it's like the music labels going after napster. This eliminates the largest network (and the easiest one for authorities to monitor), and pushes the whole internet sex economy further underground.

tptacek17• 16 years ago

I know that's the talking point about prostitution, but I don't automatically agree with it. If targeting craigslist is part of a broader crackdown on the online sex trade, where craigslist is forced to adopt a more conservative editorial posture and other sites are forced out of business completely, then the argument doesn't stand.

People talk as if the sex trade can go completely underground, as if it's only exposed to the public eye through the benevolent lens of craiglist. Of course that's not true. Even among the worst offenders, the mafia-based sex slave traffickers, it's still a business, and it still needs customer acquisition mechanisms.

joe_the_user9• 16 years ago

Is the underlying concern nonsensical?

Well there are a number of ways that can be interpreted.

Is there exploitation and misery within the sex industry? Yes but far from every sex worker is a fifteen year old Russian nanny tricked into prostitution. Many go into the field with their eyes open, make more money than they make in a mainstream field and leave. Others go in that way but get addicted to drugs or otherwise harmed. It's dangerous but so are a lot of things.

Is making it harder for prostitutes to find johns going to decrease exploitative aspects of prostitution? It seems highly doubtful to me. While I know of friends of friends who used the adult section to turn tricks, I'm far from an expert. Still, the most plausible argument is that craigslist makes it possible for prostitutes to operate in the safest possible fashion doing what they'd do anyway. If you disagree, I'd like to hear the argument.

So, is the entire campaign a political stunt that hasn't prevented a single act of child exploitation? I think the article makes a good case for this. As far as "outrage", that's also a rather nebulous thing.

tptacek17• 16 years ago

I'm not going to get pigeonholed into sticking up for some career pol in Connecticut. The motivation behind the attack on craigslist is obvious.

But neither am I going to allow my recognition of that fact to reshape my views on the sex trade. Blumenthal being opportunistic and unfair doesn't make craigslist right.

What I see here is yet another case of technology complicating law enforcement, and the peanut gallery expecting the laws to change to accomodate it. That shouldn't be how the world works. I'm biased, because I'm pretty intimately familiar with other crimes that technology makes harder to enforce.

webSexBuyer• 16 years ago

Is craigslist assuming a central role in that transformation? Yes

No, there are some sites that devoted solely to promoting prostitution:

http://www.theeroticreview.com/

http://www.bigdoggie.net/

Seeing state AG's going after Craigslist really shows how disinterested they are in addressing the problem they perceive and that they are merely playing for the camera.

tptacek17• 16 years ago

The problem with your argument is that I agree with it, and yet my argument still stands.

korch• 16 years ago

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

Incidentally, many of the communities on these under the radar, non-Craigslist sites are now bracing for the equivalent of the Eternal September, like when AOL opened up access to Usenet and an ocean of newbies destroyed the careful equilibrium of a community which the general public mostly didn't know even existed. I worked for one of the bigger sites(in the top 5), and let me tell you, the amount of traffic they all get, the number of users and the number of women posting would absolutely shock folks. The entire online prostitution industry is much, much bigger than everyone realizes. It's just all under the radar, and for good reason!

Craigslist has always been the AOL of the industry, as the lowest hanging fruit, with the most blatant crime, spam, cops and worst behaved prostitutes. But at the same time, their traffic amounts were a high multiple of everyone else combined. All the AGs have accomplished is to redirect hundreds of thousands of posts and millions of hits elsewhere on the Internet. :P

The AGs surely must be grand-standing, or else I am vastly underestimating their intelligence and understanding of how the Internet works. They surely know damned well they stand no chance of going after the dozens upon dozens of other sites out there, wrangling each one through the courts, and shutting each down one by one. All it will take is one legal fuck up in one case against one site that gets thrown out or won to set the precedent, then the flood gates open and we're all back to where we started: the general public has a fundamental base level of protected free speech online, and online prostitution continues as it always has.

Also, the AGs have just made the jobs of the cops infinitely harder to go after prostitution. This is actually a law enforcement disaster—when you can't stop all the crime, the next best hope is that you can at least have an evidence trail for the worst crimes that you must go after. It's a triage system, as applied to law enforcement. Now the cops don't even have that. Before, with CL being the hub, the cops make one phone call and get IPs, credit cards, and post history—it was a nearly automated process that would shock most people how easy it was. Now, as the user base fractures amongst sites all over the world, the cops are going to have a much harder, less user-friendly way of getting any investigative information. So when some criminal fool posts on some board that they have a basement full of 12 year old Eastern European girls chained to the wall, or whatever extravagent crime you want to imagine, the cops won't be able to hit the ground running after one phone call. It could take weeks just to locate where the poster originated. Nice job AGs!

Not to mention that when women can't easily post online, their next best alternative is to work as street walkers, and that is a public safety disaster. You could even argue that in the past decade Craigslist has helped society by moving prostitution off the streets and onto the web.

Besides, many of the big sites are not even hosted nor incorporated in the US and are quite untouchable.

Basically it all boils down to this:

AGs: it's an election year, we need to drum up PR, sex & prostitution moves our political base, so it cannot possibly backfire, it's illegal, it has all moved to the Internet, so let's stop the Internet!

Internet: lol wut?!

ww5203• 16 years ago

The tech industry seriously needs to organize to have a bigger political clout.

tptacek17• 16 years ago

And you think craiglist prostitution ads are the rallying point for that?

ww5203• 16 years ago

While I agree that the current Craiglist's predicament is unpleasant, what is it about that "First they came for ..." thing?

oiuygtfrtghyju• 16 years ago

Isn't it time to go after the real enemy?

Corning make almost all the glass that transmits all this digital pornography around the world.

Isn't it time somebody acted to stop these monsters profiting from the evil trade in dense wavelength division multiplexing?

tedunangst• 16 years ago

In other news, the Mercury News website was obviously hacked. It's a well known impossibility for "old media" to publish anything supportive of craigslist.

Campaign against Craigslist reaches absurd heights

Related Stories