Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle with the Feds

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-backpage-vicious-battle-feds/

by gok • 7 years ago

85 39 7 years ago

Anyone who sits down and reads the Senate report (not mentioned in the article until about 75% of the way though) and is still on the side of Backpage.com is probably a monster.

The report makes no allegation not directly derived from internal company policies, documents, emails, and sworn employee testimony.

Backpage.com was an active participant in human trafficking.

Miner49er• 7 years ago

I skimmed it, and maybe I didn't see the worst stuff, but based on what I saw it doesn't seem as clear cut as you make it out to be. A lot of what they did seemed to be to help sex workers. This had the unfortunate side effect of also helping traffickers. Again, maybe I didn't see everything.

Glyptodon• 7 years ago

No matter how terrible Backpage is, legal chicanery isn't befitting and not what we should hope for from federal agencies.

deogeo• 7 years ago

Don't worry - I have it on good authority that it will only be used against Bad Guys.

gamblor956• 7 years ago

Agreed, but in the US much of our legal process protections are made in cases with the most heinous defendants because they are the ones that test the system the most.

Fins• 7 years ago

Oh sure, a report created to justify a massive assault on both speech and rights of (possibly unsympathetic, but still) sexworkers makes the chose scapegoat look bad. Not exactly surprising. Just as the absence of any significant numbers of,you know, actual sex traffickers being caught anywhere either before or after BP's shutdown.

monksy2• 7 years ago

The only thing that is supporting the human trafficking "industry" (let's face it.. it's organized and it's filling a demand in the market) is having that kind of work made illegal. It forces the demand and supply into the black market.

There is and always has been a demand and (willing and consenting) supply for those services. The best you can do is to put in a framework in which they can do so legally and safely. It's not going to knock out all trafficking. But when you have a superior service that's legal, safe and reliable. You're going to lose the financial benefit of running it on the black market. (Also you'll end up having an entire framework to deal with crimes related to the work [i.e. abuse, violence related, etc])

anbop4• 7 years ago

So the solution to trafficked 14 year olds is to legalize 14 year old prostitutes?

skinnymuch3• 7 years ago

You make it sound so clear cut and yourself as such a virtuous person knowing who is a monster and who isn’t.

Has human trafficking gone down since Backpage went down? Has sex work gotten better or worse for sex workers since Backpage went down? Have pimps and other assialiants and middle men of [rougher] sex work and trafficking stopped doing their work since Backpage went down? Or been caught more?

If nothing actually changed, but now all we have are the morally bankrupt Backpage founders fighting against government overreach and abuse, why are people monsters for being against what the government is doing (and thus in a way, on the side of Backpage.com)?

zokula• 7 years ago

Stop the hyperbole. I'll be on backpages side way before I'm on some puritan's law enforcement side.

scarface744• 7 years ago

If it were just about consenting adults I would agree. While I’m the last person to preach “think about the children” in most cases, I draw the line at child sex trafficking.

JamesBarney5• 7 years ago

The report is 53 pages, mind pointing out the damning pages?

devoply• 7 years ago

Someone must not have hired a lobbying team and lined some pockets in Washington.

Also the crooked US justice system, you don't have the right to defend yourself using your own money:

The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.
But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July...

tptacek2• 7 years ago

I don't understand the thru-line of this Wired story. It effectively concedes the government's case: Backpage built a system that coached users to post trafficking ads without setting off its controls. If you posted an ad containing “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” or “little girl” (the article's examples), the system would alert the user so they could use different terms, and then accept their new ad.

There's lots not to like about SESTA, but the Backpage people weren't (AFAIK) charged under SESTA.

Why am I meant to care about the Backpage owner's colorful history? Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story, in a couple paragraphs discussing what they were actually charged with? Agree or disagree with the prosecution, but that's the story.

I feel like people on message boards are sold on a narrative about how child sex trafficking never happens, which is easy when it's an abstraction. But it does happen.

A middle aged man I briefly worked with, and that a friend of mine worked for --- Peter Privateeer, the former CEO of a company called Reflex Security --- just finished serving 12 years in prison for buying a 14 year old girl. The pimp who sold her had been holding her at gunpoint and forcing her to "service" his customers. Where did the pimp meet the CEO? On Backpage. The girl cost $600.

The ads for teenaged children Backpage was handling were real. Not all of them, I'm sure. But it was really happening. And Backpage helped it happen.

Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps. But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously. That's not Backpage. Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.

baoha• 7 years ago

>Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story

This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts.

I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.

mindgam32• 7 years ago

Thank you for stating this so clearly. Something always seemed off to me about the argument that punishing Backpage was going to backfire because all it would do drive exploitation and child abuse more underground. This claim would have merit if Backpage hadn’t been explicitly enabling a market for this terrible stuff via those keyword suggestions. I’m not going to shed any tears for the poor site owners having to face penalties for this.

JamesBarney5• 7 years ago

To provide a little more context. They built out a "strip words from ad" feature that relied on a large list of words provided by the moderators to strip out terms. Most of these words were related to prostitution and only a few related to anything underage.

But there's also this.

Similarly, in a June 7, 2011 email, Ferrer told a Texas law enforcement official that a word found in one Backpage ad, “amber alert,” “is either a horrible marketing ploy or some kind of bizarre new code word for an under aged person.”142 He told the official that he would “forbid[]” that phrase—without explaining that, inside Backpage, this meant filters would simply conceal the phrase through automatic deletion.143 Ferrer forwarded the same email chain to Padilla and noted that he had instructed a staff member to “add [amber alert] to strip out.”144 A June 11, 2012 version of the filter word list indicates that “amber alert” was indeed deleted by the Strip Term From Ad filter.145 In short, Backpage added such terms with full awareness of their implications for child exploitation.

You'd imagine a normal person would think "we should ban this user, or report this to the authorities" instead of "we should definitely filter out that phrase".

adisinom• 7 years ago

At least according to the article it was a keyword ban, not keyword suggestions. To my reading the intent of the ban is to (1) avoid the appearance of carrying advertisements of sex with children and (2) discourage such advertisements.

The critical view is that this is intended to help child traffickers write clandestine ads so they can continue using the platform however that seems unlikely. The problem with any keyword-based filter is false-positives such as kink content. Such filters operating opaquely and dropping bans in other contexts such as banking and copyright draw deserved criticism. We should be no less critical here.

gojomo• 7 years ago

Should a safe online market for sex workers exist? Perhaps.

Indeed! Online listings are associated with less violence & other exploitive harms, compared to other ways such sex work is arranged when such listings have been shut down.

But we should be able to at least agree that the people who operate it should take their responsibility as a steward of the public safety seriously.

That's a hand-wavy, euphemistic political line like one might hear from a grandstanding Attorney-General or Senator, who really just wants to ban every kind of "safe online market for sex workers", by holding them to murky and unattainable standards.

So how, specifically, would you suggest a "safe online market for sex workers" could police their listings, other than the ways Backpage tried?

Backpage tried multiple content-based strategies for banning or discouraging advertisements for odious and exploitative practices. Terms linked to problematic practices either led to ads being blocked or bowdlerized to become less-effective. I see these as genuine ways to drive both buyers and sellers of harmful practices away from the service, by making such practices impossible (or at least much more difficult) to advertise. And yet, each of Backpage's attempts to limit bad-actors is now being portrayed as evidence of sinister intent.

Backpage isn't a law enforcement agency. It lacks the same investigative or arrest/prosecution powers of the state. Backpage had to guess what the shifting legal standards of competing jurisdictions might require of them.

The likely best policy for a listing-service, if police & politicians wouldn't crucify them for it, would be to allow all kinds of ads, but also give local enforcement agencies the most-advanced kinds of notifications and "standing searches" that any of the service's power-users or customer-support personnel have.

Then, the actually legally-empowered experts – police – could do their job, and catch & punish the worst criminals, who have conveniently described exactly their crimes in public ads with contact information! That is, the police would not just scatter criminals to other channels with half-measures while prosecuting tangentially-related middlemen.

Backpage did did at least as much to set back the cause of safeguarding sex workers than any misguided lawmaker.

Both actual sex workers & studies of the effects of Backpage-like ad-boards disagree with your assertion here.

"Sex workers 'devastated,' look to alternatives after Backpage closure": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...

Both sex worker advocates & police report increased trafficking & abuse in San Francisco after Backpage shutdown: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-Sex-wo...

"'People are going to die': Sex workers devastated after Backpage shutdown" : https://www.newsweek.com/people-are-going-die-sex-workers-de...

"7 Sex Workers on What It Means to Lose Backpage": https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/7-sex-workers-on-what-it-mean...

Craigslist's similar-to-Backpage "erotic services" listings, which Craigslist was pressured into discontinuing in 2010, had measurably reduced female homicide rates wherever introduced: http://scunning.com/craigslist110.pdf

tptacek2• 7 years ago

That's because actual sex workers were unaware of what Backpage was doing, and what the consequences were. By knowingly running an online market for child sex trafficking harmed the entire enterprise of safe sex work.

module0000• 7 years ago

Well, if you take away a website were bad things happen, all the bad guys will magically disappear...right?

I enjoyed the article, a good read. I hate the topic; government overreach.

zadkey• 7 years ago

"Since March 2018, federal prosecutors have seized more than $100 million in cash, real estate, and other assets from Lacey and Larkin. The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED.

The asset freezes raise all kinds of thorny constitutional questions. Generally speaking, federal prosecutors are permitted to freeze a defendant’s assets based on probable cause alone, even before the defendant has a chance to challenge the government’s case in court. But regular forfeiture rules do not apply in cases involving forums for speech—newspapers, films, books, magazines, websites. The US Supreme Court has decreed that when the government seizes these expressive materials, or the proceeds derived from them, it must immediately hold an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the seizure is valid.

But the Backpage defendants have a problem: So far, they can’t get a court to hear their claims. Since last summer, the Justice Department appears to have been playing a clever shell game. They’ve brought cases against the Backpage defendants in two federal districts—civil seizures in Los Angeles, criminal matters in Phoenix—and they’re making the defendants spend what money they have left chasing Uncle Sam from place to place. So far, judges in both districts have agreed with the government’s suggestion that they should defer to each other, effectively denying the defendants a forum to challenge the asset freezes. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments in the case in July."

This kind of tactic definitely rubs me the wrong way. I am not saying that backpage should exist.

But I don't buy into ends justify the means arguments for the way the government is going about it.

upofadown• 7 years ago

“I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? ... "

Well, enforcing the law is actually the job of law enforcement. It sounds like the ultimate goal is to keep the bad stuff where the general public can't see it.

JamesBarney5• 7 years ago

For those who are interested, this reply all goes into the effects of backpage's closure on sex workers.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho97/119-no-more-s...

scarface744• 7 years ago

I’ve listened to the episode before, but after reading the Wired article and seeing the comments here, the Reply All episode now feels very one sided. I don’t remember them mentioning the underage aspect.

JamesBarney5• 7 years ago

Yeah but I also don't think the question "is Carl Ferrer a scumbag?" and "was the closing of Backpage good for sex workers and at risk youth" have to have the same answer.

The wired article talks about culpability and most focuses on the first question where as the reply all seemed to exclusively focus on the second.

Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle with the Feds

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