Law Backpage has been seized

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We have just lost cabin pressure.

Null said:
Backpage was seized because the Communications Decency Act was amended to allow LEO to pierce the veil and come after hosts and services when users had broken the law. This may seem trivial, but the CDA's safe harbor provisions is what enables every site that exists and allows user-generated content to be self-published.

4chan? At risk. 8chan? At risk.
Encyclopedia Dramatica? At risk. Kiwi Farms? At risk. Every other web forum? At risk.
Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube, Twitter, Gab? At risk.

If the CDA continues down this path we will see our largest export (culture and technology) be swiftly transplanted to other countries with safe harbor provisions.
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Ruin said:
Congress is mostly boomers of course they don't understand the internet. Another fun consequence of this is they keep trying to fight every war as though it's the cold war which is why we haven't won since then.
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It's not just that, they're all lawyers or businessmen by trade. These are people that are put into positions where they're supposed to be in charge of certain aspects of the government that they literally have no knowledge of.

How many times have you heard an executive say, "I don't need to know about that. I have people to tell me about that." Or something to that extent. The problem is unless you understand it, you're still not going to get it even if your staff have written up a report. It's up to you to present it and it might come out like a Series of Tubes.
 
Holy shit! George Orwell warned us about this! He tried to warn us! Soon, we'll come to learn to love Big Brother.
 
Phil Ken Sebben said:
Oh this is fucking stupid. Why are we allowing stupid people to make decisions on issues that they have no idea what the consequences are?

I thought we were past Ted Stevens and his "series of tubes" argument.
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Has someone asked Massachusetts's tech candidate, Brianna Wu, her opinion on this?
 
Stock Photo James said:
Worst case scenario: the big Web companies use bribes or maybe collected data blackmail to prevent the law from affecting them but secretly support its existence to make it harder for less influential competitors.
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It'll be this one. Zuckerberg has had sit-downs with heads of state to discuss how he can help suppress things that make governments look bad, these laws aren't aimed at him.
 
Fareal said:
(Note that the DMCA already drove a coach and horses through s230; FOSTA is not the first crack in the wall)
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No it didn't. The DMCA doesn't require any prior restraint on the part of site operators. Just that when a report does fall in your lap, you handle it properly, and it also includes a process for bogus reports.
 
It's going to take a couple years of court reviews, challenges and shake-outs to figure out exactly what is and ins't allowed under yet another nice-intentions-but-little-else federal law, and it will get sorted out.

In the meantime, I'll be soliciting all my sex in the mens room of bus stations like a NORMAL person.
 
TowinKarz said:
It's going to take a couple years of court reviews, challenges and shake-outs to figure out exactly what is and ins't allowed under yet another nice-intentions-but-little-else federal law, and it will get sorted out.

In the meantime, I'll be soliciting all my sex in the mens room of bus stations like a NORMAL person.
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Lot lizards, we're bringing them back.
 
Attorney General Ken Paxton announced today that his office’s prosecution of Backpage.com has resulted in the company pleading guilty to human trafficking in Texas and its CEO Carl Ferrer pleading guilty to money laundering. This comes less than a week after the attorney general’s office assisted the Department of Justice with permanently shutting down the website.

Ferrer will be sentenced to up to five years in prison once he’s fulfilled the terms of his plea agreement with Attorney General Paxton’s office. His cooperation in the ongoing investigation into Backpage could lead to other criminal charges against individuals associated with the company.


As the largest online sex trafficking marketplace in the world, Backpage facilitated the sex trafficking of innocent women and children through sites it ran for 943 locations in 97 countries and 17 languages. It was involved in 73 percent of all child trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Taking down Backpage and obtaining a criminal conviction for the company and its CEO represents a significant victory in the fight against human trafficking in Texas and around the world,” Attorney General Paxton said. “I want to thank the Attorney General of California, the U.S. Department of Justice, federal law enforcement officials, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez, and the prosecutors and law enforcement in my office for their outstanding collaborative work on this investigation and prosecution.”

In October 2016, Attorney General Paxton’s Law Enforcement Division arrested Ferrer in Houston. It also executed a search warrant on the Dallas headquarters of Backpage, uncovering evidence that was critical in building a case against Ferrer and the company.
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https://breaking911.com/just-in-backpage-com-pleads-guilty-to-human-trafficking-in-texas/
 
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The 61-page indictment for Backpage.com was unsealed, for anyone interested in the specifics of the actual case.

According to the indictments, one of the contributing factors was that Backpage was running ads that contained pictures of children who were the victims of sex-trafficking, and even though they were deleting and adjusting the ads when it was brought to their attention, they really weren't doing much apart from just taking the child's listed age off of the ad before reposting it. Bear in mind that when they say "ads" they're not talking about internet ads like the hyperlink GIFs, they're talking about actual "personal ad"-style advertisements.

They were also failing to meaningfully implement a warning system whenever a user was searching for categories that would be indicative of child prostitution, and not only did they fail to meaningfully implement that system, but what system they did end up using in cooperation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), they ended up severely hamstringing because it "wouldn't be beneficial for public relations" and to avoid "making too many referrals." Why report as many as 500 cases a day when it comes to missing and exploited children when you can just limit it to 16? Seems normal.

I can appreciate that a lot of people have a lot of concerns about where this case was going and what sparked the initial, sudden jolt that tore the thing through the floor, but the more I keep leafing through these indictments the more it's pretty clear that some intensely shifty businesses was going on over at Backpage, and not all of it was just related to child trafficking.
 
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It's HK-47 said:
end up using in cooperation with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), they ended up severely hamstringing because it "wouldn't be beneficial for public relations" and to avoid "making too many referrals."
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Holy fucking shit just that one paragraph is damning as hell. I hope the operators get shivved in prison, that plea deal is a disgrace.
 
It's HK-47 said:
I can appreciate that a lot of people have a lot of concerns about where this case was going and what sparked the initial, sudden jolt that tore the thing through the floor, but the more I keep leafing through these indictments the more it's pretty clear that some intensely shifty businesses was going on over at Backpage, and not all of it was just related to child trafficking.
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Exactly. The legislation just seemed too perfectly worded to nail Backpage's hide to the wall. Their shady dealings have been quite well known for a long time and they have always managed to skate. Until now. Good luck, fuckers.
 
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I'm still rummaging through this indictment and it just keeps getting worse. Being a gross website founded with the sole intention of peddling hookers is one thing, but these guys were seriously dedicated to just being as sleazy as possible. Hiring a secondary company with the sole purpose of hunting down more prostitutes to rope them into your service? Working directly with sex-trafficking victims to help them reword ads so that it can be published on the website now that it technically adheres to the guidelines?

Then you start getting into the stuff like how they weren't even requiring age verification after all this time, how they weren't bothering to take down nude pictures of a murder victim, how they started going out of their way to found secondary companies in order to commit money laundering, and even after getting all of their accounts locked they'd still just keep on advising customers on different ways to keep shoveling money at them. This was an astoundingly filthy company, and they knew exactly what was going on the entire time.

Christ, this place was just begging to get clothes-lined by the feds if this is how they were conducting themselves, no wonder they took them down so hard.
 
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Okay, that's some pretty alarming shit to read through considering they doing this knowingly just in order to make money. Prostitution is one thing that most people are okay with. Knowingly posting CP and trying to cover it up is something way different.
 
I still think holding all site owners responsible for the content of their users is still dumb as shit as long as the owners are making serious good-faith efforts to stop that kind of shit. These guys, however, clearly did no such thing. Lock 'em up!
 
I don't know why some of you seem surprised over this. The US feds don't give a fuck about "muh rights."

They will literally write new laws in order to take down your website. They will kill you and plant evidence.

They could remove Kiwi Farms from existence and execute all the admins and all we could do is shit our pants and do nothing.
 
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