The raid of Backpage.com’s Dallas office and the arrest of its CEO is an election-year stunt, not a good-faith action by law enforcement.
– Liz McDougall
For the past five years, pompous politicians have repeatedly attempted to bully and threaten Backpage into removing its designated escort ad section in the same way they terrorized Craigslist into doing it, and like all bullies they’ve grown increasingly crimson-faced and apoplectic as the Backpage has not only ignored their toothless threats, but beaten them at every turn in court. The reason this has happened is that career politicians are narcissistic sociopaths who can’t grasp when they’re in the wrong and are no more capable of rethinking their tactics than a tribe of rather slow-witted gibbons might be; because Craigslist backed down after a bit of posturing and saber-rattling, naturally the politicians assumed the same schoolyard tactics would work on Backpage. Unfortunately for them,
Craig Newmark is a shy, timid fellow who may have Asperger’s Syndrome and was unable to cope with tyrannical demands and false accusations from people who relish upsetting others. So he simply shut down his “adult services” section, thus granting the witch hunters their empty symbolic victory and allowing the whores who advertise on Craigslist to return to the personals and therapeutic services sections where they posted their ads before the government demanded the creation of an “adult services” section in the first place…[however] Village Voice Media is not run by gentle, socially-awkward souls who shrink from confrontation, and its owners have no intention of running from this fight; some commentators have observed that they actually seem to relish it, and why shouldn’t they? The attorneys general don’t have a legal leg to stand on, and they know it; they’re just trying to blow down paper targets with hot air…
Time after time after time after time after time, judges have slapped down attempts to hold Backpage liable for the content of its ads, and for good reason: if publishers (whether traditional or electronic) were responsible for third-party content, nobody would dare risk hosting such content (from newspaper ads to WordPress blogs) for fear of being sued out of existence. But neither common sense nor the common good ever stopped a politician, so last week Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California (who is running for US Senate) conspired with the attorney general of Texas to commit the blatant crime of falsely arresting Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer. Though the headline writer is a slackjawed moron who uses the phrase “sex trafficking” to mean “sex work”, the author of this article agrees with my analysis:
It takes a lot to turn a publisher of sex ads into a First Amendment hero. But the attorney general of California has managed the feat. By charging Carl Ferrer…with pimping and sex trafficking in minors, Kamala Harris has seriously breached the constitutional wall meant to protect the free press. Ferrer — and the two controlling shareholders of the online classified marketplace Backpage — aren’t charged with actually arranging sex for pay. They’ve been criminally charged based on a claim that Backpage is designed to, and does, publish third-party ads for sex trafficking. On this theory, essentially any publication that sells ads could be outlawed — and that’s almost any publication on earth…
Harris has knowingly and with malice aforethought arrested a publisher for publishing; that makes her guilty of several federal crimes I can think of, and I’m sure a creative prosecutor could come up with a lot more. Not that she’s ever likely to be charged; witch-hunters rarely are, certainly not during the witch hysteria and not generally after it’s over either. The reason is evident from that asinine headline and from the subtext of this article in the generally anti-whore publication hypocritically named Vice; though it quotes several sex worker rights activists, it gives just as much space to prohibitionist propaganda and is laced through with garbage like this:
Backpage notorious among law enforcement…the risk of physical violence or rape among sex workers who advertise…online is…still ever present…Backpage has become synonymous with sex trafficking…E.S. who said she was a forced into prostitution on the site when she was 13…The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has also said there has been a more than 800 percent increase over the last five years in reports of suspected child sex trafficking, with much of it happening online…Backpage made it easy to earn cash fast, which isn’t necessarily a good thing: If it wasn’t for the website, [one incarcerated sex worker] says, she might not have fallen into sex work in the first place…
With that kind of attitude so common among the people who are supposed to be questioning government pronouncements, is it any wonder Harris felt emboldened to her blatantly banana-republic actions? Which, by the by, have now extended to Backpage’s owners:
All three top executives of Backpage.com are being held without bond in a jail in Sacramento, California, on sex-crime charges. Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, listed as owners of the website through a Dutch corporation, were booked late Monday…Liz McDougall, a First Amendment attorney who represents Backpage…[explained that] the charges were…”flatly illegal. They ignore the holdings of numerous federal courts that the First Amendment protects the ads on Backpage.com. The actions…also violate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act preempting state actions such as this one and immunizing web hosts of third-party created content”…
All three men were granted bail yesterday afternoon after a secret hearing in which a judge slapped down the state’s argument that all of their money is contaminated by sex rays so they couldn’t use it to post bond. Lacey & Larkin are going to fight this evil lunacy, and they’re no strangers to being arrested on bullshit charges by megalomaniacal politicians; Loony Joe Arpaio tried that in 2007, and when the dust settled Lacey & Larkin were awarded $3.75 million because of it. So here’s hoping that history repeats itself, and that this time the award is at least 10 times as high and is accompanied by criminal charges against their persecutors.
