This is not exactly the introduction issue I wanted to my blog. This blog entry is an answer to youtube discussions I have had, and I would put this very thing up in a youtube vid, except I'm not quite ready for prime time. Since it's timely issue and time was running out as I struggled with the vid, I decided I had to write it instead.
It looks like the first issue I'll discuss, damn the timing, is the censorship of Craigslist Adult Services section. This is in answer to the anti-prostitution side who think this is wonderful news.
That is even if you know no molesters, no traffickers will be brought to justice because of it. There's no logical or causal connection between closing Craigslist and bringing anyone to justice. That's obvious. My educated, intuitive guess that it will prevent close to zero people from being enslaved, if not actually zero. Why? Because people who manage the trafficking trade have two principle marketable skills: chutzpa and an utter lack of morals. Neither of those are going to change when you censor a website. You might temporarily lower their profits, but generally, as blatant sociopaths with few lucrative skills, they can't work anywhere else. If they're not arrested, they're not stopped.
Now, some of you have erroneously pointed out that Craigslist Adult Services wasn't protected speech since it was illegal. No, many of its ads were illegal.. According to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has been adjudicated and confirmed repeatedly, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This isn't just legal theory. Cases have been brought against Craigslist before for the content of ads on the site, and not just in the Adult Services section, and Craigslist won every time due to Section 230. If you think Section 230 only protects perverts, pimps and pornographers, you're wrong. The entire Internet runs on that clause. If it weren't for it, such companies as AT&T and Verizon wouldn't even offer you the web. And really, if the authorities had a leg to stand on with Craigslist, they could use the same legal logic with AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other ISP's for even making the content available.
Previous attempts by authorities to close down or censor Craigslist were resounding, embarrassing failures. Dart v. Craigslist, handed down in 2009, ended with the Sheriff of Cook County Illinois getting, what they call in legalese, depantsed. In 2008, the South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened Craigslist with criminal prosecution if it didn't pull all its adult ads, and Craigslist preemptively sued the state in Craigslist vs. McMaster. The Attorney General then realized his case was so hopeless, and the state could lose so much money, that he settled out of Court. In legalese, that's called a wedgie. Craigslist's position was that the Attorney General even threatening that was a violation of their civil rights, and legal indications were, they were going to win.
So, Craigslist was legally safe, that is until the attorneys general tricked them into charging for their ads, thus leaving them open to charges of profiting from prostitution. In November 2008, a coalition of states attorneys general, led by Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal, persuaded Craigslist to kindly help them by getting credit card and phone numbers of Adult Services ad customers, and to, oh, collect a nominal fee, purportedly to give it a paper trail and suppressing the volume. So, Craigslist only charged for Adult Services at the direct urging of the same state attorneys general who now smear them. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's Attorney General running for Senate, who publicly praised Craigslist when it started accepting money for Adult Services, now criticizes Craigslist for $44 million from the ads in the last year.
Yes, before Craigslist took their suggestions, placing an Adult Services ad was free. This goes to show: never trust a politician running for high office. If you go back further, Craigslist had no Adult or Erotic Services section. They added this section to prevent people from posting adult ads in other sections of Craigslist. Apparently, this was a real problem on the site. So, Craigslist got into the sex industry an afterthought and only began to get revenue for it at the request of the very authorities that then smeared them. Craig Newmark is not, like, say, Larry Flynt. It wasn't in his original business plan. Now, that the adult services section is closed, presumably erotic ads will end up back on other sections, and be harder to spot, except by people who will be nauseated the most by them, and meanwhile, the ads will be placed for free.
(By the way, $44 million in a year at $10 an ad means that 4.4 million adult ads were placed on Craigslist . . . in a single year. An astounding number. More about that later.)
Now that I've covered the legal side, maybe you think the closing at least be effective in fighting prostitution anyway? No, it won't be effective, and that isn't the point of closing it, as I will show. I realize those of you in the anti-prostitution camp have absolutely no respect for an adult prostitute and client having consensual sex for money. Even so, if the ad is placed openly, then why is it necessary to shut the section down when you could hire a some low paid worker with your local government to moderate the site, call Craigslist to have improper ads removed, and call local police to bust them? How expensive can it be to have somebody sit on their butt and look at Craigslist all day? We have so many unemployed people. Pay minimum wage or contract it out to India. I mean, this is the information age, don't we have to adapt like this?
Or, lacking that, why couldn't private anti-prostitution volunteers have done this, local initiatives enforcing community standards and all that? No, I don't like my suggestions, but despite any oughtas I have, prostitution is illegal, and these solutions would be acceptable to me if it caught some traffickers or molesters, and if the alternative is to take the whole thing down, or far worse, have people get away with slavery and rape. It's less damaging to all of us, and it least it goes after people actually responsible for crimes.
So, all those nasty perverts and their hookers are right there, why don't you do this?
That's a rhetorical question: I already know why. The ads disgust you. The people who hate prostitution and pornography the most are those least able to deal with it. So, even if you're absolutely certain you will catch sooo many traffickers and molesters, not to mention ordinary SCUMMY prostitutes and customers, you can't make yourself look at those ads. I understand, this not really something that can be compromised. You can't reason with a gag reflex, and I can understand a gag reflex, if not exactly the trigger. I totally know those of you who hate adult, consensual prostitutes and clients, can't read the ads without losing your shit, your lunch and your minds. I've seen it happen in simple discussions about porn. So, I know it will happen if you try to read the ads.
Same with authorities, many of them can't handle it either, and though some on the pro-legalization side have already pointed out that Craigslist Adult Services, in fact, was a demonstrated tool for law enforcement to make busts that it used countless times. But I know there's a flaw to this point. Other than the aforementioned gag reflex, I know authorities still had a few major problems with it.
First, they did not want to be bothered with doing that policing because of the potential embarrassment when they fail. and they would fail due to the sheer number of those ads, 4.4 million ads in one year. If informed of all of them, vice would have a lot of work to do. That's probably more than 10,000 times the number of vice cops and feds available to follow the ads. It would be impossible to chase a fraction of them, and almost every time, the only thing they would yield from it is the arrest of a single, probably independent, adult prostitute, the sort who considers themselves a sex worker and not a victim. For vice, this would be like spending your entire day, every day, busting jaywalkers. The manpower expense in doing it would immense.
But far worse than the workload if you're in law enforcement: out of the tens of thousands of those ads yielding very little, it's the ones you don't follow up on that might be the real tragedy. The one on there for forty days in which a cruel, murderous pimp had a whole harem of girls and boys fourteen and younger who got infected with HIV. And that, for you, is a possible embarrassment, or even a bomb under your career, a civil servant's nightmare. Institutionally, no civil agency wants that. As far as the authorities are concerned generally, the sad fact is, it's better if they never had a chance to capture the child-trafficking ring, rather than have a blatant chance with a Craigslist ads and blow it. Embarrassing blown chances had already happened and were guaranteed to keep happening. Unfortunately, no matter how many successes authorities had, people would not understand all the failures. That is, unless they shifted the blame to Craigslist.
However, the most compelling reason is the high profile of Craigslist Adult Services threatened to normalize prostitution. The fact is, the sheer number of those ads, 4.4 million in a year, proves that it is already normal, if not exactly mainstream. Both anti-prostitution people and authorities tacitly agree, rather than deal with this fact, it's better to sweep it under the rug, shoot the messenger, stick your head in the sand, cover your ass, and hide the trail of metaphors with moral outrage.
But . . . at least you get rid of those nauseating ads so you can enjoy breakfast again. So, the reason for the harassment and censorship of Craigslist, no matter if you're an attorney general, a vice cop, or an anti-prostitution activist, comes down to two things: comfort and embarrassment.
Even if you despise prostitution and reject everything I say, where is triumph in knowing that if society is given free speech, what you get is something you feel you have to squelch to “save children?” And you've discovered that by simply giving people an opportunity for legitimate, communication, free trade, or even courtship, that the results are something that fills you with such disgust that you're relieved to the point of smugness when its closed down? Don't you at least find the results of the Craigslist experiment, by your own point of view . . . discouraging? What happens when the entire Internet is considered just a tool of prostitution? The same principles that allowed Craigslist also allows internet service providers to exist. It's common knowledge that pornography is a huge part of the Internet, and trysts on some basis are being arranged all the time with it. How different is Craigslist from the whole web? Why not close down Verizon for providing Craigslist adult services on your browser.
And if 4.4 million ads are any indication, how is the web really different from . . . humankind?
BTW, you could tell I'm pro-legalization, but I don't think it's really going to happen in . . . 500 years, normal or not, and we all have to live today. I'm sorry to disappoint you in the pro-legalization camp with that assessment, and I'll tell you why I think that in an upcoming post or video.
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