Silicon Valley on edge as lawmakers target online sex trafficking
Silicon Valley on edge as lawmakers target online sex
trafficking
By Evan Halper August 31, 2017 5:50 PM
After a sustained assault from lawmakers, investigators
and victims groups, the website Backpage.com agreed early this year to shut
down its lucrative adult page, which had become a well-known sex-trafficking
hub.
It wasn’t long before the company was back in the
headlines.
The adult section was gone, but the sex traffic was not.
In May, authorities in Stockton charged 23 people with involvement in a
trafficking ring that was using another corner of Backpage to market sex with
girls as young as 14. A Chicago teenager allegedly trafficked on Backpage had
her throat slit in June.
The resilience of this platform — host to an estimated
70% of online sex trafficking at its peak — is a long-running public relations
mess for the tech industry. Internet freedom laws held sacred in Silicon Valley
have helped shield Backpage from prosecution and lawsuits by victims of
gruesome sex trafficking.
Now the tech industry’s Backpage problem has evolved into
a full-blown political crisis. An unexpectedly large coalition of lawmakers is
aiming to hold sites like Backpage liable for trafficking, sparking panic in
Silicon Valley over the far-reaching consequences for the broader Internet.
The noisy political battle is forging unusual alliances
in Washington. And caught in the middle are some of the most influential
lawmakers in California.
They find themselves struggling to reconcile a sex
trafficking scourge that has hit their state hard with a remedy that Silicon
Valley cautions would be a disaster for a free and open Internet.
Trade groups representing Google, Facebook and other
Internet giants warn of a “devastating impact” on the tech industry if the 1996
Communications Decency Act is tinkered with in the way lawmakers envision to
hold Backpage and others liable for criminal material on their pages.
They project “mass removals of legitimate content” by
social media and other firms scrambling to shield themselves from a deluge of
lawsuits from trial lawyers and prosecutors. The ACLU joined the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and other groups in warning lawmakers that if they pass the
law, every one of the millions of social media postings placed online daily
becomes a potential liability for the company hosting it.
But much of Congress is unimpressed by the predictions of
calamity.
The lawmakers have grown impatient with Silicon Valley’s
limited success at self-policing, and its flat-out refusal to consider
modifications to its cherished immunity from the illegal behavior of posters,
as enshrined by the two-decade-old act.
Judges keep returning to that immunity in dismissing
claims against Backpage, sometimes in the face of what they acknowledge may be
compelling evidence that the firm condoned trafficking.
“The Communications Decency Act is a well-intentioned
law, but it was never intended to protect sex traffickers,” said Sen. Rob
Portman (R-Ohio).
More than a quarter of lawmakers in Congress have already
signed on as sponsors of the nascent bill Portman is taking a lead on that
would change the act, or to a similar measure in the House. It is a formidable
show of bipartisan support that is jolting tech companies. The momentum grew in
August, when a Sacramento judge threw out state criminal pimping charges
against Backpage, citing the immunity from such prosecution the company receives
under the act.
California prosecutors had built much of their case
around allegations that Backpage helped traffickers and pimps edit their ads to
evade law enforcement. “Until Congress sees fit to amend the immunity law, the
broad reach … of the Communications Decency Act even applies to those alleged
to support the exploitation of others by human trafficking,” wrote Superior
Court Judge Lawrence Brown.
The judge is allowing prosecutors to proceed with
money-laundering charges against Backpage, which is accused of illegally using
shell companies to trick credit card firms refusing to do business with
Backpage into processing the payments of its customers.
The company denied helping to craft any of the sex
trafficking ads that landed on its site. It is fighting the money-laundering
charges. Company officials declined to comment on the congressional effort it
has inspired, directing a reporter instead to the opposition campaign mounted
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and
Technology — groups that receive substantial funding from big technology
companies.
Almost every attorney general in the country wants the
decency act changed to strip legal immunity for sites that condone or promote
trafficking. Fifty of them wrote a letter to Congress a few weeks ago citing
several horrific cases in which Backpage was used to traffic teenage girls.
They warned the act has “resulted in companies like Backpage.com remaining
outside the reach of state and local law enforcement in these kinds of cases.”
California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said the site would
have been shut down long ago if not for the immunity. “We would have been able
to stop the abuse and in some cases the death of some of these young people who
got caught up in these sex trafficking rings,” Becerra said.
Missing from the long list of sponsors of Portman’s bill
is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who aggressively went after Backpage while
serving as the state’s attorney general, and in 2013 joined colleagues in other
states in signing a letter with the same demand state attorneys general sent
Congress this week.
The hesitance of Harris and California Sen. Dianne
Feinstein to sign on reflects how cautiously lawmakers close to Silicon Valley
are treading.
The indictment Harris filed against Backpage last year
was a memorable career moment, with a three-year investigation leading to the
arrest of the company chief executive as he returned from a trip abroad, and a
large raid on corporate headquarters in Dallas. But stripping immunity under
Internet law from companies like Backpage is complicated business that could
have unexpected fallout. Harris still wants the decency act changed, but
appears unpersuaded that the Portman plan is targeted enough.
Other California lawmakers are also uneasy about it. Only
a smattering of the state’s immense delegation has signed on to the House
measure.
Among those opposing it is Rep. Ro Khanna, the former
Stanford University economist now representing Silicon Valley in Congress. He
is loathe to tinker with what he says is a pillar of the Internet economy. The
protection online companies are given against illegal material that users lob
on their platforms was foundational to the explosive growth of the industry, he
said.
“It is a reason America dominates tech instead of Europe
or China, where such immunity doesn’t exist,” Khanna said. He said he feared
even a narrowly targeted tweak could be exploited by lawyers and activists to
attack a broad range of Internet content they find objectionable.
Opponents also warn that stripping the immunity may
merely force Web companies to less aggressively police their content, because
knowing what illegal material is on their sites could increase liability under
the proposed changes to the act. They say companies should instead be pressured
to step up their enforcement efforts and innovation of anti-trafficking
software.
Tech companies, one of the most dominant lobbying forces
in Washington, have been caught off guard by the fight. It wasn’t long ago that
there was scant support for changes to the immunity laws that Internet firms
rely on, according to Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute
at Santa Clara University.
“This has moved faster than tech companies can even
respond to it,” said Goldman, who argues that the measure would merely drive
sex trafficking to places where it is harder for law enforcement to find and
undermine the innovation economy in the process. “Can you come up with a topic
more troubling to a legislator than sex trafficking? The argument that the bill
may not solve the problem and actually create new problems is hard to make.
Legislators are thinking, if it has a chance to help, why not try?”
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