Trump signs controversial FOSTA

[Guest]

The Washington Post reports

President Trump signed a bill Wednesday that gives federal and state prosecutors greater power to pursue websites that host sex-trafficking ads and enables victims and state attorneys general to file lawsuits against those sites....

... Advocates for sex workers also criticized the bill as depriving them of a safe place to screen customers, as well as removing a tool for law enforcement to track pimps, locate missing children and build criminal cases. “Shutting down every service provider and website will not end sex trafficking,” said Jean Bruggeman, executive director of Freedom Network USA, a coalition of anti-trafficking advocates. “What it will do is push traffickers to overseas websites that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, making it harder to prosecute them and harder to find them through the victims.”...

...Ads by sex workers are already closing and moving to less well-known or dark websites, said Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, an author and expert witness on human trafficking... But there are thousands of others out there waiting,” many of them out of reach of American law enforcement.

Jackman, T. (2018, April 11). Trump signs 'FOSTA' bill targeting online sex trafficking, enables states and victims to pursue websites. Retrieved April 12, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tru ... 39b428e40d

If the above is true, then Congress and the White House have just made one of the worst mistakes ever. There are better ways to fight trafficking as Jeff Waldorf points out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0SWy7mBsnM

[_MeDotOrg]

From my reading of the article, the government is faced with two unenviable choices: If these websites are illegal here, they will surely set up shop somewhere else, outside the reach of law enforcement. The argument is that by protecting the right of websites to exist here, the traffickers themselves will be vulnerable to prosecution in the United States, where law enforcement has more jurisdiction and control, and where warrants aren't going over International boundaries. But if the prosecutors are too vigorous, the websites go overseas, which is a big win for the prosecutors, right?

The problem is that the websites will still exist here, but because the website are not hosted in the United States, law enforcement will not have the snooping and sniffing capabilities they have under current U.S. jurisdiction.

In either scenario the website still exists. No one can will stop the website at the border. But if it exists in the U.S., there can be search warrants and prosecutions. It's a fine balancing act, and I'm not going to pretend that there is no moral gray area. I reminds me a bit of when the government gives clean needles to drug addicts: It's a pragmatic response.

[_DoubtingThomas]

New Vox on the possibility of the internet ending as we know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBaqDjPCH8k