Internet Censorship Bill Could Spell Disaster for Speech and Innovation

The Act is as bad as the EFF says it is. 18 U.S.C. 1591 makes illegal "participation in a venture" which financially benefits from trafficking. This bill defines "participation in a venture" to include "knowing conduct by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports, or facilitates the violation."

That language vastly expands potential liability. If a website knows that its services are being used to somehow assist in sex trafficking,[1] the website could be as culpable as the persons getting paid to coordinate the shipping of sex slaves. It's completely bananas.

Here are the sponsors:

Rob Portman (R, Ohio) Richard Blumenthal (D, Connecticut) John McCain (R, Arizona) Claire McCaskill (D, Missouri) John Cornyn (R, Texas) Heidi Heitkamp (D, North Dakota)

[1] It's pretty much impossible to run a website that allows people to communicate that isn't used for illegal purposes. For example, GMail is definitely used to facilitate a wide variety of illegal conduct. Up to now, for criminal liability to exist, you had to go beyond knowing that your service was used to assist criminal activity to taking special measures to assist that criminal activity. This bill basically lowers the standard from "having intent to assist the illegal activity" to "knowing that what you're doing will somehow assist the illegal activity."

It might be a possible minor win for privacy - if collecting certain information might mean that you know that your service somehow assists illegal activity, then one defense against it is not collecting that information.

The real way to fight trafficking is legalization and regulation, including interviews with sex workers to detect coercion, then followups to help them.

Since fixing the laws is going to take a while, we've taken it upon ourselves. We're building such a superior solution for both sex providers and clients, it'll hurt trafficking like iTunes hurt music piracy.

This is not some covert attack on Internet businesses, it is a well-intentioned but misguided attempt by these senators to prevent adult service websites (namely backpage.com) from enabling pimps and organized crime to traffic victims with impunity under Section 230. Backpage actively helps buyers and sellers remain anonymous specifically for adult services, and provides the means to avoid detection by law enforcement - Bitcoin payments, encouraging prepaid credit cards, not requiring phone numbers for verification, stripping metadata from images, etc. Interestingly, it requires phone number verification for other classified sections on its website like cars and boats, but for adult services it even offers a 10% discount for using Bitcoin.

There could be a legal argument made that Backpage induces trafficking on its website by not requiring verification for adult services, and is therefore involved in the creation of its content and thus not protected under Section 230. Section 230 could also be amended specifically for adult content to require verification and restrict anonymous payment methods. But the EFF is absolutely correct that in its current form, this would be terrible for anyone hosting content on the Internet because this amendment could be broadly applied to illegal content posted on any content providers website, and creates an incentive to have no filtering of content.

One recent development is this Washington Post article that uncovered evidence that Backpage has actually been actively promoting sex trafficking posts to its site [1]. This would make Backpage unequivocally the publisher of its content, and therefore criminally liable. So it is entirely possible that this amendment will not be needed to bring down the human filth that operate on backpage, but some legal remedy is certainly needed to combat the many existing and future websites that will enable sex trafficking.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/backpage-...

I'm not a lawyer but what does this mean for apps like Signal?