Last week, Senators Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
introduced a bill aimed at cracking down on child sex
trafficking that could ultimately harm web publishers, adult
entertainers, and free speech. The bill sets up onerous and
invasive new registry requirements for those who post and host
adult service advertisements. And it holds online publishers
criminally liable not only for illegal activity facilitated though
their ad sections but also for failing to keep—and make available
to attorneys general—proper records on all adults advertising legal
or illegal erotic services.
The “Stop
Advertising Victis of Exploitation (SAVE) Act“—crafted after a
related bill that passed the House in May—makes it a federal
crime for any content platform to host an advertisement that
“facilitates or is designed to facilitate” sex acts with anyone
under 18 years old. At first blush, that may sound unobjectionable:
Of course it should be a crime to sell minors for sex.
But, of course, that already is a crime. This bil is about holding
web platforms (like Craigslist) criminally liable for
anything that criminals may post to them.
“This is a major liability risk for operators of user-generated
content platforms, who host high volumes of content and have little
to no control over what users decide to upload,” notes
Emma Llansó at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
With penalties including up 10 years in prison on the line, sites
might decide just to prohibit ads of a sexual nature—including
personals, where many sexual services ads end up
running—altogether.
The SAVE Act would also require all sites that host adult
advertising (whether paid or free/user-generated) to review ads
before publication, request a valid telephone number and credit
card number from each poster, “prohibit the use of euphemism and
codewords” in ads, and prohibit the use of prepaid debit cards or
cryptocurrencies in placing paid ads. For sites that run
paid adult advertisements, publishers would be responsible
for verifying the identity of every person who placed an adult ad
by obtaining a copy of a government-issued ID containing their
name, photo, and date of birth. The publisher would have to hold on
to these records for seven years and make them “available to the
(U.S.) Attorney General, any designee of the Attorney General, the
attorney general of a State, and any designee of the attorney
general of a State for inspection at all reasonable times.”
The bill insists that information won’t be used against
registrants in criminal proceedings unrelated to sex trafficking.
But knowing how fond government and law enforcement officials are
of privacy and keeping promises, you can see why those advertising
adult services—many of which are for perfectly legal activities,
such as phone sex lines, dominatrix services, and stripping; many
of which aren’t—may be reluctant to hand over such information.
“An online identity verification requirement would
unquestionably have a chilling effect on adults’ willingness to
engage in communications about lawful goods and services and would
be a significant intrusion into their right to privacy,” writes
Llansó.
Similar identification requirements in the Child Online
Protection Act led to that law being struck
down due, in part, to the burden these requirements place
on speakers, listeners, and hosts of protected speech.
Illegal immigrants and others without government issued IDs
would be barred from legal advertising online, leaving them to rely
on more dangerous methods of finding clients. Those running
organized, professional sex trafficking organizations, however, are
probably savvy enough to get and submit decent fake IDs (or simply
turn to more underground methods of advertising online themselves).
As adult workers shy away from placing ads, online publishers
will lose money on one of the last classified sections that’s been
making any money. Meanwhile, they’ll face a minimum fine of
$250,000 for improper record-keeping and jail time if anything
illegal slips through. Ultimately nobody wins—except the
politicians who appear to be getting tough on the child
sex trafficking “epidemic”. On his Facebook page June 30, Sen. Kirk
posted:
Every year, 100,000 children are at risk of being trafficked
against their will in the United States. Learn more to
help: http://ift.tt/TzV1qh #NotForSale
There’s not any way to refute Kirk’s “100,000 children” claim,
because Kirk doesn’t define what “at risk of” means. Theoretically,
all children in the United States are at risk of
being trafficked. Theoretically, I’m at risk of drowning in a
bucket or getting eaten by a cannibal.
None of these things, however, are terribly likely to happen. Or
even marginally likely to happen. The likelihood of a U.S. child
being kidnapped by a stranger for any reason is incredibly
small (about 100
children each year, or 3 percent of all kidnapping cases).
But Sen. Kirk’s website is full of dubious
numbers and scary sounding pronouncements. “Backpage.com sells
modern day slavery,” it proclaims. In one press release, Kirk
insists that 100 percent of “dates” set up through Backpage.com are
for prostitution, “often child prostitution.” The site intersperses
videos of sad-eyed children and forlorn teen girls with statistics
about adult prostitution and adult advertisements in general. And
though he touts the SAVE Act as a way to fight child sex slavery,
he mentions nothing about who the bill actually targets or how it
actually works.
For a more detailed look at the SAVE Act’s flaws,
check out this analysis from The Center for Democracy and
Technology. The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has a thorough takedown
of the House version of this legislation. “Lawmaking is messy
stuff, and mistakes like this happen,” the ACLU offered charitably.
“Working to combat coerced or underage prostitution is incredibly
important; however, legislation must be carefully drafted to be
sure to protect our free speech rights online.”
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