What happens now with FOSTA?

[MzDDD]

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/s60

Two Nay votes in Senate. Two.

When I posted about this when it passed the House, I had just watched a Representative speak about what a wonderful achievement it was, and idk if it was hypocrisy or delusion I was listening to, but she made me want to vomit.

I'm glad Paul Rand has balls to stand up to both parties. That's why I'm not a Democrat anymore and became Libertarian.

 

[AudriTwo]

I'm glad Paul Rand has balls to stand up to both parties. That's why I'm not a Democrat anymore and became Libertarian.

Rand Paul is hilarious. His neighbor feud was him doing the most libertarian thing ever. Dumping yard waste on his neighbors property.

 

[Deleted member 37064]

You are mixing your Grift Queens up. That was Pelosi.

Very true. But, with many of them, there really is no difference between them, male or female.

 

[fandango]

Or better yet, when Feinstein said "Well, in order to see what's in it, we have to pass it."

I totally misread that at first and spent way too long thinking "What the hell has Harvey Weinstein got to do with any of this?"

 

[MzDDD]

Rand Paul is hilarious. His neighbor feud was him doing the most libertarian thing ever. Dumping yard waste on his neighbors property.

Yeah that made me laugh my ass off!!

 

[Guy]

I think the ladies who do Skype shows (SkyPrivate, LiveCamModelShows, CamModelDirectory, etc.) are especially worried. I mean, even the Reddit "SUGAR DADDY" forum is gone. It's craziness.

You know who I think is going to be affected the most? Adult dating sites. There have been cases of escorts using casual sex sites like Adult FriendFinder and Fling for their services.
Sites like those will almost certainly be targeted and shut down.

 

[yummybrownfox]

You know who I think is going to be affected the most? Adult dating sites. There have been cases of escorts using casual sex sites like Adult FriendFinder and Fling for their services.
Sites like those will almost certainly be targeted and shut down.

Craigslist personals is gone. Reddit ‘Sugar Daddy’ forum is gone. Seeking Arrangement and Established Men (sugar dating sites) are still there for now.

 

[Vera]

I posted this in MO but hopefully there will be a pocket veto.

The Constitution grants the president 10 days to review a measure passed by the Congress. If the president has not signed the bill after 10 days, it becomes law without his signature. However, if Congress adjourns during the 10-day period, the bill does not become law.

That quote is taken from https://www.senate.gov/reference/glossary_term/pocket_veto.htm

FOSTA/SESTA was passed by the Senate March 21. Trump hasn't signed it yet. We are past the ten day period for the President to sign the bill *and* Congress adjourned the 26th without Trump making a decision, which would typically mean a pocket veto. However, I don't put it past some shithead saying Congress wasn't actually adjourned because the holiday was planned. Congress is a total shitshow right now and that sounds totally in character.

(Reminder to vote in your 2018 midterms! Here's a calendar. This shit is SUPER IMPORTANT. A lot of the challenging candidates are doing AMAs on Reddit leading up to the elections, so check those out too. http://www.politics1.com/calendar.htm )

Congress resumes the 6th which is when I guess we can expect some closure.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/2018_schedule.htm

TLDR, hopefully the bill will be pocket vetoed and we will have some more time to neuter it.

I absolutely despise the current administration, but if Trump looks the other way long enough to keep this (horrifically bipartisan!) bill from passing it would be an enormous boon. God knows he has a taste for us heauxs if nothing else. My indie work has already been kneecapped and the sheer invasiveness of this bill is unconscionable.

All this comes with the warning note that I am mere smutpusher with an intense interest in politics. I welcome corrections and civil discussion but have zero interest in arguing.

 

[dilligaf0]

It also depends on if Congress actually adjourned. They can leave and still technically be in session (pro forma). All they need to do is have a few meetings of only a few minutes each.
This was done in the past to keep a President from making recess appointments.

 

[Vera]

@dilligaf Thanks for articulating that better than I could have. Ostensibly they have been adjourned but it is hard to know about the status of the bill without any information on its status or reports of whether or not Congress has been meeting.

 

[dilligaf0]

@dilligaf Thanks for articulating that better than I could have. Ostensibly they have been adjourned but it is hard to know about the status of the bill without any information on its status or reports of whether or not Congress has been meeting.

Congress does so little, it's hard to tell if they're working or not.

Usually, not.

 

[TajaEthereal]

It appears that congress stalled in sending the bill to Trump. Which means they waited until their recess was over to avoid a pocket veto. Sneaky modafuckas. But now www.backpage.com has been officially seized and there will be an updated statement at 6pm est in regards to that from the Department Of Justice. I'm curious to know if this is when we'll get an official statement about FOSTA?

 

[Val Vega]

And The Erotic Review just blocked US users. Welp, onto the streets where Johns and police will harass sex workers even more. Good job, motherfuckers.

 

[Val Vega]

I guess we'll have sex worker parades on Main Street now. We should have an ACF float. Giant boobs that shoot paper tokens out.

 

[weirdbr]

I'm curious to know if this is when we'll get an official statement about FOSTA?

Probably not, because the law has not been signed yet (as far as everyone knows), so there's no way in hell that the FBI would get a warrant to seize assets in multiple countries (they've seized domains from multiple registries) with that - the more likely explanation is that the grand jury found something that isn't covered by section 230 of the CDA (which is what SESTA/FOSTA tried to get rid of). Plus, even if the government didn't pass SESTA/FOSTA, two courts recently ruled that backpage didn't have immunity due to their actions ( https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...gecom-before-sesta-has-even-been-signed.shtml )

Also, I've seen some comments about how this reflects on MFC and the date raffles.. Simple answer - it doesnt impact MFC at all, as MFC is doing *a lot more* to prevent escorting/solicitation on their site than backpage ever claimed to do (AKA, nothing)

 

[justjoinedtopost]

http://pounced.org/

Here is another one.

 

[MicaVerano]

Gosh with all these adult advertisement websites being seized in getting really really scared and wondering when an de if it will affect camming.

I just hope not.

 

[Lexi Lovegood]

The problem is that it passed by such a wide margin that it doesn't matter whether the President vetoes it or not (and I don't see why he would). It has enough support to override a veto. As for the pocket veto, all Congress has to do to avoid that is designate someone to receive veto messages while they're out of session. I think the only way around it becoming law is for it to be challenged in the courts.

 

[TajaEthereal]

The pocket veto was mostly just a theory and one last hope among us. But they're playing games a.k.a politics and didn't officially send it to Trump until 4/3. Once they were back in session. I think that ship has sailed sadly.

Its the number one most watched bill on the website and I'm sure they're all aware of this. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865/actions

Backpage was seized. The owners were raided and several other sites threw in the towel. And that was just on Friday. Plus there was some type of summit in DC to stop trafficking this weekend.

This is why I wondered if there would be some sort of ceremonious signing of the law. Its just to big to do it quietly. Politicians are like Peacocks. Or maybe the president is afraid of that spotlight considering recent scandals? Maybe he'll just quietly let the time run out and let it become law? It seems that the upper echelon has gone mute.

 

[hiakuryu]

SESTA is probably unconstitutional because it violates the Ex Post Facto clause of the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1).



In specific what this means is it makes something you did in the past a crime and you can be charged for it retroactively. Which is kinda crazy on the face of it. I expect the EFF and ACLU to challenge this law almost immediately with separate Amicus Briefs from many interested parties.

SESTA has a ton of backing from Hollywood industry types because it could in effect weaken the Communications Decency Act section 230 significantly

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 would make it easier for them to go after many other sharing sites who can claim Safe Harbor provisions.

With regards to the Backpage situation Federal law enforcement is notoriously slow in moving forwards and probably used existing laws and Judicial judgements to support the seizure of the domain.

Here are the relevant cases

https://cases.justia.com/federal/di...e/1:2017cv11069/189893/54/0.pdf?ts=1522402415


From page 3

The allegation in the complaint that “Backpage . . . redrafted the advertisement [of Jane Doe No. 3] to suggest she was an adult” suffices to allow the complaint by Jane Doe No. 3 to proceed in the face of the CDA’s statutory immunity, which does not protect service providers when they create content, FTC v. Accusearch, Inc., 570 F.3d 1187, 1197 (10th Cir. 2009). The further discovery, while not clarifying greatly the matter, provides, drawing all reasonable inferences in Plaintiff’s favor, a modicum of support for the notion that Backpage has substantively changed an ad, which then supports the information and belief allegation in the complaint. Thus, the CDA poses no bar to Jane Doe No. 3’s claim at this stage of the proceedings.

and so did a court in Florida

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/florida/flmdce/6:2017cv00218/333342/85/

From page 8

Plaintiffs have alleged facts suggesting that Defendants materially contributed to the content of the advertisements, and thus the issue of CDA immunity cannot be resolved on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss in this case.

These 2 judgements alone put a giant juicy target on Backpage no need for SESTA

Also from the Senate report on Backpage.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Backpage Report 2017.01.10 FINAL.pdf

Backpage Has Knowingly Concealed Evidence of Criminality By Systematically Editing Its “Adult” Ads

Backpage has publicly touted its process for screening adult advertisements as an industry-leading effort to protect against criminal abuse, including sex trafficking. A closer review of that “moderation” process reveals, however, that Backpage has maintained a practice of altering ads before publication by deleting words, phrases, and images indicative of an illegal transaction. Backpage has avoided revealing this information. On July 28, 2011, Backpage co-founder James Larkin wrote to Carl Ferrer cautioning him against Backpage’s moderation practices “being made public. We need to stay away from the very idea of ‘editing’ the posts, as you know.” As the report explains below, Backpage had good reason to conceal its editing practices: Those practices served to sanitize the content of innumerable advertisements for illegal transactions — even as Backpage represented to the public and the courts that it merely hosted content created by others.

and

By May 2009, Ferrer was moving toward a new solution: directing Backpage employees to manually edit the language of adult ads to conceal the nature of the underlying transaction. The policy was first introduced on an ad hoc basis. In response to a news article regarding a potential criminal investigation of Craigslist in South Carolina, Ferrer instructed the company’s Operations and Abuse Manager Andrew Padilla to scrub local Backpage ads that South Carolina authorities might review: “Sex act pics remove ... In South Carolina, we need to remove any sex for money language also.” (Sex for money is, of course, illegal prostitution in every jurisdiction in the United States, except some Nevada counties.) Significantly, Ferrer did not direct employees to reject “sex for money” ads in South Carolina, but rather to sanitize those ads to give them a veneer of lawfulness. Padilla replied to Ferrer that he would “implement the text and pic cleanup in South Carolina only.”

Most damning of all is that

The Strip Term From Ad filter concealed the illegal nature of countless ads and systematically deleted words indicative of criminality, including child sex trafficking and prostitution of minors. In a December 1, 2010 email addressed to Backpage moderators and copying Ferrer, Padilla touted the success of the Strip Term from Ad Filter, solicited ideas for additional words to be stripped, and attached the list of words then-programmed to be stripped. Padilla wrote:

Between everyone’s manual moderation, both in the queue and on the site, and the Strip Term From Ads Filters, things are cleaner than ever in the Adult section.

In an effort to strengthen the filters even more and avoid the repetitive task of manually removing the same phrases everyday, can every moderator start making a list of phrases you manually remove on a regular basis? ...

Included in your lists should be popular misspellings of previously banned terms that are still slipping by.

To avoid unnecessary duplicates, I'm attaching a spreadsheet with the most current list of coded terms set to be stripped out.

The spreadsheet attached to Padilla’s email indicates that the following words (among others) were automatically deleted from adult ads by the Strip Term From Ad filter before ads were published:
• “lolita” (and its misspelled variant, “lollita”)
• “teenage”
• “rape”
• “young”

Between the court judgements and the Senate subcommittee report it is obvious that Backpage actually had a material hand in the creation of the adverts by modifying the ads to be less obvious to law enforcement as pertaining to the exchange of money for an illegal activity throughout the USA except for some counties in Nevada, also that Backpage was knowingly complicit in the formation of ads that could be considered for Prostitution and Child Sexual Exploitation, and that the management actively conspired to create an environment where this was not only possible but encouraged?

And third, despite reports that Backpage was sold to a Dutch entity, it was, in fact, purchased by CEO Carl Ferrer through a series of shell companies, the ultimate parent of which is based in the United States.

So playing silly buggers with Senate, not complying with Senate requests for more information when the courts rule against you is bound to create a situation where they will do everything they can to nail your ass to the wall AND on top of that playing the shell game badly enough that the Senate catches you at it will lead to a prime case of pour encourager les autres.

So while this does touch on the issue of whether prostitution should be illegal or not the main issue for Backpage was they were flagrantly breaking the damn law in the USA both with regards to modifying the ads in such a way as to remove their own Safe Harbor protections and effectively profiting from prostitution, child sexual exploitation and trafficking which are all illegal in the USA (except some counties in Nevada but only for the prostitution and not the CSE and Trafficking).

Please note I'm not at ANY point defending SESTA-FOSTA it's a bad law, badly written, incredibly vague and just overall crap at what it's supposed to do, but Backpage created this situation where they had pissed off the Senate enough with their actions to paint this giant target on everyone's backs.

 

[Jesse0328]

As of right now there is no evidence showing that the President even signed the bill turning it into a law
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865 Now the government moves slowly and possibly they haven't updated the website yet, but even still there is zero reporting on what's happened so far.

Now the question is did the bill get pocket vetoed because he didn't sign it before the the ten day period was up AND while congress was out of session? There's a lot of stuff still up in the air and could be a positive delay once we're able to determine if this actually qualifies for a pocket veto or not.

Read this article for more information https://adultbizlaw.com/2018/03/29/will-trump-pocket-veto-fosta/

On the HR1865 status page you linked above, the legislation was presented to the President on April 3rd. The ten day waiting period excludes Sunday, so that would make April 14th the deadline to sign.

 

[justjoinedtopost]

I think it is grasping at straws thinking it is not going to get signed. They were entirely too proud of it to slip up like that.

 

[TajaEthereal]

According to Axios Reporting here is
President Trump's week, per a White House official:

• Monday: The President hosts a cabinet meeting, meets with senior military leaders. He then has dinner with senior military leaders.
• Tuesday: Trump meets with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani. The President also hosts at the White House the NCAA Football National Champions: the Alabama Crimson Tide.
• Wednesday: Trump to sign H.R. 1865 — “The Allow States and Victims To Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.”
• Thursday: Trump has lunch with Mike Pence and gives remarks on his tax cuts.
• Friday: Trump to travel to Peru then Colombia.

 

[JickyJuly]

We have a President in the White House signing phony legislature that will make life more dangerous for trafficked people and consenting sex workers who's been accused of assault, rape, things with minors, paying a playboy model after sex and paying off a porn star mistress. I hope this is the low point of his Presidency because oof. If he does it with a straight face, he's got less shame than I imagine.

 

[MicaVerano]

oh God, so this is it?
More than ever I've chose an avatar that express my constant anxiety feeling. I've been literally Charlie Brown freaking out these past few days. I wonder how will this affect other cam girls around the world, since everybody follows the US as an example.

 

[justjoinedtopost]

We have a President in the White House signing phony legislature that will make life more dangerous for trafficked people and consenting sex workers who's been accused of assault, rape, things with minors, paying a playboy model after sex and paying off a porn star mistress. I hope this is the low point of his Presidency because oof. If he does it with a straight face, he's got less shame than I imagine.

The last one we had promised an end to the PNAC wars in M.E., and we got Libya and Syria.
The last one we had promised an end to the mass surveillance, and we got him opening the floodgates on it on his way out the door.

Not sure what the answer here is, but virtually the entire Congress, left and right, was behind this. Maybe whinging about the tabloid puppet at the top is beside the point here?

Or are you operating under the delusion that if we get the right father figure in power then everything will be ok?

 

[JickyJuly]

Or are you operating under the delusion that if we get the right father figure in power then everything will be ok?

I don't know if you need a Daddy, and I won't judge you if you do. Might help ya. I have one. Taught me to change a tire. Did some electrical work on the house I live in. Nice guy. Don't need a new one. Instead, I'd like to have folks in power, especially the one in the tallest seat available, show a little integrity. I don't think it's too much to ask. I specifically said "his Presidency" because they've all been self serving since I've been old enough to vote at least. No need to compare him with other crap Presidents unless that's what we find acceptable now.

 

[justjoinedtopost]

I don't know if you need a Daddy, and I won't judge you if you do. Might help ya. I have one. Taught me to change a tire. Did some electrical work on the house I live in. Nice guy. Don't need a new one. Instead, I'd like to have folks in power, especially the one in the tallest seat available, show a little integrity. I don't think it's too much to ask. I specifically said "his Presidency" because they've all been self serving since I've been old enough to vote at least. No need to compare him with other crap Presidents unless that's what we find acceptable now.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/repealstop-fosta-now

 

[justjoinedtopost]

I'm going to expound a bit, since I've gotten a poo rating here.

What does it say when someone is accused of...

• assault
• rape
• "things" with minors
• paying a playboy model after sex
• paying off a porn star mistress

...but it counts for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING until this person seeks office?

It says this alleged victimhood is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING until it can be borrowed from you and used for a political attack. Nobody cares, unless it can be used against their fellow elites in a struggle for power. That is disgusting.

• Trump is controlled by Putin...
• Trump is a tax cheat...
• Trump is homophobic...
• Trump is saying racist things when he calls gold star families...
• Trump is enabling Nazis ...
• Trump is withholding help from Puerto Rico...
• Trump is calling other countries shitholes...
• Trump is going to get us nuked by North Korea...
• Trump is mentally ill...
• Trump is a sexual predator...
• Trump blah blah blah...

All these attacks masterminded by politically correct charlatans that are willing to overlook their own sins even though they are clearly just as guilty as Trump in every way imaginable, and who also didn't give a good goddamn what Trump was doing until he ran for office. And once these attacks are passed down to us commoners, they are unironically repeated ad nauseam with a hypocritical air of moral superiority that should make any sane person retch.

If Trump is guilty of any of these sexual allegations and winds up going down for it, so be it. But the man has called for torture; he has called for an increase in executions. The sexual accusations are the least concerning thing to me; and annoyingly enough, that is exactly what the spotlight seemed to be on when this FOSTA wretchedness was winding its way through Congress.

edit: and please forgive my testiness; perhaps I am feeling a bit slighted that no one wanted to discuss this topic at the beginning of March
https://www.ambercutie.com/forums/threads/more-government-protection-incoming.30826/

 

[justjoinedtopost]

Or are you operating under the delusion that if we get the right father figure in power then everything will be ok?

One last thing before I hush; apologies to Jicky and anyone else who interprets this a "daddy issues" swipe. That wasn't what I meant, and it didn't dawn on me until now that it might be interpreted that way (if it was).

It was a product of listening to Michelle Obama's speech the other day, her using a parenting metaphor to compare Trump's presidency to the one of the fraud she is married to. Really struck me as demeaning, just sort had it on the brain since then.