TER General Board

Fighting the previous war
Valida 17 Reviews 665 reads
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Lots of posts about opsec items from before the new law.   But it's a different beast.  

Basically, Fucksta/SESTA gives any hooker a great big blackmail hammer.  Against some very large targets.   Some sharksters are going to start figuring that out, and asking girls for sob stories.  The fireworks will be something to watch!  

What computer system gets used to facilitate nearly every act of prostitution in the world today?  

Hint:  it's in one of the major slang terms for prostitute.

"Call girl" anyone?

Right -- the phone systems!   F/S says they are liable.  Probably fight it by claiming to be a "regulated communications carrier" and not a "computer system" -- and the sharksters on both sides of that one will be, erm, "highly compensated".  Won't much matter to the attorneys who wins.  Both sides with have plenty of fucking-around money afterward.  

Other targets abound.  Point is,  you don't have to keep any hooker data or speech at all to be liable.  You don't have to host ads or reviews.  You just have to make it easier for someone to fuck for pay.  

Google searches?  Even if they lead me to out-of-US fireproof sites, they greatly facilitate my good times!  Maps?  Makes it al lot easier to get to the hooker's apartment on time!  Or maybe I take Uber/Lyft  ...and so forth.  

Glory days for lawyers who figure it out early.  

I haven't looked yet, but I bet there's history from the early days of telephony over calling girls, and they beat it then.  This new law is a different beast and they are going to have to beat it again.  

Our only hope, as murine spectators of pachyderm combat, is that these companies beat it to death rather than special-casing their way out of it.  Because the real evil of F/S is not its impact on hookers and johns (bad as that is), but the suppression of speech by attacking intermediaries.  Just think what Trump can do to Bezos with a small tweak or two in this law.  Anything powerful enough to seriously hamper prostitution is powerful enough to bring on a dictatorship.  
 Civilization may be hosed.

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Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, an honest lawyer and an old drunk are walking down the street together when they simultaneously spot a hundred dollar bill. Who gets it? The old drunk, of course, the other three are fantasy creatures.

-- Modified on 5/4/2018 8:33:59 AM

FOSTA/SESTA are both worded vaguely enough that basically any website can be shut down at-will.  

 

The guise to pass these laws was "sex trafficking" but in reality it was a power grab. The government now has the internet by the balls, and it's totally legal. Forget about blackmailing so and so, the government can blackmail google now, as in "take down xyz site" or "tailor your algorithm to suggest X idea as fact" etc.  

I'm not going full tinfoil here and suggesting that this is happening, only that it's now more possible than it previously was. You give a monkey a gun, and eventually it's going to realize the power it has, and when it does, it'll be drunk on it.

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