{"id":179252,"date":"2018-04-06T19:13:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-07T00:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/06\/fbi-seizes-backpage-com\/"},"modified":"2018-04-06T19:13:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-07T00:13:00","slug":"fbi-seizes-backpage-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/04\/06\/fbi-seizes-backpage-com\/","title":{"rendered":"FBI Seizes Backpage.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>It appears that the founder’s home has been raided as well<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On Friday, federal law enforcement authorities seized Backpage domain names, including Backpage.com and Backpage.ca. <\/p>\n

In addition, the Arizona Republic reported<\/a> that on Friday morning, law enforcement raided the Sedona-area home of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of the site. <\/p>\n

For years, Backpage has acted with impunity as a place that offered thinly veiled online prostitution ads. In December 2016, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and his co-defendants beat back<\/a> a state prosecution in California.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

However, with the recent passage of FOSTA and SESTA<\/a> by both houses of Congress, that shield is about to be removed for sites that allow sex work ads once President Donald Trump signs the bill into law<\/a>. That new bill is aimed<\/a> squarely at Backpage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not fond of bills of attainder, which FOSTA and SESTA come close to, and not fond of the ancillary effects, with sights likes Craigslist<\/a> terminating their far more benign personals sections.<\/p>\n

I rather expect to see these laws, and the seizures and raids, extended into other areas of speech in the not too distant future.<\/p>\n

The ACLU agrees with my position<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that the founder’s home has been raided as well: On Friday, federal law enforcement authorities seized Backpage domain names, including Backpage.com and Backpage.ca. In addition, the Arizona Republic reported that on Friday morning, law enforcement raided the Sedona-area home of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of the site. For years, Backpage has acted with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[413,368,364,407,526,449,374],"class_list":["post-179252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-justice","tag-law-enforcement-misconduct","tag-legislation","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}