US P4P News

US moralist institutions, including the government, have found that a great way to censor people is to control their financial access.

The best example is Operation Chokepoint , a Department of Justice (DOJ) effort that put pressure on the banking system to cut off financial access for politically disfavored industries, such as sex work or porn production.

Under the Obama administration, regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued threatening letters to financial institutions that processed payments for industries such as payday lenders, gun and ammunition firms, and cryptocurrency companies. The message was clear: cut back on business with these industries, or else. Banks got the hint, and affected firms found it harder and harder to find banking partners.

Bullying banks into doing the government's dirty work was a quick and easy way to get the job done. Even better: it was an extralegal method to get rid of businesses the feds didn't like too much anyway. But of course, if something works, then why not extend it to ever more pet peeves.

For example, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed his Department of Financial Services to issue Operation Chokepoint-style warning letters to financial institutions which provided services to the National Rifle Association. Climate change activists have turned similar tactics towards banks who process payments for oil and gas companies .

But help may now be coming from some unexpected quarters: the OCC, which less than a decade ago had led the charge with Operation Chokepoint. Under the leadership of acting director Brian Brooks, the OCC has proposed a rule change that would make government-supported financial suppression much harder legally.

The Dodd-Frank Act was a sweeping financial reform that, among many other things , authorized the OCC to ensure that nationally chartered banks provide fair access to financial services, and fair treatment of customers. The intention was that minority customers be evaluated for creditworthiness on her or her own individual merits rather than the attributes of their broader group. In other words, a creditworthy individual shouldn't be punished because they belong to some group that is considered high risk in the aggregate.

The OCC would like to apply this thinking to industries through the proposed Fair Access to Financial Services rule. The largest banks in the country--those with more than $100 billion in assets--would be prohibited from red-lining politically disfavored industries just as they are prohibited from red-lining politically oppressed populations. Rather, a gun manufacturer or pornography company or payday lender must be evaluated on the terms of their individual creditworthiness.

The rule does not require that all large banks must do business with all, say, fossil fuel companies, just like banks are not required to extend credit to every single member of a protected class who applies for a loan. Rather, it is a nondiscrimination requirement. Large banks will not be allowed to cut off financial access for disfavored industries just because the government or some other powerful group leans on them to do so.

See more details in article from reason.com

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has published a report on decriminalising sex work. The ACLU writes:

The ACLU's Research Brief, Is Sex Work Decriminalization the Answer? What the Research Tells Us, reviews existing empirical research on the impacts of decriminalization -- and conversely criminalization -- of sex work to inform recommendations for policy and practice. The ACLU has a history of supporting the decriminalization of sex work, but as efforts for U.S. legislative reform at the local, state, and federal level grow, examining the potential impacts of proposed policies is critical. Developed in consultation with local affiliates and sex worker organizers, this Brief provides an assessment of the growing evidence base on the potential benefits and harms of the decriminalization of consensual sex work (including buyer-only criminalization and full criminalization) and concludes with specific recommendations for policymakers, law enforcement, advocates, and researchers.

The report concludes with the following recommendations, starting with:

• Decriminalize all consensual sex work, including prostitution, among adults. Fully decriminalize by eliminating all criminal penalties for sellers and buyers. Also remove all criminal penalties for youth who participate in sex work, but not for adults who exploit youth. Decriminalization should include a retroactive component, permitting expungement of criminal records.

• Eliminate unwanted police presence within the sex work community.

• Support sex workers and listen to the recommendations of community organizers who lead sex work decriminalization groups and grassroots organizations.

• Decline to prosecute charges related to consensual sex work.

• Remove barriers to reporting violent crime.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the 30-year-old advocacy group that has been a pioneer in defending digital civil liberties, sent a letter this week to the United States Senate, opposing the controversial EARN IT Act -- which the EFF says will result in online censorship that will disproportionately impact marginalized communities, will jeopardize access to encrypted services, and will place at risk the prosecutions of the very abusers the law is meant to catch.

The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020, or EARN IT, is designed to roll back protections for online platforms under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is widely considered the First Amendment of the Internet. As AVN reported last month, the law is not only the backbone of open online communications, but for adult content online as well.

Efforts to roll back Section 230 protection will have a significant adverse impact on the adult entertainment industry if passed, First Amendment attorney Lawrence Walters told AVN in August. Any change to Section 230 could result in restrictive content moderation rules or elimination of the platforms themselves.

Platforms would be required to earn the protections currently afforded by Section 230 by following a set of vaguely defined best practices to prevent illegal activities, specifically sex trafficking and Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM), if EARN IT passes.

Under EARN IT, states will be free to impose any liability standard they please on platforms, including holding platforms liable for CSAM they did not actually know was present on their services, EFF warned in its letter to the Senate. Nothing in the bill would prevent a state from passing a law in the future holding a provider criminally responsible under a 'reckless' or 'negligence' standard.

In other words, under EARN IT, state governments could punish online platforms for almost anything that could be broadly interpreted as CSAM or Sex trafficking, even bringing criminal charges against site operators. The dangers for the adult industry are clear if states are allowed to define a wide range of sexual content as promoting sex trafficking.

But sex worker advocacy groups have also warned that the EARN IT law could lead to increased surveillance of workers in the sex industry. EFF also addresses the surveillance threat in its letter to the Senate.

End-to-end encryption ensures the privacy and security of sensitive communications such that only the sender and receiver can view them, the group wrote. But the EARN IT Act threatens to undermine and disincentivize providers from providing strong encryption.

The EFF compares EARN IT to a previous sex trafficking law, FOSTA/SESTA, which is the only law so far passed that actually curtails Section 230 protections, in cases when sites are deemed to promote online sex trafficking. But that law had the opposite effect from its stated intention.

Instead, it has forced sex workers, whether voluntarily engaging in sex work or forced into sex trafficking against their wills, offline and into harm's way, EFF wrote. It has also chilled their online expression generally, including the sharing of health and safety information, and speech wholly unrelated to sex work.

In the letter, EFF urges the Senate not to fast track the EARN IT bill -- and to vote it down if or when it finally comes before the entire Senate. The bill passed through the Judiciary Commitee in July.

The operator of Bella's Hacienda Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada, has announced new procedures she will adopt once Governor Steve Sisolak gives the green light to reopen.

Madam Bella told AVN that her plan involves several key procedural changes, including a plan to include COVID-19 testing as part of the weekly sex worker testing done at the bordello.

Madam Bella also will require customers to wear face coverings and everyone entering the establishment will be tested for elevated temperatures. Hand washing and showers have always been a part of the business' cleanliness protocol, but Madam Bella will make showers prior to a session mandatory for additional precaution.

However the brothel will be somewhat scaled down with only 8 ladies, about half the usual number.

In Nevada, which reported its first confirmed death from coronavirus infection on Monday, the country's only legal brothels have been ordered to close, along with strip clubs, casinos, restaurants, gyms and other public gathering places.

In addition, sex workers who take private clients have reported widespread cancellations, according to a report by McClatchy News.

But the crisis has not been confined to sex workers in the U.S.. According to an Associated Press report, the world's supposedly oldest profession is suffering a sudden slump. Over the past week, business has gone down by 50 percent, Berlin brothel operator Johannes Marx told the AP. Another Berlin sex worker told the AP that, 90 percent of all dates are being canceled anyway. As always, we're left to fend for ourselves.

Sex workers in Australia report a similar economic crisis due to the pandemic, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. There's no stimulus package available. We don't have sick pay, we don't have annual leave, one sex worker identified only as Anya told the network.

Chatbots posing as sex workers engaged 15,000 people in conversations between 2016 and 2018 in response to a fake advert triggered by a search for sex online.

During a two-year period, a moralist campaign group, Seattle Against Slavery posted fake online adverts that connected people with chatbots that initially posed as sex workers, before delivering a deterrence message. The campaign, which also involved placing more than 2m Google adverts warning people of the risks of buying sex online, led to a 50% decline in online searches for keywords such as teen escort.

Robert Beiser, former executive director at Seattle Against Slavery, who is presenting the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Seattle on Friday, said: In a fairly short length of time we were able to reach hundreds of thousands of people who had searched for common terms. In Seattle, we were able to impact the marketplace pretty dramatically.

Between 2016 and 2018 the organisation also began to post fake ads apparently offering sex that would appear in response to keyword searches. These would contain a mobile number to text, which would trigger a chatbot designed to pose as a sex worker. Beiser said that developing the chatbot was quite straightforward because the conversations were so repetitive. There were lots of 'Hello, where are you? What do you do? Where can I meet you?', he said. The chatbot would sometimes add a little bit more colour to the conversation.

Vermont State Representative Selene Colburn has repsonded to the plight of sex workers whose lives (and incomes) have suffered drastically by federal and state government attempts to help them through legislation like SESTA/FOSTA and local human trafficking ordinances. She has introduced a bill that would decriminalize sex-for-pay between consenting adults, while at the same time making penalties worse for child sex traffickers.

Colburn's bill, H.B. 569, would completely repeal the state's current prostitution law and replace it with a new law retaining only those sections involving minors or trafficking.

The bill, which has four co-sponsors and is currently being considered by the House Judiciary Committee, would, if passed, make Vermont only the second state in the Union to have legalized adult sex work--but its proponents still have their work cut out for them. Assuming the bill survives the judiciary committee, it still has to be passed by both the full House and Senate, and while Democrats and Progressives.