This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 12, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Under the guise of going after sex traffickers, the president has signed a law to go after

websites and other online platforms where sex workers and

their customers are likely to get together. Problem is, just about any online platform that

provides free and open discussion allows for exactly this kind of commerce.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes about these subjects at Reason magazine, we spoke yesterday.

Backpage.com, describe what that is.

A back page is or was until recently a online market, a website, an app, an online marketplace,

much like Craigslist that had different sections where people

could post ads for services, for jobs that they were offering.

It had all your typical sections and it also had an adult services section which had different categories including things like strippers and strip clubs and dominatrixes and fetish and people who just wanted to hook up for sort of kinky things and then also it had

an escort section and that's the section that draws all of the the trouble that

we're in right now. Now if you go to backpage.com now, it says the site and affiliated websites have been

seized as part of an enforcement action by the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service, and the

Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division

with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.

Why has this site been seized?

So the site has been seized, you know, when it was seized they said that the charges were

going to be out and then the court sealed them but they finally then released them.

And then everyone had been speculating

that it was going to be about sex trafficking.

...