IMO, the biggest threat from SESTO is government overreach. The government is like a mouse...if you give it a cookie, it's gonna want a glass of milk. No bureaucrat can turn down power, and a bill like SESTO is open to interpretation, and thus, abuse. Your website facilitates Pay for Play, pimps and sex traffickers use websites like yours to ply their trade, so we're going to arrest you and shut you down. We can pontificate about how much SESTO will do to help victims of sex trafficking, but we should never forget the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
That said, you can't censor the interwebs. Oh, you can censor the big media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and even Google. But modern cryptography remains proof against government encroachment. How many times has the US tried to shut down The Pirate Bay? Australia recently passed a law mandating that communication application providers give the Australian government access to their users' messages. Signal told them to
go fuck themselves.
If this site goes down, it can always be resurrected in an onion service and accessible via TOR. Or another will pop up. That's the beauty of the free market system: there will always be a demand for a way to connect providers and clients. If no supply exists, the market will create one.
Originally Posted by snarl
IMO, the biggest threat from SESTO is government overreach. The government is like a mouse...if you give it a cookie, it's gonna want a glass of milk. No bureaucrat can turn down power, and a bill like SESTO is open to interpretation, and thus, abuse. Your website facilitates Pay for Play, pimps and sex traffickers use websites like yours to ply their trade, so we're going to arrest you and shut you down. We can pontificate about how much SESTO will do to help victims of sex trafficking, but we should never forget the words of Justice Louis Brandeis, "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
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