Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons Podcast

How can you go wrong trying to stop sex trafficking? FOSTA, that’s how. The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) tried to fix something that wasn’t broke: under pre-existing law, we already had common sense regulations in place to prosecute online services that facilitated sex trafficking. But perhaps in an effort to appear tough on sex crimes, the US Congress passed additional regulations that are difficult to enforce and possibly even unconstitutional. The result may be more harm that good, robbing sex workers of resources that tools that served to protect them and squelching legitimate online content. I delve into this topic with the EFF’s Elliot Harmon, covering the history of legislation in this area and analyzing the nuances of this tricky area of law. We also explore the political and financial reasons the FOSTA/SESTA bills appeared to have such broad support and how these laws closely parallel copyright enforcement bills. Elliot Harmon is the associate director of activism at EFF. He advocates f