\n\n“Among other provisions, FOSTA created the new federal crime of owning, managing, or operating an “interactive computer service” with “the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.”
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In court last week, U.S. attorneys still clung to the argument that FOSTA merely targets illegal conduct, not protected speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government has “essentially made a single argument, which is that FOSTA is essentially just an aiding and abetting statute, despite the language that it uses\u2014it doesn’t use the terms and abetting\u2014and as a result of that, it’s constitutional,” explains Greene. And last week in court, “they got a lot of pushback against that from at least two of the judges,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“In my mind, it’s not an aiding-and-abetting law. We know how to write ’em when we want to,” Harry Edwards, one of the three judges on the panel, said during the hearing. “This doesn’t look like anything that I understand to be an aiding-and-abetting law.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“That immediately tells me the government’s got great concern that the statute, as actually written, has problems\u2014so let’s make it something that it’s not,” Edwards continued. He characterized U.S. attorneys’ reasoning as “let’s call it aiding and abetting, and maybe we can cause the court to believe that the reach of the statute is limited because we’ve called it something that it’s not.””<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Greene and his team argue that FOSTA violates the First Amendment “because it’s overbroad [and] can apply to a substantial amount of protected speech,” he explains. “And that’s principally because the language that it uses includes not just things that are in themselves the commission of illegal acts of sex trafficking or prostitution.” Rather, “it uses language like ‘promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person’ without being clear on what that means.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The language of FOSTA “can be reasonably read to include protected [speech]\u2014and not just protected speech, but speech that’s really highly important, like providing harm reduction, health and safety information to sex workers, to advocating on particular sex workers’ behalf, to advocating for decriminalization, and things like that,” Greene says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During last week’s hearing, Judge Patricia Millett pushed back on the government’s claims that FOSTA didn’t criminalize advocating for legal prostitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“If someone actively promotes on their website the legalization of prostitution \u2026 how is that not [promoting prostitution]?” she asked.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n