[MUSIC]
And we're running with a one minute delay.
Welcome, good evening, welcome to Digital Courage.
Tonight we're talking about sex workers versus surveillance.
If you're on the Fediverse,
you can add us with the hashtag #CCCcamp23DigitalCourage.
And without further ado, I'm gonna leave my field to the fabulous Maggie Mayhem.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you so much for such a warm introduction.
And I am so happy to be here and to see so many people who are interested about
this topic that is so near and dear to my heart, really having a wonderful time.
Thank you so much to the Digital Courage Village for
accepting this talk and give me this space.
Thank you to everyone who has done any work or labor to make this camp happen.
I hope everyone has been having as much fun as I have been.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> My name is Maggie Mayhem, and
it has been my pleasure to be a companion to people during times of sex, birth, and
death, all underscored by 20 years of experience with harm reduction.
Harm reduction is a practice that I think is so important.
It comes from the drug user community.
It was created by drug users.
It's intended for drug users.
But it ultimately has a belief that what we need to work for is any positive change.
And that is a theme that I hope that you will all consider as I go through this talk.
I am available on the Internet in many forms.
You will not find me on Facebook.
I am not there.
I am affiliated with some different organizations.
I am currently involved with the Distributed Denial of Secrets.
I am formally on the Sex Worker Outreach Project USA Board of Directors.
I am also a former trainer and leader with the Bay Area Abortion Support Team.
And doing reproductive rights activism is one of my other many hats.
Today we are gonna be talking about sex worker rights.
These are some of the things that we're going to be going over.
And one of the reasons that I'm in this room today is because sex workers
are a part of this community.
We're here.
We have always been here.
And we are never going away.
I also think that it is so important for the people who build, support, and
subvert our digital infrastructure to know about this community, what our needs are,
and what some of the challenges we face are, so that we can have a better,
safer future as we engage with our lives.
I'm gonna be doing a brief introduction to some very kind of basic sex worker
rights topics and jargon.
I'll be talking a little bit about tech.
I'll be talking about borders and information biopolitics.
And I will be doing a little bit of a talk about subverting surveillance.
I only have 45 minutes.
I have a lot of slides.
I tend to speak very fast, so my apologies to anyone who is a German speaker.
I'll do my best.
This talk is being recorded and it is being streamed.
But you can also feel free to take a picture of a slide if there's a big,
overwhelming block of text that you want to review.
Pictures of me are okay.
Cats out of the bag in terms of this content.
So I feel very comfortable with that.
As a content note, I will be talking a little bit about discussion of some human
trafficking and abuse.
So be aware that that is something that might come up.
And I trust that you will know yourselves and that if you're here today,
you're prepared to hear some conversation about that.
There is a chant in the sex worker rights community when there has been labor
activism, and I would like to share that with you.
This came out of a unionization struggle at a strip club in San Francisco.
There were lots of protests and one of those chants was,
when sex worker rights are under attack, what do we do?
Get dressed, fight back.
So let's do that.
What is sex work?
Sex work is a very broad umbrella term.
It covers so many different kinds of labor.
There's also a lot of other language.
Some of it is very dehumanizing, but people sometimes reclaim it for themselves.
They may use it as a self identifier.
It's also, there's some language that is part of criminal, legal, or
penal codes that may still be used, but
it may not be favored by people in the trade themselves.
There is such a diversity of things that people do in terms of erotic sexual
commerce.
Instead of breaking things down into legal or illegal, because there is so
much variation about what that might mean in any given location,
I would like to think about it more in terms of high contact and lower contact.
But that does not mean visibility necessarily, because there are people who
have less contact with their clients and their customer base,
who are very highly visible, and that comes with its own risks.
But in general, it is the people who have the highest amount of immediate contact
with their clients and their customers who face the brunt of violence,
and extreme violence at that.
They also face risks of infection, exposure, and also to say that those
infections are not necessarily just sexually transmitted infections.
That includes any possible disease exposure, including COVID,
tuberculosis, any bug that's going around.
They are up close and personal with people.
So the population of people who are performing outdoor sex work are very,
very visible on our public streets.
They are subjected to the highest amount of violence, and they also face the highest
amounts of criminalization.
They're the people who are really at the center of this conversation.
It's also important to note that there is a great deal of intersectionality in terms
of who is the brunt of this violence.
People of color, especially people who lack citizenship status in the place
where they are working, are particularly at risk.
People who may be transgender, gender nonconforming, they also face a great deal
of violence in what they do.
There's a lot of overlap in the International Day to End Violence Against Sex
Workers and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, where there are people in the center.
And those people in the center are just so, so important, and the rights
conversation is really about them and the overlap and why they are facing those
types of consequences for work where other people might experience more safety.
There's also some ambiguity.
People may engage in multiple forms of sex work over the course of their career.
Some people may use different types of personas.
They may do little bits to keep them separate.
They may have different names that they use for different forms of work, but
different -- uh-oh.
I think it's just a sensitive cord.
I can keep talking.
Oh, okay.
Maybe it needs to be taped down.
We'll get through it.
I have an idea.
Let's try that.
Let's see if that little bit of support -- problem solve it.
There can be some ambiguity that goes on.
Criminalization and stigma also mean that people may hide their participation in the
trade, so they may not be disclosing.
They may not be as open about what they do.
People may also need fronts, not rants.
Fronts are plausible deniability.
For example, I'm a former sex worker.
I'm absolutely retired.
Never happens anymore.
That's long in the past, you know, or as good as the next offer is.
Sex trafficking is of significant concern, and I want to talk about what that actually
is in detail, so this is where we're going to have some real talk going on.
There's a spectrum of participation in terms of sex work.
There are people who essentially are, you know, part of this trade by choice because
it's -- they find enjoyment or pleasure out of it, and they are real.
They are part of our trade.
There are people who are here by circumstance.
They're kind of in the middle.
It's the work that they're doing because it meets their needs, but maybe something better
will come along, or maybe they'll pay off that debt.
Maybe they'll be more established.
They'll secure their housing.
They'll be able to move on to something else, something that they would rather be doing.
And there are people who are in this trade by coercion or by force.
They may not be consenting adults.
They may not be over the age of 18.
They may be people who were given a false bill of goods about what kind of work they
might be doing in their path of migration.
They might be people who are in an intimate partner violence situation in their relationship
where a partner or even a parent or a loved one compelled them to do this work.
Rights encompass all of these people.
Rights are not predicated upon empowerment.
Rights are about addressing the way power imbalances have lethal consequences.
So rights are necessary for that.
Respectability politics have no currency with me.
That's not what this struggle is fundamentally about.
So understanding that there is this range is a very important thing to really think
about.
Human trafficking for non-sexual labor represents the overwhelming majority of cases, and that's
simply because there is more labor in this world that is non-sexual than there is labor
that is sexual.
Human trafficking is also about the food that we eat, the clothing that we wear, the things
that we do every day where we don't have as many people jumping up to talk about their
rights and the way that they are being trafficked.
Criminalizing sex work isn't going to have a benefit for the people who are being trafficked
in that way.
Those types of laws and penalties don't necessarily correspond or come to support them in the
situation that they are facing.
And oftentimes anti-trafficking organizations will really do a lot of shock and awe to talk
about how hard and brutal human trafficking in sexual cases is, and I'm not going to deny
it.
It can be absolutely abhorrent and it can be brutal.
And there is that brutality that is present in all forms of human trafficking.
The more you look into that, the more that that can be seen.
When we treat people as disposable, when we treat people as individuals that we can just
have, do our labor and disregard and throw away, bad, bad, bad things happen.
There are multiple regulatory models of sex work.
Legalization is one of them, and oftentimes it's what a lot of people think would be the
best because we have this idea that legal means good, illegal means bad.
But that's not necessarily the case because whenever there is a legal or regulated form
of sex work, there are going to be people who don't fit into that very well, who fall
into the cracks, and they still face significant penalties for their participation.
And in one case, I think it's really important to say that that's something that's happening
here in Germany.
I've had some conversations with people throughout the day who have been telling me that this
sounds like a very interesting talk, but here in Germany we have some regulated legal forms
of sex work, so we're doing pretty good.
This is not necessarily what people who are doing activism here have to say.
I'm going to drink some water and hope.
All right.
That's not necessarily what the activists here have to say.
And it's not my place to speak over the German sex worker rights activists who are doing
lots of hard work, who are the most informed.
But some of the things that they have wanted to address are the fact that licensing creates
a potential risk for data breaches.
If you have to apply for a license, if you have your information, your personal identifying
information and a photograph attached to this kind of work, you are at risk.
That's a database of people who are involved in sex work.
There are some people who might want to get their hands on it who don't have the best
intentions.
That could be very problematic.
They could be outed.
There are exclusionary zones where people can still be penalized.
And in general, just any time we have a form of policing, it is going to target marginalized
identities and people who are non-citizens may not have full access to the rights and
protections that come from a legal framework.
So if you want to know more in depth about what's happening here in Germany, it is upon
me to refer you to German sex workers themselves.
Hydra is that organization.
Their website is listed.
And this is a QR code that goes to a very detailed paper analyzing the policies that
are happening here.
This is the one that is in German.
And this is in the English.
This QR code will not be available for more than two weeks.
So it's really for those of you who are here in the audience.
If you're watching this later on, you can still get this information on their website.
Full criminalization is what we see in most of the world.
In most places, sex work is prohibited.
It is criminalized with a full set of laws detailing what that looks like.
And the reason that these laws can be so precise, they're so detailed, is because communication
and association are the only ways that we can distinguish a sex act that is commercial from
one that is recreational or relational.
So ultimately, it does become a matter of expression, the way people are communicating.
It comes down to the way people are dressing on the street, the way they can be visibly
identified.
It has to do with who they're associating with.
You know, if they're with someone who has already been known or identified as a sex
worker and they're in that company, you can be held accountable for their actions too,
or you can be lumped in with them.
So the fact that that's such a nebulous issue means that all of these laws are always going
to be, are going to have collateral damage and they're going to ultimately extend beyond
their "intended targets" because it's just not as clear what makes a legal sex act different
from an illegal one other than biases, judgments, stigmas, and perception of the people that
you're looking at when you're thinking about it.
The Nordic model, or end demand, is the, it sounds great on paper, it's the idea that
we could criminalize the purchase of sex only, but not the people who are selling it.
Asymmetric enforcement of laws will always infringe upon the fundamental rights of the
non-criminal party.
And one way to explain this is, if I told you that we were going to propose a law that
it was totally okay and totally legal to attend a concert, but not to be a musician playing
one, that would mean we're not going to have too many concerts because people would not
be able to go there.
They're still going to be surveilled.
The whole event is going to be shut down.
It's going to be impossible to do.
So it does, it sounds really, really great, but it just doesn't work out that way in practice.
Decriminalization is the idea that we can just take the laws governing forms of sex
work off the book entirely and just move away from the form of policing.
Full decriminalization is never going to be possible in a world with any form of policing
and criminalization, in many ways for the same reason that end demand is problematic.
If we still have laws that criminalize people, then we can't actually accomplish decriminalization.
But this is the model that has been most preferred by people in the sex trade.
New Zealand is an example of a place that has had successful decriminalization happening,
but it also too has its own limits because as I said again, when there's anyone in society
who is being criminalized, then this type of work can still be subject to penalties
and punitive reactions.
We've also been moving away from the idea that we need to criminalize or eliminate sex
work because it's a moral bad issue.
And we're moving on to a new era of humanitarian securitization.
That's the idea that we're going to have laws and surveillance and policies that aren't
necessarily just intended to be mean and bad to people who are in the sex trade or with
a moralizing idea, but rather for humanitarian purposes to end trafficking.
The anti-trafficking movement relies on this.
But humanitarian securitization is still a form of securitization.
It's still the implementation of mass surveillance.
It's still another way to justify establishing stronger policing, but it sounds good and
sometimes people don't realize it's creeping up on them too, even though they're not in
the sex trade.
It just means that those apparatuses are emboldened and they have more money, they have more power,
they have further reach.
Violence not rescue is one of the ways that we can address the wrongs, the brutality of
trafficking.
We really cannot arrest our way out of this kind of violence.
We need to start establishing a world that provides resources for people, regardless
of how they came into the sex trade.
We need to have resources for people who are escaping intimate partner violence that have
very low barriers that are accessible beyond business hours.
We need to have a full set of resources and support for people who may have substance
use disorders that don't have barriers.
So the moment that they're ready to start detoxing or enter recovery, there's a place
for them that's open, that has a bed where they feel safe.
Those places, all of these places have to be ready to handle people of all identities,
of all genders, of all races, of all kinds of relationship statuses.
They have to be safe spaces and there has to be enough of them.
They must be well funded.
They cannot just be something that are done cheaply or with so many barriers, they just
don't work for the people who need those resources.
All raids are going to be violent and rescue is just a nice way of saying a raid.
That's all that it is.
It's just a euphemism.
There are no teddy bears and hot cocoa when they come in to shut these things down.
The UN, UN AIDS, the World Health Organization and Amnesty International have all recognized
that the rights not rescue model is what is important and that decriminalization is a
step that will help protect the rights, the dignity, the health and the safety of people
who are in the sex trade.
So it's not just me, it's some very big organizations and experts who do work in human rights.
It's also important to note that rescue industries receive most of the money and most of the
funds and there is a lot on the table.
They get a lot of money for a lot of programs and a lot of that will go to their overhead
or their staff budget and it doesn't necessarily go to a full range of services.
In the United States there's a very big anti-trafficking organization called Polaris.
They get millions upon millions of dollars and very often they would refer people who
were looking to get information or support who were in the sex trade to the swap USA
hotline and we funded that with volunteer hours and a very small budget from our like
meager ability to fundraise.
So we were doing work that they claimed to be doing without getting any of that monetary
support to do it.
We simply are just not necessarily eligible for the same kind of grants or we're not trusted
to be able to do this work within the community.
Police militarization budgets have all gotten so much bigger.
They get a lot more money to get a lot more tools and so there's all this money is not
going to sex workers themselves.
Having these types of laws can really result in a lot of censorship, limited speech for
everybody who is communicating.
The more surveillance networks we have the more people who will be caught in that kind
of a dragnet no matter what you're talking about.
So sexual speech and sexual education is all going to be potentially at risk and we are
definitely seeing consequences of that in the United States.
This also means that reproductive health information is going to be limited and we are seeing this
as a consequence as well.
Information for people who are looking for transgender resources or queer resources.
resources, they're going to lose those because it could possibly be associated
or people are going to be afraid to possibly be associated with trafficking
for having any of the buzzwords or the keywords that are the same or held in
common. So this collateral damage is important because these are resources
that we need that need to be really fully fleshed out because people have a
right to information, unrestricted information, they need to get the best
tools that they need to live their best lives. And in response to these shifts in
public perception, a lot of religious organizations have actually started to
do some deceptive things in their marketing and their practices so they
may sound like a secular organization but they're not. They're actually far
right Christian organizations. The Moral Majority was a group that started in the
United States in the 1960s. They are evangelical Christians. They are now
rebranded as the National Coalition to oppose sexual exploitation of children
and they chose that their name because it was so similar to another
organization that had been long established to help children who were
missing or vulnerable, who were exploited. But the difference between
those orgs is in their ideological agenda. The legitimate one was really
working with the hard reality that children who go missing or are exploited
are often being harmed by someone they know and love. It is often a parent. It is
often someone in their family and it's not because there was a big bad sex
trafficker who threw them in a van. It's because there was someone they loved who
was hurting them and oftentimes it's also as simple as a custody dispute issue
where parents have split and one parent has decided they don't like the
arrangement or how things have worked out and they're going to come take their
kid and go somewhere else far away that may not be safe or the best place for
them. One great example is there is a movie that is making waves in the US. I
don't know if it's out here yet but it's called The Sound of Freedom and it's
simply a propaganda piece that has a lot of very very bad information and it
comes from some very bad practices. I don't know if anyone here is familiar
with Pizzagate. That was a problem in the United States. It was a conservative
political just nightmare where some people on the internet suggested that
there was a pizza parlor that was responsible for sex trafficking
children. They were being held in the basement by Hillary Clinton and it was
going to be necessary to storm the pizza parlor to save the children and
this was a bad tip. There were no children in the basement. It was just a
pizza parlor and someone showed up with a very large weapon and there was no one
there to rescue. That was what was happening with the people who were
making this happen. They actually started by traveling to the Caribbean
and they would try to set up their own stings. They were not professionals. They
didn't have a background in this. They really didn't know what they were doing.
They were possibly driving up the demand for child sex trafficking by even trying
to facilitate this or make it happen and they would storm the situation with guns
and they would terrify those kids. They would pat themselves on the back but
they didn't make sure that those children were safe afterwards. No one
heard where they went or what happened to them. No one made sure they were okay
after experiencing that and they're just very misleading and when we have these
propaganda pieces we're not able to do the work that we need to do to get
people out of these situations and into something safer. Here's some example of
some of these organizations. This is just one that I picked because I like to pick
on them. The National Anti-Human Trafficking Coalition and they also
encourage just a lot of religious volunteers to jump into work that they
are not trained or ready to do. So they have, this may not be clear on the slide,
but at their level four the highest honor is after you've volunteered enough
and done enough church work you too can join in on the rescue. So again people
who just aren't ready to do this work and they can make situations worse. Some
of these organizations have also done a little bit of what we might call tourism
of various sex trade districts where they would get people together in prayer
groups to get in a shuttle and go by outdoor sex markets to look and gawk at
the people who were there and you know pray the rosary but really that's
just that's not helpful and it's degrading. It's absolutely degrading. They
also collaborate with law enforcement so they may not actually be in law
enforcement but they they like to work with them and sometimes law enforcement
really likes these groups because these groups can do things that they wouldn't
necessarily be able to do because they don't have the same types of policies or
body cams or accountability. So there is that little bit of a joint partnership
there with the rank amateurs who make everything worse. There's a fantastic
project called Rape That Rescue. It is a sex worker led project. It does cover
rescues internationally and it analyzes what the budgets are, what the outcomes
are and whether or not the people who are involved felt that their life was
better as a result of that rescue.
The US Department of Homeland Security is of course very concerned with human
trafficking because they want to have a good way to justify a lot of
surveillance that they're doing that is extending as far as possible to extend
that reach and I want to focus in particular with what they were doing
with the hospitality industry. They were doing a lot of mandatory training with
hotel chains to help people there spot the scourge of trafficking and here are
some of the indicators of human trafficking and some of these might
whether or not you're in the trade might sound familiar such as simply leaving
the do not disturb sign up for multiple days in a row, having lots of technical
devices, anyone travel with a few computers or some extra things like that?
Very suspicious. Good reason to check in. You could be a trafficker. So some of
these things might actually be kind of accurate and helpful but a lot of them
are also quite obvious. Sometimes their guides will have things like you know if
there's a child who's you know talking about overt sexual acts and looking for
money in the lobby be suspicious and yes perhaps that is suspicious but it's
interesting to see the other things that get thrown in there as reasonable cause
for a search or reasonable cause to call law enforcement in to investigate the
situation. The private sector of course is coming in to charge you know every
kind of business possible with their model of training so lots of these
companies are opening up and they have their own how to spot and stop human
trafficking. They're making a lot of money off of this industry and we have
no way to tell if they're actually doing anything to prevent it. They just sell
courses and certification for people. Palantir, they're fun. We all love
Palantir. I think they are definitely being making fantastic use of the human
trafficking rhetoric to justify the expanded scope of the surveillance that
they have been doing everywhere that they possibly can and one of the things
they wrote in this article I thought that was quite interesting is to give
non-technical people a view of the world as discrete objects relationships and
they're describing data and that's a good thing right. We're all just data and
relationships that can be mined and pulled for different purposes but they
can expand the scope they can keep growing especially when they have this
type of a project that they can push to the forefront. We're not here to invade
your digital privacy and your rights we're just trying to find the bad guys
and that's all we'll do and they're getting some major contracts with the
US government and they are absolutely putting that to the forefront of their
website and their promotional materials. They're spending a lot of time going
into conferences and occupying a lot of space in this domain but I think we all
have some questions about what their intentions really are. This is a poster
that was made by traffic brothel workers in Thailand and these are people who
were experiencing some of the worst outcomes of trafficking and they had an
opportunity to to share some of that and what it was and this is some of the text
that they wrote to transcribe it in case it was hard to read on the poster and
this was the experience of people who were in the midst of trafficking who
were doing work that they wouldn't have chosen otherwise who were looking for a
different or a better kind of life and they made it a point to say that their
their income their savings their money was seized that they were locked up that
they were detained detained that they were interrogated by many people for
many long hours that they were forced and compelled to be witnesses even if
that might be dangerous for them that they were held until their court case
and did not have the ability to move freely in the place where they were
living that they were forced into retraining into industries that they
didn't necessarily find any better for example the garment industry that were
gonna save you and pull you out of the sex trade and now you're gonna go work
in front of a sewing machine not necessarily for much more money in fact
oftentimes less than they were making before they were not compensated by
anyone for their loss of wages or income their family was then having to do more
work to help support everybody they were of course worried because they're out of
contact and they don't know where their loved one is they had to deal with the
stigma and judgment of people after being subjected to a raid if you are
pulled out by a lot of police and dragged through town people tend to make
some pretty big judgments about that soldiers and other people were looking
for more information about them and therefore asking questions of their
friends and their family and people in their community bribes have to be paid
they're sent back home where it could be dangerous to have this kind of you know
experience and this knowledge in your community where people might really have
some serious judgment about that their family then has maybe some more debt to
pay and that regardless of whether or not they were rescued they had to find
a way to get back because that was the way the only means that they had to keep
making a living was to go back into really bad brothel conditions and since
nothing improved all they could do is go through the arduous journey once again
go back into those conditions once again just recycling the experience
re-traumatizing over and over this is what raids look like and this is what
rescues look like I just have a few examples taken from the media about the
dehumanizing type of photos that are used and the way that people who are
victims are being treated Detroit Michigan this is Anaheim these guys look
so friendly isn't this exactly who you would want to see if you were having a
really bad day this is London this raid in particular was in SoHo and they
actually called the police or the media ahead of time to document what they were
doing I haven't included any of the photos that they were using of the
people inside but they were of course in their work gear and their negligee so
they were very vulnerable they were very exposed and this was about
gentrification about upsetting that type of industry not because they were
worried about anyone in it but because the real estate was really valuable of
course in India again here's some more of a dehumanizing stock footage that is
used they have used that handcuff picture for like pretty much any non-
western raid like that's the raid photo you see so that's probably not from that
exact raid and you can see the people who were arrested and what their ages
were and whether or not they were victims is really not fully taken into
consideration in New York there was a raid that went very very very horribly
wrong and this was Yang Song who was in an Asian massage parlor that's where she
worked she had had previous negative experiences of sexual violence from the
police and they were so bad they were so traumatic that when she was
experiencing a raid once again rather than just kind of comply with what they
were saying and go along with them she jumped out of a four-story window where
she was working and she died to any members of law enforcement who may be
here with us today or watching from the comfort of their own homes I strongly
suggest that you find new employment because someday there may be people who
come to rescue them too. Sex worker rights really are inextricably linked
to migrant rights because oftentimes this is the only work that people have
when they are not considered full citizens in the places that they are
going it is just simply the only possible form of income that is available
and so that really has to be the important focus of what we're doing
because migration is something that has happened for a long time and it's
something that we're gonna see more and more of with climate change we're gonna
see more people who are gonna be forced to leave their homeland not by choice
but because they are facing extreme danger or a total lack of resources. Of
course some more the ways that sex trafficking and sex work can be linked
to a lot of xenophobia and a lot of our anti-migrant sentiments for example the
Twitter account the border observer complaining about the sex workers who
are available and the the rhetoric that they're using you can see is really it's
not one of care or concern or love it's about we need to stop this because these
people are coming and that's their intent and that is their dehumanizing
tone and again deportation is a big consequence of these laws there is no
guarantee for a victim that they will be given safety and a chance to stay in the
place that they have moved to in the long term they will not be granted
housing they're simply deported so we have to ask when people are rescued
because they were trafficked what were they offered what happened to them let's
follow up on that story we can't just end the sentence with they were rescued
we have to ask what does rescue mean another example of a Ukrainian OnlyFans
model who was barred from being able to evacuate from war because she was linked
to her information and couldn't get over the borders so there is a lot of border
problems that are happening right now where people simply cannot move because
they are being associated with sex work from their digital footprint so the
criminalization of sex work it does not alter a remedy the socioeconomic context
that precipitates entry into the trade whether that is by choice coercion or
force all sex workers all workers benefit from rights and solidarity and
destigmatization destigmatization protection from violence protection from
the police and the freedom of movement the world that we live in is what shapes
our choices and we cannot prosecute our way out of an inequitable world we
simply can't we have to change our world we have to make it better for the people
who are trying to live thrive and survive in it so how do sex workers use
technology many different ways I'm running out of time so I'm going to
really be rushing through this but they've had a long history of finding
innovations at the forefront of technology to facilitate their work and
they also help advance things like streaming video digital anonymous
currencies a lot of technologies that people use were really developed from
the use of sex workers and of course all those technologies have the other side
of harm and ways that there can be negative outcomes simply from how
prevalent they can be banking bans are increasingly a big one that that may not
be a form of criminalization but if you can't have a bank account you really
can't function in the place where you live automated license plate readers
deep web search tools all of these things can be used to create harm in the
lives of people in the sex trade and we can see a positive effect for example
this is a study on craigslist effect on violence against women in the United
States where craigslist was associated with a 17% reduction in the homicide
rate for women in the country 17% for all women and most of those was
understood to be involved in the sex trade some people have said this could
be a correlation or causation but I can tell you as an outreach worker that when
craigslist went down that we saw an eightfold increase in outdoor sex
workers that people were using phones to book ads and I don't have to tell this
crowd that opening an email can sometimes have a negative outcome but it is always
safer to open an email than it is to stick your head in a car window in a
remote part of town where no one can hear you or come help you so having that
distance and ability to move indoors is very protective here's a migrant sex
worker who benefited and was actually able to move out of a trafficking
situation through her adoption of technology she was able to move away
from brothel and outdoor work and what is she using it's kind of blurry but
she's using a phone and she's able to clients and although she's still
ambivalent being in the sex trade she's having a much safer experience of it and
she's making enough money to support her family so not perfect but better
project doxy spotting is another example of the way people are using technology
to harass sex workers they're using Google search kind of images to identify
and make a giant database and of course there are always going to be some limits
and our government this is a quote from president brought former president
Barack Obama about using technology specifically to target traffickers but
they really mean sex workers in general these are some examples of border
crossing issues that people are facing all over where they're finding that just
going or they are being identified and they are being halted and they're being
denied entry and this is happening more and more and more as AI and facial
recognition software gets more sophisticated so even though it may not
be apparent they are being recognized simply from these these smarter machine
tools sesta FOSTA in 2018 has had a major global impact because we live on
an American dominated internet so companies that are based in America of
course have to answer to the policies that they have there so cloud flyer for
example based in the US does a lot of hosting and they certainly have to
answer to this and people are being discriminated against not just for using
being doing commerce but for using these tools I still have two minutes I'm gonna
rush I see they're getting ready to kick me out digital safety has many
interdependent axes and we have to reconceive of the fact that we don't
just have external territorial borders anymore our borders are internal they
are omnipresent they are always watching us and they are distinguishing fit
citizens from unfit citizens so we can't just think of them as a place that we
cross one time this is gonna rush through this one of the some of the key
things if you're traveling and you are a sex worker say as little as you
possibly can know as much as possible about what your crossing process will
be understand that there is going to be a lot more involuntary facial
recognition I experienced that on my flight from San Francisco over here for
the first time being about to board my plane I had to undergo facial recognition
biometrics literally right before boarding so that's going to be
happening to everybody so please use some of these practical steps please
look at the this show later to see what they are and remember that borders are
systems of domination but not absolute domination we can figure out some ways
to get around it this was a great paper got me real hot that some of these facial
recognition aren't always insurmountable so don't tell me the odds because the
odds are really bad this is some big technology it's very widespread instead
please let's talk about the goal and the goal is that people need to live freely
in this world and we need to support others in living freely in this world
too that's our goal these are pictures of me from my work in Maurya camp I was
there in 2015 before it burned to the ground and I am never going to forget
the people that I met and the work that I did there many of those people are
going to go on to do sex work voluntary or involuntary and I hope that they have
the best lives possible and that by teaching these things that can that can
happen for them thank you so much
you
(gentle music)