Court rules sex website must comply with congressional subpoena

Backpage.com, one of the country’s chief outlets for prostitutes and other adult services, must turn over records to a congressional probe that’s looking into whether the website does enough to try to screen for victims of human trafficking, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Carl Ferrer, chief executive of Backpage, had insisted that, as a classified ads website, he is protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, but U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer rejected that, saying the subcommittee conducting the investigation is well within its rights.

“Mr. Ferrer cannot use the First Amendment as an omnipotent and unbreakable shield to prevent Congress from properly exercising its constitutional authority,” Judge Collyer wrote.

The case served as the latest test of Congress’s investigative powers in the internet age — and Capitol Hill appears to have won this round.

The Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has been looking into sex trafficking and the internet, after experts said most commercial sex transactions have moved online.

“This is the first time in more than 20 years that the Senate has had to enforce a subpoena in court, but we are pleased that the court has vindicated the Senate’s constitutional right to gather information to help us fight the scourge of online human trafficking,” said Sen. Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican who heads the investigative subcommittee.

Backpage couldn’t be reached for a comment Friday evening.

The company’s annual revenue is estimated at more than $150 million.

Judge Collyer gave Mr. Ferrer 10 days to hand over the documents.

And she issued a searing evaluation of Backpage’s approach to its business, saying the company appears to have changed its own practices specifically to hide what it’s doing.

While the company says it does try to weed out illegal ads, Backpage does not maintain a specific policy, leaving it to individual employees to make judgments. The company argued in court that forcing it to produce all of the employees’ emails would be too burdensome.

But Judge Collyer was having none of that.

“So be it,” she said. “Backpage has no recourse but to produce all employee emails concerning moderation activities that would otherwise remain hidden. Backpage cannot proclaim its attention to moderation efforts to avoid ads for sex trafficking and refuse to respond with documentary evidence of how that attention works in practice.”