Michigan Attorney General Tells Craigslist to Shape Up

The AG mailed the letter after months of e-mailing to the provided law enforcement link got no response, a spokesman for Cox said. “We were using their procedure to communicate with them.” He said the office asked three times for its phone number and a link to its site to be placed on Craigslist. Undercover agents also sent messages to Craigslist posing as a child, a teacher and a parent seeking help, the letter said. “The vast majority of our complaints were not responded to, while only a few received automated replies,” the letter said. The procedure, at best, is malfunctioning, the spokesman said. “This is unacceptable,” Cox wrote.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster issued a written statement saying, “We share the concerns of Attorney General Cox, and look forward to working with his office to improve safety for our users and the general public.” Craigslist signed an agreement with the majority of state attorneys general in November in which it stepped up protection procedures for posting in the erotic services section (WID Nov 7 p2). At the time, Buckmaster said preventing site misuse and improving public safety were the company’s “highest priorities.”

Cox said his office has arrested seven people in the last two years who solicited children they came across in the “men seeking men” section. The most recent, announced in conjunction with the release of the letter, was a former teacher and school administrator, Steven LaJoie. Cox’s spokesman alleged LaJoie responded to a classified in the “men seeking men” section, and even after it became clear that the poster was a child, who actually was an undercover agent, LaJoie still wanted to meet.

Although this case involved a “child” knowingly agreeing to meet an adult, Craigslist could still help prevent sexual predation if it offered easier access to help, the spokesman said. He said the undercover agent sent messages to Craigslist, pretending to be a boy who realized he'd gone too far and wanted help, but got no response. “Here a child stopped himself … and looked for help and basically didn’t get any,” the spokesman said. Craigslist could make the Internet safer today, he said.

Cox asked Craigslist to create public guidelines for how it responds to complaints of crime, to refer to law enforcement complaints of child exploitation and to remove broken links to law enforcement agencies. It said when Craigslist gets a complaint of child exploitation, it should forward the complaint to law enforcement, provide links to law enforcement agencies in each state and make the “exploitation of minors” link easier to find.

Cox is certainly within his rights to ask Craigslist to make certain changes, said John Morris, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The letter is more an “exhortation” than anything else, and it doesn’t impose obligations, which would be a different story, he said. But he did wonder how realistic the requests are. The attorney general complained of a link to the Atlanta police department being broken, which he said made him think “Craigslist is asleep at the switch on any on-going verification of this critically important information.” Law enforcement agencies should probably take responsibility for the currency of their links instead of expecting the smallish staff of Craigslist to monitor them, Morris said.

Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation also said the letter didn’t raise alarm bells of overreaching on the attorney general’s part. “It can’t hurt for Craigslist to provide some links to law enforcement officials or designate who to turn to when problems develop,” he said. That seems like it would be an industry best practice, he said.