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from the looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places dept.
Amazon and Microsoft employees caught up in sex trafficking sting
The tech industry has a clear history of sexism and misogyny, but a recent Newsweek report highlights another problem. The publication got its hands on a slew of emails sent to brothels and pimps between 2014 and 2016 that document the industry's patronage of brothels and purchasing of services from trafficked sex workers. Among the emails, which were obtained through a public records request to the King County Prosecutor's Office, were 67 sent from Microsoft employee email accounts, 63 from Amazon accounts and dozens more from companies like Boeing, T-Mobile, Oracle and local Seattle tech firms.
Some of the emails were collected during a 2015 sting operation that targeted sex worker review boards and resulted in the arrest of 18 individuals, including high-level Amazon and Microsoft directors. Two opted for a trial, which is currently set to begin in March.
Seattle's sex industry has grown right alongside its tech industry and the city's authorities have said that some men spend up to $50,000 per year on sex workers. Brothels are even known to advertise how close they are to tech offices. Alex Trouteaud, director of policy and research at the anti-trafficking organization Demand Abolition, told Newsweek that the tech industry is a "culture that has readily embraced trafficking."
Newsweek: Tech Bros Bought Sex Trafficking Victims by Using Amazon and Microsoft Work Emails
Related: "Pimping" Charges Against Backpage Executives Dismissed
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:18AM
To get free nookie on a regular basis, you have to invest time and effort and usually money into getting to know potential partners and/or making oneself attractive to those that enjoy casual nookie, and then of course invest time and effort and usually money into getting particularly close to a partner. That time and effort is something that rich and powerful men don't have in abundance, so for them investing just straight up cash for a prostitute is much easier.
Also, part of the attraction of prostitutes for a lot of high-powered men is precisely that it's not free, and thus a transaction in which their partner(s) has no power to refuse them when they request a particular act. So even if they could get free nookie, they choose hookers instead.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.