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In many ways, Sen. Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his vice president is historic: She is the first woman of color on a major party ticket, as well as the first female vice-presidential Democratic pick in more than three decades. Yet many on the left were not overly pleased with the pick, pointing to Harris’s somewhat regressive record when she was district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California. Among these critics were sex workers’ rights advocates, who have been vocal about Harris’s...

On Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders revealed a sweeping, 6,000-word reform plan aiming at totally overhauling the criminal justice system. The plan featured many progressive touchstones, from abolishing the death penalty to ending cash bail to legalizing marijuana and expunging sentences for drug possession. However, there was one criminal-justice issue it did not touch on: sex work, specifically sex-work decriminalization. A few days later, Sen. Elizabeth Warren also released her own expansive criminal justice reform plan, which similarly did not mention the issue.

This omission from Sanders and Warren...

When Kristen Diangelo was younger and doing sex work, police officers would routinely do big sweeps of areas known to be frequented by sex workers. “Cops would roll up. They’d grab your purse and dump it out. They’d look at your arms for track marks. They’d look through your pockets,” Diangelo, now executive director of Swop (Sex Workers Outreach Project) Sacramento, tells Rolling Stone. “They’d just do it. They didn’t ask.” Sometimes, they’d find condoms during these searches — and under California law, that would...

Facial recognition technology is everywhere these days, and people aren’t having it. Cities like San Francisco have officially instituted bans preventing police officers from using it, and none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued an ominous warning that the rise of facial recognition technology is “tied to the political reality that there is a global rise in authoritarianism and fascism.” Now, it’s allegedly being used to ID members of the sex industry, which could potentially be used to chilling effect.

According to a post on the Chinese social network Weibo,...