Concerned Members of Congress and state legislators around the country are grappling with how to make the internet a safer place for kids, but too many have overlooked an integral element of any successful strategy: getting individual predators and global organized crime networks out of the equation. This failure of vision begins with a myopic vilification of online platforms and a steadfast disregarding of the reality that underfunded, poorly coordinated law enforcement has barely made a dent in a global crime problem.
By turning the discussion of online safety into a shortsighted jihad against tech companies, these policy makers have ignored the fact that virtually every successful criminal prosecution for online child exploitation begins with a cybertip reported by tech companies. Instead of amplifying these potentially powerful partnerships, policy makers have turned against the best resource they have when it comes to fighting crime online, these mandated reporters that provide millions of leads every year, which are the backbone of any criminal investigation of online child exploitation.
Worse yet, only a fraction of cybertips reported to the authorities are investigated by law enforcement agencies, which are under-resourced and stretched to the limit. The result is this: While the tech companies spend millions of dollars collecting, analyzing and conveying this data to the authorities, much of that work is ignored by the very agencies tasked with carrying out a meaningful law-enforcement response to these persistent reports of online predation.
This means that, while outrage is expressed against platforms for a range of perceived issues, the investigation, indictment, prosecution and conviction of the criminals who have done violence to children is effectively foregone. This flawed approach has ensured that bad actors online can operate with almost complete impunity. Missing in this discussion is the key point that largely “administrative” recommendations in bills like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) misdirect attention and pull focus away from the real problem — criminals who are victimizing children.1https://www.stop-child-predators.org/whitepaper
The status quo is equal parts intellectually confused and ineffectual at apprehending criminals. This is the predicament tech platforms face in today’s world: private companies cannot issue arrest warrants, execute search warrants or prosecute crimes. However, de facto, that is precisely the expectation federal and state legislators have when it comes to solving a growing number of complex criminal acts in cyberspace.
Imagine for a moment that you are the president of a large bank. You call law enforcement millions of times a year to report attempted bank robberies. But those 911 calls are only answered a minute percentage of the time. You then learn that federal and state officials expect you to catch your own bank robbers; and if you don’t…you will be sued.
If you are a convenience store owner and your manager is shot and killed in a robbery, you will be expected to catch the murderer…or you will be sued.
If you are a large chain store like CVS, already an attractive target for gangs of shoplifters, you cannot call the police to root out these criminal enterprises; you must do it yourself…or you will be sued.
Many legislators seem oblivious to the fact that tech giants – the overwhelming majority of which are US incorporated – are required by US law to report instances of child sexual abuse material [CSAM] to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a task they have dutifully carried out for years.
Still fewer seem to be aware that when a report is made, “geographic indicators related to the upload location of the CSAM are used to make the report available to appropriate law enforcement.” In practice, this means, for instance, that there were 178,648 UK cyber tips made in 2023, almost entirely the product of mandated reporting by Big Tech. However, the UK government indicates that there were only 39,640 CSAM image offenses in the UK and Wales during that reporting period, representing a small fraction of CSAM reports made by tech.
The international crime element of this problem is no small consideration, as roughly 94% of cybertips are referred to foreign governments where the US has little or no ability to force those jurisdictions to pursue successful criminal investigations.
More importantly, it is common knowledge that some of the most intractable and serious victimization of kids is being perpetrated by well known, highly organized international crime rings like the Nigerian based Yahoo Boys, a collective of thousands of criminals operating in more than 20 countries around the world. Thinly veiled censorship or unconstitutional mandates are not going to stop these clever and well-organized predators.2https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/american-compass-points-the-wrong-way-on-online-regulation/ Nothing but taking them off the digital streets – an effort that will require significant law-enforcement engagement and coordination – will put an end to the vicious cycle of victimization they have set in motion.
Bills like KOSA and other proposed, largely technical, “remedies” do nothing to address rampant crime online. They fail completely to acknowledge the limitations private companies face when it comes to effective prosecution. And they certainly ignore to an almost comical extent the degree to which the information that is gathered and made available about internet child exploitation comes directly from the entities – i.e., the social media platforms – they now seek to sanction. This concept is a fool’s errand if there ever were one.
So, what is to be done about this pernicious, seemingly intractable problem?
Policy makers could start by investing in child safety, a concept beautifully laid out in the one bill that does get to real solutions, the Invest in Child Safety Act.3https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3689/text This bill has been sponsored in Congress by Sen. Ron Wyden and others and would cost only a small fraction of proposed budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Invest in Child Safety Act would go a long way toward right-sizing the federal commitment to fund everything from cybercrime investigators to Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforces to training investigators, helping prosecutors and expanding judicial capacity in order to successfully prosecute these crimes.4https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/the-right-way-to-protect-children-online/ Though some have questioned the bill’s cost estimate, implementation would require a miniscule percentage of current budget requests for agencies like DHS.
Unfortunately, however, these exigencies arise at a time when fiscal concerns are pressing and budget requests for agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are being reduced. Criminal investigators at agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, whose superb cybercrime unit is doing superb work on cybercrimes and child exploitation, are being moved into other areas like border security and current efforts to combat urban crime with National Guard deployments. This is not a problem, though, that we can solve by expecting the private sector to perform law enforcement tasks, which only the public sector can legally – or appropriately – execute.
Politicians who engage in misdirection and partake in ill-informed magical thinking have to face facts. At the moment, that means hiring and supporting trained investigators, prosecutors and judges at the federal, state and local level to bust child predators – not engage in ad hominem attacks on tech firms who actively seek law enforcement cover every time they make a report to the NCMEC.
Of almost equal importance is the project to bolster and expand existing public–private partnerships like the Department of Homeland Security’s Know2Protect Program, an invaluable public education and awareness resource for families struggling to understand the risks their families may face if they are not vigilant enough.5https://www.dhs.gov/know2protect
The bottom line is that a small proportion of child exploitation crimes are being investigated by law enforcement, despite tech companies having reported them. If those crimes are not being investigated, the criminals responsible will never be charged, let alone prosecuted, convicted, or imprisoned. And that is a huge problem that no amount of age verification or backdoor online censorship will ever fix.
Maureen Flatley is the President of Stop Child Predators.
