A bipartisan bill to protect children from online sexual exploitation is on President Biden’s desk.
The bill proposed by Senators Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-SC) aims to strengthen the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline. If an online service provider discovers child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the platform is legally required to report it to CyberTipline. NCMEC then works with law enforcement to investigate the crime.
The problem is that NCMEC is understaffed and operates on outdated technology. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory, platforms send CDs and USB sticks containing CSAM to NCMEC, where they are manually uploaded to the nonprofit’s database. And as AI-generated CSAM becomes more common, the flood of reports will only make it more difficult for NCMEC to timely investigate urgent child sexual exploitation threats. According to Stanford’s research, only 5% to 8% of reports currently result in arrests, due to funding shortages, inefficient technology and other limitations. This is particularly astonishing when you consider that the CyberTipline received over 36 million reports last year – when the tipline was set up in 1998, 4,450 reports were processed.
“NCMEC faces resource constraints and lower salaries, resulting in difficulty retaining staff who are often poached from industry trust and safety teams,” Stanford’s report said. “While there has been progress in de-conflicting reports – identifying connections between reports, for example identical offenders – the pace of improvement was seen as slow.”
This bill won’t solve all of these problems, but it will allow providers to retain the contents of reports for up to a year instead of just 90 days – giving law enforcement more time to investigate crimes. Rather than relying on decades-old storage methods, the bill also includes a way for NCMEC to legally store data using commercial cloud computing services, which could make the process of evaluating reports more efficient. Providers also face higher fines if they fail to report suspected violations to NCMEC – platforms with more than 100 million users will face a fine of $850,000 (up from $150,000) for a first-time violation. In addition to their obligation to report CSAM, platforms will also be required to report child luring.
“At a time of such division in Congress, we are bringing Republicans and Democrats together to protect children online,” Senator Ossoff said in a statement.