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Congress' Preoccupation With Cyber Porn
by Andrew Noyes
If there is an Internet, child advocacy or trade group whose voice has not been heard during Washington's wide-sweeping war on child pornography, it needs a bigger megaphone. More than a half-year of congressional hearings have resulted in reams of testimony from nearly every government bureaucrat, industry specialist, nonprofit entity, academic and attorney worth their salt in sexual-exploitation expertise.
The Senate Commerce Committee started the investigation with a high-profile hearing in January, where lawmakers heard from high-level FBI and Justice Department officials and Web industry representatives. Another hearing came last month that featured law enforcement and child-protection experts. But the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee far exceeded other panels' preoccupation with child porn, holding eight hearings on the topic dating back to April.
The last hearings occurred just before a cyber-sex scandal involving congressional pages and former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., broke.
At its most recent hearing in September, lawmakers grilled adoption advocates. Current laws make it tough to supervise international adoptions in the United States, witnesses said. Some said better screening could have prevented the abuse suffered by one orphan, Masha Allen, whose nude pictures were put online by her adoptive father.
Allen, whose name has become synonymous with the horrors of child sexual exploitation, pleaded with lawmakers in May to target Web predators like the man convicted of molesting her. He is serving a 15-year federal jail term and was sentenced to more than 30 years by a state court.
Justin Berry, who ran a porn site at age 13 and was allegedly sexually abused by adult males whom he met online, also gave chilling testimony in April. He told lawmakers that his experience was "not as isolated as you might hope." Berry and his attorney Stephen Ryan said they were upset with law enforcement for not acting faster to apprehend abusers.
The Message: Take Action Or Else
The hearings focused in part on efforts by the technology industry to keep child porn offline and deter sexual exploitation of youth.
An executive from GoDaddy, a major Internet-addressing registry, and the founder of a small Web-hosting company called Blue Gravity testified in September about their efforts to remove illegal child images from their networks. In another subcommittee hearing that month, officials representing online payment processors like E-Gold and PayPal, and executives from American Express, MasterCard and Visa shared anecdotes about their work.
The Senate Banking Committee staged a similar meeting days earlier, hearing from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children President Ernie Allen and bank and credit-card officials.
Social-networking sites took heat in June as lawmakers pushed for immediate industry-wide reforms to protect children from Web predators on such sites. Executives from Facebook, MySpace and Xanga.com testified. Subsequently, the companies unveiled a series of technological safeguards and new policies.
The lawmakers' take-action-or-else tone echoed another hearing that week where executives from the Internet firms America Online, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo went before the subcommittee. They pledged $1 million to help NCMEC develop a central database for identifying online child exploitation and alerting law enforcement.
Credit-card companies took some blame for facilitating the purchase of unlawful pictures and videos. They are now working through the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography to snuff out illegal online sexual content by 2008.
"Our mission is to follow the money, stop the payments, shut down the accounts and put an end to this multibillion-dollar worldwide enterprise," NCMEC's Allen told Senate Banking.
Bills As A Band-Aid Approach?
The House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee joined the conversation in July with a hearing on a bill, H.R. 5319, that would force schools and libraries receiving government funds for Internet access to ban kids from social-networking sites. That legislation got a chilly reception from consumer advocates, librarians and some in the high-tech sector. The House passed the bill, but the Senate has not advanced it.
Meanwhile, an industry-wide standard for Internet service providers to retain customer data first proposed by the Bush administration is being carried forth in Congress by Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. She reportedly is working on a measure under which firms would have to preserve subscribers' Internet protocol addresses for a year.
Twelve months of basic record-keeping sounded better to ISPs than the data-retention proposal originally floated by Justice and the FBI in meetings with Internet companies. The initial plan was said to have included storing users' Web content, which ISPs complained would cost too much. The suggestion also scared privacy hawks who worried about keeping the data secure.
One of the most important steps taken by the administration this year was enacting legislation, H.R. 4472, that aims to strengthen sex-offender registries and enhance Internet safeguards. President Bush signed the bill in July.
At the Senate Commerce hearing, Fisher described related Justice-led initiatives, organized under the heading Project Safe Childhood. The effort involves "an army of people" on local, state and national levels.
NCMEC's Allen singled out Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for putting child safety on the front burner. "The emphasis and priority that he has placed on sexual predators and their victimizing of children is historic," Allen said in an interview. Gonzales has "tackled this issue in a truly unprecedented way."
Dateline NBC's ongoing "To Catch a Predator" series also helped raise awareness, Allen said. "Seeing how many people are willing to use the Internet to target kids and travel to try to have sexual contact with them has shocked people," he said. Allen said the multi-pronged, multi-stakeholder progress has "made us far more effective than we've ever been."
Cyber-law expert Parry Aftab agreed. The congressional hearings paired with TV reports have "scared parents out of their minds" and "taught a lot of the legislators in Washington what's really going on," she said.
Fine-Tuning The Focus
Despite progress on a number of fronts, the child porn and exploitation effort is not free from criticism.
Too much attention has been paid to regulatory fixes that will burden the Internet, said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Calls for labeling mandates for "sexually explicit" Web pages and burdensome data-retention requirements for ISPs have usurped the commendable goal of "getting predators behind bars and away from kids," he said.
The Center for Democracy and Technology concurred. The labeling idea, which was worked into several legislative packages, could impose "an enormous chill" online, CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris said at a recent briefing. The provision remains in a Senate appropriations bill and its fate is uncertain, Harris said.
The House investigations subcommittee "performed a terrific service in putting before the parents of America the real dangers of the Internet," Justin Berry's attorney said. "I don't think there had ever been an event that catalyzed parents' knowledge as much."
He took issue with law enforcement's handling of Berry's case. "They couldn't see the kid was a victim, and they were treating him like a perpetrator," Ryan said. Still, the agency is "different today" as a result of the attention, he said, and is "better to have gone through the crucible of those hearings."
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