As Congress Grandstands Nonsense ‘Kid Safety’ Bills, Senator Wyden Reintroduces Legislation That Would Actually Help Deal With Kid Exploitation Online

As you've likely heard, this morning the Senate did one of its semi-regular hearings in which it drags tech CEOs in front of clueless Senators who make nonsense pronouncements in hopes of getting a viral clip to show up on the very social media they're pretending to demonize, but which they rely on to pretend to their base that they're leading the culture war moral panic against social media.

Meanwhile, Senator Ron Wyden has (yet again) released a bill that will get little (if any) attention, but which actually seeks to help protect children. Reps. Eshoo and Fitzpatrick have introduced the companion bill in the House.

As we've discussed multiple times, all evidence suggests that the internet companies are actually doing an awful lot to stop child exploitation online, which involves tracking it down, reporting it to NCMEC, and putting in place tools to automate and block such exploitation content from ever seeing the light of day. The real problem seems to be that after the content is reported to NCMEC, nothing happens.

Wyden's bill aims to fix that part. The actual part where the system seems to fall down and fail to protect kids online. The part about what happens after the companies report such content, and NCMEC and the DOJ fail to take any action:

The Invest in Child Safety Act would direct more than $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target the predators and abusers who create and share child sexual abuse material online. It also directs substantial new funding for community-based efforts to prevent children from becoming victims in the first place. The legislation would also create a new office within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to coordinate efforts across federal agencies, after the DOJ refused to comply with a 2008 law requiring coordination and reporting of those efforts.

The federal government has a responsibility and moral obligation to protect children from exploitation online, but right now it's failing in large part because of a lack of funding and coordination," Wyden said. It's time for a new approach to find child predators, prosecute these monsters, and help protect children from becoming victims in the first place - and that's why we are introducing the Invest in Child Safety Act."

The bill includes a ton of pretty clear and obvious common sense approaches to helping deal with the actual crimes going on and to actually step in and protect children, rather than just grandstanding about it and magically pretending that if only Mark Zuckerberg nerded harder, he'd magically prevent child exploitation.

• Quadruple the number of prosecutors and agents in DOJ's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 30 FTEs to 120 FTEs;
• Add 100 new agents and investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Innocent Images National Initiative, Crimes Against Children Unit, Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Teams, and Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Forces;
• Fund 65 new NCMEC analysts, engineers, and mental health counselors, as well as a major upgrade to NCMEC's technology platform to enable the organization to more effectively evaluate and process CSAM reports from tech companies;
• Double funding for the state Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces;
• Double funding for the National Criminal Justice Training Center, to administer crucial Internet Crimes Against Children and Missing and Exploited Children training programs;
• Increase funding for evidence-based programs, local governments and non-federal entities to detect, prevent and support victims of child sexual abuse, including school-based mental health services and prevention programs like the Children's Advocacy Centers and the HHS' Street Outreach Program;
• Require tech companies to increase the time that they hold evidence of CSAM, in a secure database, to enable law enforcement agencies to prosecute older cases;
• Establish an Office to Enforce and Protect Against Child Sexual Exploitation, within the Executive Office of the President, to direct and streamline the federal government's efforts to prevent, investigate and prosecute the scourge of child exploitation;
• Require the Office to develop an enforcement and protection strategy, in coordination with HHS and GAO; and
• Require the Office to submit annual monitoring reports, subject to mandatory Congressional testimony to ensure timely execution.

Of course, doing basic stuff like this isn't the kind of thing that gets headlines, and so it won't get even a fraction of the attention that terrible, unconstitutional, problematic bills like KOSA, EARN IT, STOP CSAM and others will get. Indeed, after doing a quick search online, I can find exactly no articles about Wyden's bill. Dealing with actual problems isn't the kind of thing this Congress does, nor something that the media cares about.

Having a show trial to pretend that terrible bills are great makes headlines. Actually presenting a bill that provides real tools to help... gets ignored.