Expressing excitement for his soon-to-arrive “new material,” a man shared with his online network of child sexual abusers an in-utero picture of his unborn child. This is just one of far too many horror stories I have heard from investigators at the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
Children as young as 8, 4, and 2, and, increasingly more often, pre-verbal infants, are subject to horrific, unspeakable, and gut-wrenching sexual abuse that is then broadcast to a global audience. Last year alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received nearly 17 million reports to their CyberTipline. This haul exceeded 27 million images and 41 million videos. The average victim is 8 years old. Sadly, these reports constitute only a fraction of the global child sexual abuse trade.
WIRED OPINION
ABOUT
Hany Farid is a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in digital forensics and internet-scale content moderation.
For the past decade, a dynamic group of researchers, child-safety advocates, legislators, and technology sector experts have been working ardently to develop and deploy technology to protect children online. Among our many efforts includes the widely implemented and effective photoDNA program that was launched in 2008 and is today used globally to find and remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This program extracts a distinct signature from uploaded images and compares it against the signatures of known harmful or illegal content. Flagged content can then be instantaneously removed and reported.
Frustratingly, for the past decade, the technology sector has been largely obstructionist and full of naysayers when it comes to deploying new technologies to protect us. As a result of this deliberate neglect, the internet is overrun with child sexual abuse material, illegal sex trade, nonconsensual pornography, hate and terrorism, illegal drugs, illegal weapons, and rampant misinformation designed to sow civil unrest and interfere with democratic elections. This is the landscape facing us as we consider the Senate Judiciary’s Eliminating Abusive and Ram
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