Digital activists oppose US bill protecting children online: why?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a prominent digital rights group, has once again expressed its opposition to a bill intended to protect children from online sexual exploitation. Activists say it’s quite simple: the document does no such thing.

The bipartisan “Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment Act” of 2023 (the STOP CSAM Act) is slowly advancing in the US Senate.

According to senators sponsoring the bill, social media is full of child sexual abuse material while the big tech companies do too little and have to be held accountable.

Proponents of the bill are urging the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to quickly pass it because, currently, as Republican Senator Josh Hawley says, the victims have no legal recourse against the firms allowing CSAM to proliferate on their platforms.

The STOP CSAM bill makes it a crime to “promote or facilitate” the sexual exploitation of children. The bill also opens the door for civil lawsuits against providers for the negligent “promotion or facilitation” of conduct relating to child exploitation.

However, digital rights organizations are adamant: the bill actually reduces safety online. According to the EFF, while the goal to protect children is important and laudable, “laudable goals do not always make good law.”

The initiative itself seems demonstrative because existing laws already require online service providers to report CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Then, actionable reports are forwarded to law enforcement agencies.

The new bill, the EFF says, creates a “convoluted” notice-and-takedown regime overseen by a new Child Online Protection board, where providers may be required to remove lawful content prior to any adjudication that the content is in fact CSAM.

“This system is ripe to be gamed by bad actors, leaving lawful user content exposed to bogus takedown requests,” the EFF points out, adding that the bill threatens the privacy, security, and free expression of all users, including children.

The organization also sees a threat to end-to-end encryption and says that it’s “unfortunate” that government agencies, including the FBI, keep pushing the idea that strong encryption can be coupled with easy access by law enforcement.

Hackers from Salt Typhoon, a China-backed group, breached US telecom systems last year by infiltrating the same systems that the major providers had opened to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“If there’s any upside to a terrible breach like Salt Typhoon, it’s that it is waking up some officials to understand that encryption is vital to both individual and national security. In fact, in response to this breach, a top US cybersecurity chief said that encryption is your friend,” said the EFF.