Critics call Florida bill aiming to protect minors a threat to encryption

When you want to protect minors from predators online, you inevitably have to cooperate with social media firms. But they’re not too keen to help because most bills require them to provide encryption backdoors for law enforcement officials. This is what’s happening in Florida.

A draft bill aimed at safeguarding children from online predators has already passed a few hurdles and is now advancing to Florida’s Senate floor for a vote. The bill would require social media companies to break encryption if the police ask.

The Senate Rules Committee has voted unanimously to push the bill, targeting sexual predators who are hunting young kids on social media apps, further up.

Florida’s law enforcement agencies are satisfied. For instance, Randy Tifft, Santa Rosa County's chief deputy, told WEAR ABC 3 that retrieving communications from social media platforms is problematic because they are end-to-end encrypted.

“They're claiming they don't have it anymore. It goes away after they delete it, and it's over a period of time. We've had some subpoenas come back with no documentation,” said Tifft, who added this was at times the reason there’s not enough evidence to put someone away.

Now, the draft bill would require companies to provide law enforcement authorities with tools to decrypt encrypted messages if the user is underage.

A subpoena or warrant would be needed, but the bill would also require companies to grant a minor’s parent or legal guardian access to all the child’s accounts. Platforms would be forbidden from allowing minors to use or access messages designed to disappear, like those on Snapchat and Instagram.

Snapchat, the hottest disappearing image platform online, has long been called a hotbed for predators, scammers, and groomers. Its users are also mostly minors.

At the same time, opponents of the bill, including tech companies and privacy activists, have also long said that creating a decryption key would open up all accounts to hacking possibilities.

For instance, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post last week that encryption was the “best tool we have to protect our communications online” and that Florida will actually make minors less safe.

This week, lobbyist Chris Carmody, representing Meta, also said it’d be reasonable to assume that the decryption key would unlock all sorts of possibilities for the bad actors out there.

However, the bill’s sponsor, Spring Hill Republican Senator Blaise Ingoglia, quickly called such an assertion an “industry talking point,” used by social media firms to muddy the waters around a clear black-and-white issue.

“They cannot tell me with a straight face that they cannot code something that can decrypt something on a one-time basis for the purpose of retrieving the evidence needed in court to put sexual predators away and then close the door right behind them,” said Ingoglia.

According to the US Department of Justice, one in five children receives unwanted sexual solicitation online each year. One in 33 are targets of aggressive sexual solicitation, which involves pushes by the culprit to make offline contact.

This is a national problem, activists say. The bipartisan “Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment Act” (the STOP CSAM Act) is already slowly advancing in the US Senate – and is also attacked by critics.