Smith: Companies must save private data to combat child porn

According to Smith, child pornography was nearly eradicated in the 1980s, but has seen an enormous resurgence since the rise of the Internet. 

“Child pornography images litter the Internet and pedophiles can purchase, view, or exchange this disgusting material with virtual anonymity,” he said. 

Smith cited some harrowing statistics:

• “According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), child porn images increased 1500 percent between 1995 and 2005, an average increase of over 100 percent per year.”

• “As many as one in three kids have received unsolicited sexual content online and one in seven children has been solicited for sex online.”

• “The number of reports to NCMEC’s CyberTipline of child pornography, child prostitution, child sex tourism, child sexual molestation, and online sexual enticement of children increased from 4500 in 1998 to 102,000 in 2008, an average increase of over 200 percent per year.”

The opposing view on data retention came from minority witness John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. 

He discussed the problems that can arise when companies save private information.

“Mandatory data retention would cause significant harms and would, at the same time, not likely increase the number of child pornographers that this country is able to prosecute and put in prison,” he said in prepared remarks. 

He said such measures could allow government and the private sector to abuse consumer data. It could also open the door to identity theft, he said. 

Another possibility is that the measure could “chill Americans form accessing sensitive content online,” he said.

That could damage competition and innovation on the Internet, harming the U.S. economy, according to Morris. 

Morris argued that “data preservation orders” are a sound alternative to a data retention mandate. 

The law, he said, already permits enforcement officials to ask Internet service providers to save about criminal suspects without any judicial permission.

Data preservation is automatic in cases where service providers report possible child pornography to NCMEC, he said. 

“From a privacy and civil liberties perspective, the benefits of this approach are enormous: data about only the tiny fraction of individuals who have fallen under criminal suspicion is subject to a data preservation requirement,” he said.