Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in 2008, Congress responded to rising reports of child sexual abuse material--CSAM--online by passing the PROTECT Act to direct the Department of Justice to combat these heinous crimes. However, in the decade that followed, DOJ failed to request the manpower, funding, and resources to combat this scourge, leaving both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children--NCMEC--and law enforcement agencies uncoordinated, understaffed, and underfunded. As a result, though tech companies reported more than 45 million instances of CSAM to NCMEC in the last year alone, just a fraction were investigated, and even fewer were prosecuted and convicted. Yet, rather than confronting this failure by Congress and the executive branch, my colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee have put forth the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies--EARN IT--Act, a deeply flawed piece of legislation that would revoke online platforms' intermediary liability protections with regard to not only Federal civil Jaw, but also any State law broadly related to CSAM. The EARN IT Act will not protect children. It will not stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, nor target the monsters who produce and share it, and it will not help the victims of these evil crimes. What it will do is threaten the free speech, privacy, and security of every single American.…”