Latest in Encryption
Lawmakers have made significant and welcome revisions to the draft bill limiting Section 230 immunity in cases of child-exploitation material.
As the debate over law enforcement access to encrypted communications continues, commentators and policymakers often overlook an instructive historical example.
If Congress wants to restrict end-to-end encryption, it should do so directly and not, as in the EARN IT Act, pass the buck to someone else.
Critics are right that the draft legislation from Sens. Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal could affect the deployment of end-to-end encryption. But the bill makes sense as social policy.
A recent lawsuit by WhatsApp against a spyware company may signal the beginning of the end for lawful hacking as a solution to the problem of law enforcement access to encrypted data.
Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Ron Wyden have written a thoughtful letter calling on law enforcement to employ currently available digital investigative capabilities.
Editor’s note: This article grew out of work done in our Georgetown University class on national security and social media. The class tackled an array of questions related to how hate groups exploit social media, exploring issues ranging from privacy and human rights concerns to technological and legal barriers. Working in teams, students conducted independent research that addressed a difficult issue in this problem space. —Dan Byman & Chris Meserole
Child exploitation images are a horrific problem. Even the most clinical descriptions (such as the 23 sites described in the Freedom Hosting NIT warrant application) turn the stomach and chill the soul. Many individuals and companies, such as Facebook, go to extraordinary efforts to fight this menace.
I. Embrace Reality and Deal With It
On Sept. 28, the New York Times published a harrowing, in-depth investigative story on the prevalence of child pornography on the internet. The piece describes a staggering increase in the number of reports to the federal National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) flagging child sexual abuse imagery online from an already-high one million in 2014 to an almost unfathomable 18.4 million in 2018—an increase of almost 1,750 percent in just four years.