TRACE Act of 2007

I thank the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, the former chairman of the Agriculture Committee, one of the senior members of the Judiciary Committee.

I want to, in a somewhat milder vein, share the concerns that Mr. Goodlatte shared about the process. When I agreed to be the principal Republican sponsor of this legislation, I asked and was told that there would be a committee markup in the Judiciary Committee and that there would be amendments made in order. So I was a little bit surprised last week to find that this was going to be on the Suspension Calendar and expressed that surprise to Ms. Wasserman Schultz and her staff.

Having said that, there have been bipartisan discussions, negotiations. There have been changes made in the bill as originally introduced. It is a good bill. And I am proud to be the senior Republican sponsor.

This bill needs to be passed. I will agree with Mr. Goodlatte that it's not a perfect bill, and I'll agree that had there been a committee markup or a subcommittee markup and a bipartisan markup amendment process, some of the issues would have been addressed a little bit differently. I'll agree with that.

But having said that, let's look at what's positive in the bill. And let's compare the bill to current law. There are over 3 million images of child pornography on the Internet right now. Three million. And in the last Congress, as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, under my direct request as chairman, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee held nine hearings on the problem of Internet child pornography. And it's more than a problem. It is a vicious, malicious, virus, viral disease that has the potential to destroy our children. And at some point in time we have to do something. And this bill, the PROTECT bill that's before us this afternoon, is a good first start.

We found out in our hearings last year that the various State and Federal agencies didn't have enough resources. We found out that they didn't coordinate. And so this bill before us, as my good friend, Mr. Goodlatte, has pointed out, it does set up a new special counsel office in the Justice Department. And normally that would probably not be a good thing to do. But in this case, given the lack of coordination under current law, at a minimum, I think it's acceptable. And I personally think that it's commendable.

We give additional resources. Not one witness in our hearings last year said that there were sufficient financial resources. The bill before us authorizes, over the course of the next 8 years, over 1 billion additional dollars to fight this infestation of child pornography. It sets up an additional $400 million to increase funding over the next 8 years for the Federal law enforcement agencies: the FBI's Innocent Images Unit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the United States Postal Service. These are the Federal agencies that are at the forefront in investigating Internet child pornography.

The bill also authorizes increased funding for new forensic computer laboratories. One of the things that we found out is that there just wasn't enough law enforcement laboratory capability in terms of forensics to track down the information that was being provided by the agents in the field. This bill recommends and authorizes an additional $7 million each year for 2008 through 2015 for new national forensic computer laboratories.

We also found out, as I pointed out, that some of these task forces that have been set up and are well intentioned simply didn't have the resources that they needed. So the bill before us authorizes over $600 million over the next 8 years on a staggered basis for these Internet Crimes Against Children, or ICAC, task forces. That is a huge improvement over the current situation, and I don't think any Member of Congress is going to oppose that.

This bill provides additional funding for Federal and State law enforcement, greater coordination of the overall United States law enforcement effort at both the State, Federal, and local level. It establishes a Special Counsel office that I have already talked about. And I want to comment on that.

I agree with what Mr. Goodlatte said that the current task force in the current system in terms of allocating resources is doing an acceptable job. So the Special Counsel will coordinate with them. The Special Counsel will have the ability to sign off, but it doesn't have the ability to unilaterally decide where these additional funds are going to go for the very reasons that Mr. Goodlatte said in his statement a few minutes ago.

The bill before us brings additional resources that are vitally needed to the fight against the scourge of child pornography on the Internet. Almost all of us have children or grandchildren. And

when you go on the Internet today and you type in www.snowwhite.com, you may well get a pornographic child pornography site. Now, that's unacceptable. It's unacceptable to every Member on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the other body, our friends on the other side of this Capitol.

This bill before us may not be a perfect bill, but it is time to act. It is a good start. Anything can be improved.

Again, I respect the process questions that have been raised. I have some of those same questions about some issues under the committee that I serve on as jurisdiction. But in this case it really is time to protect our children. It really is time to move forward. And if we have a roll call vote, I hope every Member of the House of Representatives votes ``yes'' on the PROTECT Act because it is a huge step forward in protecting our children.

I thank my good friend Mr. Goodlatte for yielding to me.

Thank you, Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz, for your hard work and dedication to this bill.

Almost 2 years ago, the Energy and Commerce Committee began a wide- ranging investigation of Internet child pornography. During our investigation, we had nine hearings and interviewed numerous witnesses involved in the fight against child sexual exploitation: Federal and local law enforcement, Federal and local prosecutors, victims, educators, Internet service providers, and financial institutions.

This investigation helped expose the epidemic that is Internet child pornography. At that time, we learned that the Internet contained approximately three million images of child pornography. Law enforcement testified to the Committee that the images were becoming increasingly violent in nature, and that the victims in the photos were getting younger, some as young as 2 years old.

Although law enforcement is working to tackle the epidemic of abuse that exists on the Internet, their resources are taxed, because predators around the world are working just as diligently to continue flooding the Internet with images of child sexual abuse.

I am proud to be the lead cosponsor of the PROTECT Act, because this bill provides the resources that are so desperately needed by law enforcement to take the fight to those predators who seek to exploit and abuse children, often for their own financial gain. We will never win the battle against the sexual exploitation of children unless we arm law enforcement with the necessary resources and tools to bring these predators to justice.

First, the PROTECT Act authorizes, over fiscal years 2008 to 2015, $400,000,000 in increased funding to the Federal law enforcement agencies--FBI's Innocent Images Unit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the United States Postal Service--that are at the forefront in investigating Internet child pornography. The funding is directed for the hiring of additional, full-time agents to work child exploitation cases.

The bill also authorizes increased funding for forensic computer labs. One of the key findings in the Energy and Commerce Committee's investigation of Internet child pornography is that law enforcement investigations were often hampered by the backlog at forensic computer labs. This backlog sometimes made it difficult for law enforcement to identify predators or obtain subpoenas in a timely manner--a delay that endangers the welfare and safety of the victims of Internet child pornography. To address this problem, the PROTECT Act authorizes $7,000,000 for fiscal years 2008 to 2015 for new regional forensic computer labs.

The Energy and Commerce Committee's investigation also found that just as important as the Federal law enforcement effort against child pornography is the effort of State and local law enforcement, in particular, the effort of the state Internet Crimes Against Children, or ICAC task forces. In fact, 70 percent of the cases involving the sexual exploitation of children over the Internet are prosecuted at the state level. While the Department of Justice has provided funding for these ICACs through a grant program, the funding nowhere near matched the needs of these state task forces.

Now, through the PROTECT Act, these task forces will finally receive the support they need. The bill authorizes over $600,000,0000 in new funding for ICACs over fiscal years 2008 to 2015. I believe the PROTECT Act's formula for allocating this funding among states strikes the right balance between ensuring a stable base of funding for the individual ICACs and giving the Justice Department the flexibility to direct funds based on need.

Not only does the bill provide additional funding for Federal and State law enforcement, it also provides greater coordination of the overall United States law enforcement effort--Federal, State, and local--to investigate and prosecute child sexual exploitation crimes. The bill establishes a Special Counsel office within the Justice Department that is charged with coordinating the efforts and strategy of the Department of Justice and Federal and State law enforcement agencies when investigating child exploitation crimes. While I do not believe that the creation of a new Federal office is always the best solution to a problem, in this instance, I believe that this office will help to ensure that the various law enforcement agencies are receiving the assistance they need and are coordinating their investigations in a way that ensures their valuable resources are not being wasted.

This bill brings incredible resources to bear in the fight against child sexual exploitation. We must ensure that the efforts of predators are more than matched by an aggressive law enforcement strategy to bring these criminals to justice. Our children deserve nothing less. For this reason, I urge my colleagues to support the PROTECT Act and make the Internet a safer place for our children.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3845) to establish a Special Counsel for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction within the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, to improve the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, to increase resources for regional computer forensic labs, and to make other improvements to increase the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute child predators, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, just last week we learned that police arrested a senior executive at the National Children's Museum right here in Washington, DC, for distributing child pornography over the Internet. This headline floored me, but it is a good example of a problem that has gotten completely out of control.

The Internet has facilitated an exploding multibillion dollar market for child pornography. Tragically, the demand for this criminal market can only be supplied by graphic new images, and these can only be supplied through the sexual assault of more children. I rise today to urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3845, the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2007.

This bill addresses an issue that is central to the goals of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New Direction Congress, and one that should be at the top of everyone's agenda, the protection of our children. Our children deserve a future that is healthy, prosperous, safe, and bright, but our children are vulnerable when they are on line. If this bill becomes law, we have the potential to save many thousands of children from sexual abuse and exploitation.

I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague, Joe Barton of Texas, for working with me on this bipartisan legislation, and for his counsel, his very good counsel, as the lead Republican sponsor of the bill.

In the last Congress, Congressman Barton, then the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, conducted a series of hearings on this topic. Not only did those hearings expose the dearth of Federal resources devoted to investigating and prosecuting child exploitation crimes, but they also brought together an extraordinary group of parents who formed an organization called the Surviving Parents Coalition. In June of this year, I had the opportunity to visit with this very special group of parents.

When I sat down with Mark Lunsford, Erin Runnion, Ed Smart, Marc Klaas, Mary Kozakiewicz, and other founders of the Surviving Parents Coalition, I was not prepared for what they had to tell me. They shared with me their own horrific stories of how their children were abducted by sexual predators. As we all know, some of these children will never come home. As the mother of three young children myself, their stories broke my heart, and as a Member of Congress I felt compelled to act.

What surprised me most about these brave parents was their message about child pornography and child exploitation. What they said was this: If you

want to prevent predators from hurting other children like ours, the way to do that is to go back through the Internet and get them.

As we learned last month with the apprehension of a child predator in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the first time we have the technology and the evidence not only to find these predators, we have the technology to rescue their victims as well. A 2005 Justice Department study found that 80 percent of child pornography possessors have images and videos of children being sexually penetrated. Another 21 percent possess images of bondage, sadistic abuse, and torture. The children depicted in these photos are very young. Eighty-three percent of child pornography possessors have images of children younger than 12, and another 19 percent possess images of infants and toddlers. There are even Web sites that provide live pay-per-view rape of very young children.

Let me be clear. This is not about obscenity or pornography; these images are crime scene photos, created by a thriving industry that uses children as a sexual commodity.

I want to thank Chairman John Conyers for holding a hearing on Internet predators in October. At that hearing, Special Agent Flint Waters of the Wyoming State Police, a highly respected child exploitation investigator, testified that right now there are nearly 500,000 identified individuals in the United States trafficking child pornography on the Internet. That's half a million people right here in the United States. And law enforcement knows who they are, and they know where they are.

But what shocked me the most and what compelled me to get involved in this issue is that, due to a lack of resources, law enforcement is investigating less than 2 percent of these known 500,000 individuals. Less than 2 percent.

What was even more shocking is that it is estimated that if we were to investigate these cases, we could actually rescue child victims nearly 30 percent of the time.

It is clear that our current efforts are not working. We need a national campaign with everyone joining the fight: that means the full weight of law enforcement, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Congress, the executive branch, parents and victims advocacy groups and Internet service providers.

Alicia Kozakiewicz, whose testimony at the October Judiciary hearing moved us all, is a living, breathing reminder of the lives that we can save. Alicia is not just a victim; she is a survivor.

Alicia told us how over a period of months she was groomed by a 45- year-old predator pretending to be a teenage girl. When Alicia, who was 13 years old at the time, agreed to meet her cyberfriend in real life, he kidnapped her from her suburban Pittsburgh driveway and held her captive in his Virginia dungeon, where he performed unspeakable sexual acts upon her day after day and broadcast it over the Internet. Just when Alicia told us she had given up all hope, she was finally rescued by FBI agents. The FBI found her because the Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children task force, or ICAC, had the technology to lift the digital fingerprints of this perpetrator's crime and to discover the location where he held her captive, chained to the floor.

The PROTECT Our Children Act will help provide the safety net we so desperately need by creating statutory authority for these highly successful ICAC task forces which support State and local law enforcement agencies. It will supplement this local effort with hundreds of new Federal agents who will be solely dedicated to crimes against children. It will also provide desperately needed forensic crime and computer labs so agents can uncover troves of electronic evidence, locate these perpetrators, and bring them to justice.

Finally, the bill will create a special counsel within the Department of Justice who will be responsible for planning and coordinating our child exploitation prosecution efforts across the Federal agencies.

At the October Judiciary Committee hearing, a representative from the FBI told us two things, Mr. Speaker, that boggled my mind. First, he told us that the number of agents being exclusively assigned to these cases is actually shrinking; and, second, that they are giving millions of dollars that Congress has appropriated to combat child pornography to programs that have nothing to do with child protection. Should we be shrinking critical staffing power and diverting badly needed funds at a time when we are investigating less than 2 percent of known traffickers of child pornography? We can do better, and we must do better.

Mr. Speaker, the time has come to reorder priorities at the Department of Justice, and the PROTECT Our Children Act will do just that. Our mandate here is clear: we must prevent predators from hurting our children.

Again, I want to thank Ranking Member Barton for his leadership, his concern, and his compassion for our children and their safety, not just on this issue but on the Pool Safety bill that we worked together in the 109th and the 110th Congress, and I truly appreciate his leadership and effort on this bill and many others.

Mr. Speaker, this is what Congress can do when we come together in a bipartisan fashion. And maybe it's our children that can be the catalyst for the change that we need in America.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, at this time I yield as much time as he may consume to the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Conyers.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Just in response to Mr. Goodlatte regarding the Special Counsel, I appreciate the comments of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton). Special Counsel is an essential element to this legislation because right now you have no less than eight different entities and agencies that have something to do with the grants and the coordination and the prosecution and the pursuit of child exploitation crimes and particularly child pornography.

It is imperative that we have a single go-to entity, a single leadership position in the Department of Justice to ensure that there is someone who is responsible to Congress for the accountability, for the coordination, to make sure that it is elevated to the highest level of priority at the Department of Justice where clearly right now it is not.

And I again want to thank my colleague Mr. Barton for working with us on this legislation. This is an issue that transcends party. It is an issue that transcends process. When you have 500,000 known individuals out there pursuing our children on-line, Internet predators, any of our children could fall victim just by a click of the computer.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell you I have a 4-year-old who goes on-line with the most basic of Web sites, and you just never know, and we need to make sure that we have a massive effort to coordinate and put resources into going after child exploitation and child predators.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 3485, the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2007, introduced by my distinguished colleague from Florida, Representative Wasserman Schultz. This important legislation will protect this Nation's most valuable resource, its children.

As Chair of the Congressional Children's Caucus, I have been an outspoken advocate for the protection of our children against all predators, be it disease, natural disasters, or sexual deviants. While we may not be able to avoid natural disasters, there is nothing but a lack of political will and Congressional action that prevents us from protecting our children from known sexual predators. I am appalled that while the Department of Justice knows the location of hundreds of thousands of sexual predators that prey on our Nation's children within the U.S. at this very moment, the Department of Justice has consistently refused to take action or ask Congress for help despite the fact that law enforcement is investigating less than 2 percent of this criminal activity. I applaud this important piece of legislation for the accountability it will create by building the largest law enforcement army ever created for the protection of children.

This issue is not one of obscenity or pornography but rather one of human rights and this Congress's dedication to protecting them. While surveillance by the Internet Crimes Against Children, ICAC, Data Network has provided the Department of Justice with the location of hundreds of thousands of sexual predators, far too little has been done. Child pornography must be considered an issue of human rights. These photos go beyond obscenity or pornography but rather must be acknowledged for what they are, ``crime scene photos, created by a thriving industry that uses children as sexual commodities.'' We must focus on the weapon of these predators, the internet, which has provided a multi-billion dollar network for child pornography and led to the additional exploitation of exponential amounts of children.

While the child exploitation industry is global in scale, the majority of both supply and demand is based right here, within the United

States. Due to the lack of attention to this issue by the Department of Justice, it is hard to quantify the number of child pornography traffickers that are involved in this gross violation of our children's rights; the best estimates are that this practice involves 485,000 perpetrators in the United States alone. A 2005 Justice Department study found that:

80 percent of child pornography possessors have images and videos depicting sexual penetration.

20 percent of child pornography possessors have images of bondage, sadistic abuse and torture.

83 percent of child pornography possessors have images of children aged 6-12.

19 percent of child pornography possessors have images of infants or toddlers.

Only 1 percent of child pornography possessors restricted their ``collecting'' to images of nude children.

Law enforcement reports of websites providing live ``pay-per-view'' rape of very young children.

Mr. Speaker, we must act now to protect our children from these atrocities and this legislation is an important first step in doing so. This bill will increase funding for state and local task forces by tripling the size of the Internet Crimes Against Children, ICAC, program in the first year alone, which will support the 46 state and local task forces that ``have become the backbone of America's war on child exploitation.'' It further adds hundreds of new Federal agents to the FBI, ICE, and U.S. Postal Inspection Service who will be charged with the sole responsibility of working on crimes against children. This legislation also provides for the creation of new dedicated forensic crimes labs for America's overwhelmed child exploitation investigators and provides legal structure and funding for the ICAC Data Network, which has emerged as a critical asset in the fight against child pornography and exploitation. Perhaps most significantly, it will create a new Justice Department Special Prosecutor, a new high- level office within the Department with sole dedication to combating child exploitation and the oversight of ICAC Task Force Network.

This legislation is imperative to ensuring the protection of our Nation's children and engaging in a much needed and long overdue national war on child pornography. As the Chair of the Congressional Children's Caucus, a Representative of the people of the United States, and a mother of two, I am proud to cosponsor this legislation and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, the majority has decided to promote politics rather than fully protecting our Nation's children. In its last-minute rush to bring bills to the floor, the majority has selected five bills addressing the problem of sex offenders on the Internet and Internet safety for children. These bills were never considered by the Judiciary Committee, never subject to legislative hearings, and never brought through the markup process.

In addition, the majority failed to address concerns that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Justice Department expressed. To ignore the concerns of these major stakeholders is no way to legislate when it comes to the safety of our children.

Why did the majority avoid the Judiciary Committee process? For one reason, they knew the amendments we would offer at the committee would gain bipartisan support. Again, avoiding amendments that both parties would support is no way to protect our children.

Even on the substance, the majority's bills ignore the needs of law enforcement. At a full committee oversight hearing on October 17, 2007, the majority heard from law enforcement and the Justice Department about specific tools needed to protect children. The testimony at the hearing underscored the need to give law enforcement flexible tools necessary to protect children and apprehend sex offenders.

Instead of working to produce a strong bill that responds to law enforcement's requests, the majority has bypassed the normal committee process and brought an incomplete bill to the floor.

Last Congress we passed landmark child protection legislation, the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, which combined new tools, new authorities, additional programs, and important requirements on the registration and notification requirements for sex offenders. This legislation was developed through bipartisan cooperation, subject to full Judiciary Committee markup, extensive testimony on legislative proposals, and consultation with the NCMEC, and the Justice Department. In stark contrast, the majority has failed to meet these basic requirements in developing new child protection legislation.

H.R. 3845 is replete with problems. For example, the bill creates a super-bureaucratic special counsel in the Justice Department and charges that counsel with coordinating all child protection efforts across the Federal Government.

The special prosecutor duplicates existing offices within the Department of Justice with the expertise to prosecute child crimes cases and administer the ICAC grant program.

The innumerable responsibilities of this new special prosecutor require expertise across so many issues, prosecution, policy, and grant administration,

just to name a few, that no one person can fulfill this role. The bill in fact acknowledges this by directing the creation of an entirely new office within the office of the Deputy Attorney General, creating yet another layer of bureaucracy in Washington. This eats up precious resources, rather than sending them to our neighborhoods and communities.

Moreover, the bill places approval for all ICAC grants with the new special prosecutor, a role traditionally held by the Office of Justice Programs. Why? We don't know. We have been presented no evidence to suggest that the Department's performance in administering grants to existing ICAC task forces is somehow flawed.

It is sad to see that our children's safety is being sacrificed for the benefits of a quick press hit. While the bill has some good provisions, much more could have been done.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to respond briefly to the distinguished chairman, for whom I have great respect. And when bills do go through the process of the Judiciary Committee, the chairman has been most fair to us on our side of the aisle. And the previous chairman, Mr. Sensenbrenner on our side of the aisle, was also very dedicated to fulfilling that process. In fact, that indeed is what took place with regard to the Adam Walsh legislation, which was moved through the process of the committee. I only wish the same thing had been done here. It would have enabled us to have produced a much, much better piece of legislation that would more effectively protect our children.

At this time, it is my pleasure to recognize the distinguished ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Barton), for such time as he may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

I'm hoping that the discussion and the presentation by my good friend, Mr. Goodlatte, does not indicate that he is opposed to the substance of this measure and that his remarks were generated around the process, the procedure, because I'm sure he worked on the Adam Walsh bill, and here, to me, is another important step forward on that. And so we look forward to his continued support.

Now, with reference to process, that's a little bit more sensitive issue, because, you know me, I don't like to bring up things that sound partisan. But you guys avoided more process in the Judiciary Committee than we ever have in the 110th Congress. So I've got a long record of it.

But we don't want to get off the track here. This isn't about process. But I've got some not-complimentary statistics about the way we've operated in the past. And I've had good relationships with all the Republican, it almost seems like forever, chairmen of the Judiciary Committee that have preceded us for this last 12 years.

But what our floor manager Debbie Wasserman Schultz is talking about now is something for which there can be no disagreement. We've got to get these Internet sex predators out of business. And that's what this measure does. It does it well. I don't know how much more benefited anybody would be if we had gone any different direction.

We're under a little duress now. We've got measures on top of measures. The scheduling is getting horrific. But I commend the gentlelady and the members of the committee on both sides of the aisle that have worked with her in pursuance of this legislation to get it to the floor today.