SAFE Act of 2007

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support Senate bill 1738, the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008.

Mr. Speaker, I don't have to tell you that children today are growing up in a completely different world than we did. Our children have wonderful opportunities to learn in ways that we never had, but there are also dangers our generation never had to consider.

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 images can only be supplied through the sexual assault of more children.

This bill, like its House companion, H.R. 3845, that passed the House overwhelmingly last November, addresses an issue that is central to the goals and vision of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New Direction Congress, protecting our children.

The Internet is a truly wonderful tool. It has opened up the world for our children, but it has also opened up our children to the world.

A year ago, in June, I visited with a very special group of parents called the Surviving Parents Coalition, and 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; they told me that if we wanted to prevent predators from hurting other children like theirs, that the way to do it is to go back through the Internet and get them.

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. There are even Web sites that provide live pay-per-view rates of very young children. These images are crime scene photos created by a thriving industry that uses children as sexual commodities.

Special Agent Flint Waters of the Wyoming State Police, a highly respected child exploitation investigator, testified at a Judiciary Committee hearing last year that 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. And make no mistake, law enforcement knows where they are, they just don't have the resources to go get them.

Even more shocking is that it is estimated that if we were to investigate these cases, we could actually rescue a child victim nearly 30 percent of the time.

Think about that. That means there are thousands of children out there in America just waiting to be rescued.

Alicia Kozakiewicz, whose testimony at last October's judiciary hearing moved all of us, is a living, breathing reminder of the lives that we can save. Alicia told us how over a period of months she was groomed by a 40-year-old predator pretending to be a teenage girl. When Alicia, who was 13 years old at the time, agreed to meet her cyber- friend 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 that she had given up all hope, she was 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 crimes and to discover the location where he had held her captive chained to the floor.

The PROTECT Our Children Act will help provide the safety net that we so desperately need by giving us the resources and the coordination we need to bring these predators to justice. It will create statutory authority for these highly successful ICAC Task Forces, which support State and local law enforcement agencies. It will supplement this new 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.

At the October Judiciary Committee hearing, a representative from the FBI told us two things that boggled my mind: First, that the number of agents being exclusively assigned to these cases was actually shrinking, and second, that they are giving millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated to combat child pornography to programs that have nothing to do with child protection.

This bill will set us on a new course by creating a National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention. And although I preferred the special counsel provision in the House bill, I am proud to support this measure because this national strategy will ensure that the Federal Government's efforts in this era are no longer disjointed or haphazard. Instead, there will finally be a person in charge at the Department of Justice who will report to Congress and be responsible for real results.

I want to thank my House cosponsor, Ranking Member Joe Barton, for his leadership, his concern, and his compassion for our children and their safety. And thank you, Senator Biden, for your capable staff and for your tireless work in the Senate. Your skilled negotiations helped us arrive at this moment. Thank you to NCMEC President Ernie Allen and my good friend and colleague from Houston, Congressman Nick Lampson, for your improvements to the bill with the SAFE Act. And honestly, thank you, Oprah Winfrey and all of your viewers for every letter, every telephone call, every fax and every e-mail. You helped break the Senate logjam and proved that Congress is responsive to the people.

Thank you, Erin Runnion, Ed Smart, Mary Kozakiewicz, names that are far too familiar to Americans because of the travesty that happened to their children, and to all the founding members of the Surviving Parents Coalition. When this bill got mired in petty partisan politics, they helped us remember what our effort was really about. It is about Samantha, it is about Elizabeth, and it is about Alicia. It is making sure we rescue every child we can and that we leave none behind. And thank you to Flint Waters for developing the software to locate predators and rescue children. Your work and the work of the ICAC Task Force agents across this country from Broward County, Florida to Wyoming, who wake up every morning, work long hours each day, only to go home at night knowing they don't have the resources or staffing power to rescue every child. The angst that must cause is unimaginable.

Last and certainly not least, I want to commend the inexhaustible determination of Grier Weeks, Camille Cooper, David Keith and all our friends with the National Association to PROTECT Children. They kept our noses to the grindstone and our eyes on the prize. And we would never be here without their effort. They have shown us what we can do when Congress comes together and puts partisan differences aside.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the honorable Mr. Conyers from Michigan for yielding me the time and for the great work that you've done on the Judiciary Committee and particularly on this particular issue, and I thank you for letting me be a part of this.

And for Mr. Chabot, the work that he has done on not just this, but other legislation having to do with child safety, child protection.

I rise today to ask my colleagues to join me in voting for H.R. 3791, the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act of 2007. This bill modernizes and expands the reporting requirements relating to child pornography and expands cooperation in combating child pornography.

Stories of Internet predators preying on innocents making their way into our children's bedrooms with the simple click of a mouse, and they're seen and heard all too often in our media. The age of sweet 16 used to be about parties and learning to drive, but now it marks the threshold of Internet freedom. Popular social networking Web sites allow profiles to be public, providing predators with an encyclopedia

of pictures, personal interests and even addresses, which they can be used, or they can use to cause harm.

Well, this dangerous trend has become a feeding ground for pedophiles and convicted sex offenders. Parents, law enforcement and legislators must work together to bring social networking Web sites into the fight to protect America's children. And I've joined with one of my cochairs of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, I just mentioned Mr. Chabot, in introducing the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation- Online, the SAFE Act.

The SAFE Act provides increased resources for law enforcement to capture and prosecute and incarcerate these criminals. By expanding the system for service providers to report child pornography found on the systems, we improve child safety and prevent future atrocities.

Currently, Internet service providers are mandated to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Under the SAFE Act, all electronic service communications providers and remote computing service providers will have to report child pornography. For knowingly and willingly not filing a report after being made aware of a child pornography image, these providers will be subject to increased fines of $150,000 per image per day for the first offense and up to $300,000 per image per day for any image found thereafter.

This bill will also increase the efficiency of the CyberTipline, making it a better investigative tool for law enforcement by mandating that all information submitted by providers is consistent. The process outlined in this bill keeps law enforcement officials in the loop by making information more readily accessible and requires providers to retain key data that law enforcement agencies can use to investigate and prosecute child predators.

Over 10 years ago, I created the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children after a young girl in my district was kidnapped and murdered. And since then, I have continued to work extensively with organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on educating Members of Congress and others on legislation such as the SAFE Act that strengthen the National Center's ability to keep children safer online and on our streets.

Many of us have watched Dateline's popular series ``To Catch a Predator,'' and organizations such as Perverted Justice that actively look for Internet child predators. We need to become partners in this fight by talking with our children about the dangers of strangers online and making Internet use a family activity.

While parents should teach their children that the Internet may offer many different types of resources, from entertainment to educational, it also poses many risks. Parents are the first line of defense against online predators, and the SAFE Act will reinforce their efforts.

Internet companies will need to do their part as well. When we begin to hold Web sites accountable for the images that they host, we've taken the first step toward supporting parents in their efforts to protect children. Our combined efforts will help make the Internet a safer place.

I again want to thank and recognize some of the people who have worked so hard to make this legislation what it has become, those staffers who have worked diligently in bringing this legislation to fruition: Committee on Judiciary staffers Ted Kalo and Mark Dubester; Congressman Steve Chabot's staffer Kim Betz; and my staffers, Dan Easley and Abby Shannon, and a very special thank you to my distinguished Republican colleague, Steve Chabot, who has worked tirelessly on the issue of child safety, working with me as one of the cochairs of the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. I have great respect for the work that he has done here in Congress as well as for the work that he has done in his congressional district, and for championing this legislation on his side of the aisle and for helping to ensure that not only are Ohio's children protected but all of America's children are as well.

Once again, I would like to thank John and Reve Walsh for all the time that they have spent in helping us make this legislation successful, and Ernie Allen, who has spent, along with the Walshes, a good part of this day making sure that others of our colleagues were aware of it, and to be willing to support it. I thank them for their magnificent contribution that they've made to protecting children across this world, not just in the United States of America. It's because of their persistent dedication to this cause that so many of our children sleep more safely at night.

Again, I ask my colleagues to support H.R. 3791.

Mr. Speaker, I stand today in support of the ``Protect our Children Act,'' a bill that will authorize funding for law enforcement and the Department of Justice to fight the sexual exploitation of children over the Internet.

This bill is the result of over two years of work in the House and the Senate on the issues relating to child sexual exploitation. When I was Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, the Committee conducted a wide-ranging, comprehensive investigation of Internet child pornography. 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.

What we learned during that investigation was shocking. At that time, three million images of child pornography were on the Internet. Even more disturbing was that law enforcement officers told 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 two years old.

The children shown in those images suffer unspeakable pain and suffering. While law enforcement is working to tackle the epidemic of abuse that existed on the Internet, it was clear to us on the Committee that they did not have the resources to win that fight because child predators were 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 House version of this bill, H.R. 3845, with Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz. I would like to thank her for her leadership on this issue and her work to get this bill before us today before we adjourn. The Senate did make some changes to the bill we passed last November. While I wish this bill had increased the funding for the law enforcement agencies that work child pornography cases--as our House bill did--this bill provides law enforcement with tools it did not have before to fight those predators who seek to exploit and abuse children, often for their own financial gain.

The bill requires that the Department of Justice develop a national strategy for investigating and prosecuting child exploitation cases. A number of law enforcement agencies are involved in investigating these cases: the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Postal Service, and state law enforcement. With a national strategy, the Justice Department must make sure that this fight is a priority, and that everyone is on the same page so that valuable law enforcement resources are not wasted when pursuing these criminals.

A national strategy doesn't work, though, if you don't give law enforcement agents the resources they need. The Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found that just as important as the Federal law enforcement effort against child pornography is the effort of State and local law enforcement Internet Crimes Against Children, or ``ICAC'' task forces. The vast majority of child sexual exploitation cases are prosecuted at the state level, but the funding nowhere near matched the needs of these state task forces. By authorizing $60 million per year over the next five years, the Protect Our Children Act ensures that state ICAC agents will finally receive the support they need.

Another key problem identified in our investigation was that law enforcement's ability to find and prosecute those predators who create and distribute child pornography was held up by a backlog at forensic computer labs. This is unacceptable, when the price of that backlog is continued child abuse. We address that problem in this bill by authorizing $2 million per year over the next five years to increase the capacity of these labs.

The Protect Our Children Act also includes a few provisions that weren't part of our House bill, but I think they strengthen the bill and the ability of law enforcement to prosecute these cases. The bill makes it a crime to change a photo of a child to produce child pornography. In addition, the bill makes clear that it is a crime to transmit live, or streaming, images of child abuse over the Internet. I think these provisions are just common sense, and I am glad they are included in this bill.

The bill also clarifies the responsibilities of Internet Service Providers when it comes to reporting child abuse images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Current law requires that Internet Service Providers report to the National Center, but it wasn't clear what information should be reported. This bill sets out what must be included in the reports and what the providers are required to do. This will ensure that law enforcement will have all the evidence the providers have when they pursue child predators. I think this is important, because our investigation showed that Internet child pornography is not just a law enforcement problem. If we are to win the war against child sexual exploitation, everyone must do his part, and this includes the Internet Service Providers.

We are long overdue in authorizing the resources law enforcement needs to fight the battle against the sexual exploitation of children over the Internet. The children who have been abused by predators, and who have seen images of that abuse spread over the Internet, cannot wait one more day. We must ensure that the efforts of child predators are more than matched by an aggressive law enforcement strategy to bring these criminals to justice. Our children deserve nothing less. I urge my colleagues to support the Protect Our Children Act.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to speak and also for the good work that has been done on this bill and everything that you and your committee has done.

Mr. Speaker, I do rise today to ask my colleagues to join me in voting for S. 1738. This bill would authorize funds for Federal grants and additional FBI agents to address the problem of online exploitation of children as well as to establish a new anti-child-exploitation

office at the Department of Justice as well. And this has been combined with the Securing Adolescents From Online-Exploitation Act of 2007.

The Lampson-Chabot bill, which passed this body last December, modernizes and expands the reporting requirements relating to child pornography and expands cooperation in combating child pornography. Last year I joined one of my cochairs on the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, Congressman Steve Chabot, in introducing the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online, the SAFE Act of 2007.

The SAFE Act provides increased resources for law enforcement to capture, prosecute and incarcerate these criminals. By expanding the system to service providers to report child pornography found on their systems, we improve child safety and prevent future atrocities.

Currently Internet service providers are mandated to report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Under the SAFE Act, all electronic service communications providers and remote computing service providers will have to report child pornography. For knowingly and willingly not filing a report after being made aware of a child pornography image, these providers will be subject to increased fines of $150,000 per image per day for the first offense and up to $300,000 per day for any image found thereafter.

This bill will also increase the efficiency of the CyberTipline, making it a better investigative tool for law enforcement by mandating that all information submitted by providers is consistent. The process outlined in this bill keeps law enforcement officials in the loop by making information more readily accessible and requires providers to retain key data that law enforcement agencies can use to investigate and prosecute child predators.

Many of us have watched Dateline's popular series ``To Catch a Predator'' and know of organizations that actively look for Internet child predators. We need to become partners in this fight by talking to our kids about the dangers of strangers online and making Internet use a family activity. While parents should teach their children that the Internet offers many different types of resources, from entertainment to educational, it also poses many risks. Parents are the first line of defense against online predators, and the SAFE Act will reinforce their efforts.

Internet companies will need to do their part too. When we begin to hold Web sites accountable for the images that they host, we've taken the first step towards supporting parents in their efforts to protect children. Our combined efforts will help make the Internet a safer place.

I would like to extend a ``thank you'' to my colleague, Deborah Wasserman Schultz, for introducing the House-passed version of Senate bill 1738. I would also like to wish her a happy birthday. She has been a tireless advocate for additional funding for Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. I would also like to recognize my fellow caucus cochair, Steve Chabot, for championing this legislation on his side of the aisle and for helping to ensure that not only are Ohio's children protected, but all of America's children are. It is because of their persistent dedication to this cause that so many children and their parents will sleep more safely at night.

Again I call on my colleagues to support Senate bill 1738.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 3791, the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act of 2007. The bill's author, the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Lampson) and I have worked closely on several bills in strengthening our child protection laws.

I also want to thank Chairman Conyers and also the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Forbes) for their leadership in this area as well. And I'm pleased to be the principal cosponsor of this bill with Mr. Lampson, particularly as it provides law enforcement with better information to fight the despicable act of child pornography.

We don't have to look any further than our homes and our communities to see that predators are threatening and victimizing our children with just a simple click. The Internet, while providing a world of opportunity to our children, has also contributed to a worldwide expansion of child pornography enabling predators to more easily abuse, exploit and prey on our most precious items, and that's our children.

H.R. 3791 builds on the investigative tools already in place under the leadership of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Through the CyberTipline, the center plays a critical role interfacing between Federal, State and foreign law enforcement and the public, providing valuable information in ongoing investigations.

H.R. 3791 recognizes that advances in technology have made electronic communication service providers the first line of defense against crimes against children, possessing the real-time information critical to child pornography investigations. By requiring electronic communication service providers to report this information to the CyberTipline as soon as reasonably possible and maintain this information for an investigation, this act, the SAFE Act, is giving Federal, State and foreign law enforcement and prosecutors a fighting chance to put these criminals away, no matter where they are located.

And one of the things that I found out in doing investigations into this particular area was the shocking fact that there are only 50 nations, including the United States, where child pornography is illegal. Fifty nations. There are 184 nations around the world where it's perfectly legal to have, possess, to convey child pornography. So that's something that I think we need to have some focus and some attention directed upon, how much of the world, and that stuff gets in here through the Internet. It may be in China, it may be in Pakistan, it may be somewhere else, but it can be on our computers in our living rooms with our children very quickly, so we need to do a much better job on that, too.

But I want to again thank Mr. Lampson for his leadership in this area, and I again want to urge my colleagues to support H.R. 3791 today.