Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 04, 2020

#213 — The Worst Epidemic

Topics

child sexual abuse child sexual abuse epidemic internet child sexual abuse imagery photo DNA proprietary photo DNA technology child sexual abuse on Facebook sexploitation and sextortion child sexual abuse

Hosted by

Sam Harris

Guests

#212 — A Conversation with Kathryn Paige Harden #214 — A Conversation with Siddhartha Mukherjee

Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 14 minutes

Words per minute

156.55

Word count

20,985

Sentence count

1,215

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

36

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged

Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak with Gabriel Dance about the global epidemic of child sexual abuse. We discuss the misleading concept of child pornography, the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the difficulty in assessing the scope of the problem and other tools, the ethics of encryption, sextortion, and other topics. Again, this episode is not a barrel of laughs, but it s an important conversation, and it s yet another PSA, so not paywalled. If you want to support the work I'm doing here, you can subscribe at makingsense.org. And now I bring you Gabriel Dance, who is the Deputy Investigations Editor at The New York Times. Before working at the Times, Gabriel helped launch the criminal justice news site The Marshall Project, where he focused on the death penalty and prison and policing. And before that, he was the Interactive Editor for The Guardian. Where he was part of the group of journalists who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the widespread surveillance by the NSA. And yet these phrases can conjure images for people that are not aware of what s really going on here. And yet they can remind people of things that don t really get it, because they don t know it. And that s not really what gets it there, right? Because they don't even get it. And that gets found out when they re found out by their 18th birthday, or when they get into the porn industry, or they re sent to one another. Or they get found out before their 19th birthday. Or they're found out or they get it by their 20th birthday and that gets it, or it gets it by another, or that gets out into the world, or by their or or so on or what gets out there. But then they get out into this category, or gets it or gets binned into this . But at the bottom of this category of porn, or but then they're actually getting it out by a binned by this category? And so on and so on, right on it? This is an episode that many of you will find difficult to listen to this episode. I think you have a moral responsibility to listen by The Making Sense Podcast. (Make Sense Podcast, by Sam Harris) I m going to make sense of it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).

Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .

Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .

Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .

Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.

Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.

Show only flagged segments

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris.

00:00:24.880 Okay, the long-awaited episode on the most depressing topic on earth, child sexual abuse, otherwise

00:00:34.860 known as child pornography, in the form of its public consumption.

00:00:39.860 As many of you know, I've delayed the release of this episode for several months, it just

00:00:45.940 never seemed like the right time to drop it.

00:00:50.080 When is the right time to talk about this, really?

00:00:52.640 In the tech space, it was probably 20 years ago.

00:00:58.260 Anyway, this is an episode that many of you will find difficult to listen to, understandably.

00:01:06.880 If you work in tech, I think you have a moral responsibility to listen to it.

00:01:13.260 If you work at a company like Facebook, or AWS, or Dropbox, or Zoom, or any company that

00:01:21.760 facilitates the spread of so-called child pornography, you really have a responsibility to listen

00:01:30.660 to this conversation and figure out how you can help solve this problem.

00:01:36.500 As you'll hear, we've gone from a world where pedophiles were exchanging Polaroids in parking

00:01:43.000 lots to a world in which there is an absolute deluge of imagery that provides a photographic

00:01:51.100 and increasingly video record of the rape of children.

00:01:56.140 And as you'll hear, the tech companies have been terrible at addressing this problem, and law

00:02:03.800 enforcement is completely under-resourced and ineffectual here.

00:02:10.000 Now, as I said, I recorded this conversation some months ago as an indication of how long

00:02:15.060 ago, when Zoom came up in the conversation, I felt the need to define it as a video conferencing

00:02:21.320 tool used by businesses. I've since cut that. But everything we discuss is all too current.

00:02:29.580 In fact, the problem has only gotten worse under the COVID pandemic, because the children

00:02:36.780 being abused are more often than not at home with their abusers, and the people who consume

00:02:44.460 this material are at home with much less to do. So both the supply side and demand side of this

00:02:53.040 problem have increased. I will add a short afterward to mention a few things that the government is

00:03:01.180 now doing, but nothing of real substance has changed, to my knowledge. Today I'm speaking with

00:03:08.640 Gabriel Dance. Gabriel is the Deputy Investigations Editor at the New York Times.

00:03:14.460 where he works with a small team investigating technology, from the topic at hand, online sexual

00:03:22.080 abuse imagery, to the companies that trade and sell our data, and this business model that's

00:03:27.420 increasingly known as surveillance capitalism. Before working at the Times, Gabriel helped launch

00:03:33.040 the criminal justice news site The Marshall Project, where he focused on the death penalty and

00:03:39.240 prison and policing. And before that, he was the interactive editor for The Guardian.

00:03:44.460 Where he was part of the group of journalists who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the

00:03:49.720 widespread secret surveillance by the NSA. In this episode, I speak with Gabriel about the global

00:03:55.960 epidemic of child sexual abuse. We discuss the misleading concept of child pornography, the failure

00:04:03.000 of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the trade-off between online privacy and

00:04:08.460 protecting children, the national center for missing and exploited children, the difficulty in assessing the

00:04:14.800 scope of the problem, photo DNA and other tools, the parts played by specific tech companies, the ethics of

00:04:23.120 encryption, sextortion, the culture of pedophiles, and other topics. Again, this episode is not a barrel of laughs,

00:04:32.340 but it's an important conversation, and it's yet another PSA, so not paywalled. If you want to support

00:04:40.980 the work I'm doing here, you can subscribe at samharris.org. And now I bring you Gabriel Dance.

00:04:48.200 I am here with Gabriel Dance. Gabe, thanks for joining me.

00:04:58.200 Thank you so much for having me on.

00:04:59.940 So, undoubtedly, in the intro to this, I will have prepared people to not listen to the podcast if

00:05:08.240 they find the topic truly unbearable.

00:05:11.140 Right. But I guess I should just reiterate here that we're going to speak about probably the most

00:05:18.640 depressing topic I can think of. The real gravity of it tends to be concealed by the terms we use

00:05:25.800 to describe it. So, we're going to talk about, quote, child pornography and the exploitation of

00:05:32.120 children. And yet these phrases can conjure images for people that are not, that don't really get it

00:05:40.360 what's going on here. Because they can remind people of things like, you know, they're teenagers

00:05:46.460 who get into the porn industry before their 18th birthday, right? And that gets found out. Or,

00:05:52.300 you know, teenagers send naked photos or videos of themselves to one another, or even with strangers

00:05:58.920 online, and these images get out. And, you know, all of that gets binned into this category of child

00:06:04.720 pornography. But at the bottom of this morass that you and I are going into, we're talking about the

00:06:12.160 rape and torture of young children, either by family members, or caregivers, or by people who have

00:06:19.120 abducted them. And obviously, I'm going to want to know from you just what the scale of this problem

00:06:24.720 actually is. But then we're talking about a vast audience of people who are willing to pay to watch

00:06:32.240 these children raped and tortured. Because they find the rape and torture of children to be the 0.95

00:06:38.340 sexiest thing in the world, apparently. So psychologically and socially, we're just in a

00:06:43.820 horror movie here. And people need to understand that's where we're going. And, you know, you can pull

00:06:50.180 the ripcord now if you don't want to go there with us. So that's a fairly grave introduction to you,

00:06:56.620 Gabe. But you have been covering this topic for the New York Times in a series of long and very

00:07:04.060 disturbing articles. So, you know, welcome to the podcast. And thank you for doing the work you're

00:07:09.500 doing. Because, I mean, but for your articles, I really, again, would have just the vaguest notion

00:07:14.840 of what appears to be going on in our world and even in our own neighborhoods. So thank you for

00:07:22.580 lifting the lid on this horror show because it can't be especially fun to be doing this work.

00:07:28.340 Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. And I really appreciate you starting with an introduction

00:07:34.780 that discusses the terminology around this horrible, horrible crime. We, I also didn't know anything

00:07:46.320 about what I came into this calling child pornography. And our investigation started in

00:07:54.160 February of 2019. And it was pretty quick that we learned, I investigated this with a colleague of

00:08:05.340 mine, Michael Keller, primarily. And it was pretty quick that we learned the proper terminology

00:08:11.080 used by people in the industry and law enforcement is child sexual abuse material.

00:08:19.620 And I think for the purposes of this podcast, it'll be easier to refer to this as CSAM, which is the

00:08:28.240 easier way of referring to it and not constantly using what I think is the inaccurate and inelegant term,

00:08:36.700 child pornography. Maybe let's just linger on the terminology for another minute or so, because

00:08:42.520 it really is one of those terms that really just reliably misleads people. So another example of this

00:08:49.260 is people talk about male circumcision and female circumcision, right? As though the term circumcision were

00:08:56.900 interchangeable in those phrases, right? And so that's, so this is a social issue that is

00:09:02.740 is being obfuscated by, by some common words. And so, I mean, just to, to give people a sense of,

00:09:11.420 of what should be obvious, but strangely isn't, let's just consider how different this is from normal

00:09:17.300 pornography, because there's a lot that could trouble us and perhaps should trouble us about

00:09:23.120 normal pornography. It's, you can ask questions like, how did these women in particular find

00:09:29.520 themselves in a situation where they're performing sex on camera? I mean, are they getting paid?

00:09:35.160 How much are they getting paid? Are some of them actually not getting paid and being exploited or

00:09:39.700 even coerced? Are they private videos that, that were meant to be kept private that just got leaked?

00:09:46.000 Is there some backstory of suffering that would make the average person feel terrible about watching

00:09:51.740 what purports to be a, um, a video of consenting adults having sex? So, I mean, these are totally

00:09:58.120 reasonable questions to ask, but it's also understandable that most people don't really

00:10:03.240 think about these things when they're watching normal adult pornography, because human suffering

00:10:10.860 isn't being directly shown on the video. I mean, even if it's edgy porn, I mean, who knows,

00:10:17.200 it could be horrendous stuff out there that I can't imagine, but normal pornography, even edgy

00:10:23.120 pornography is within its frame, it seems to be the work of consenting adults doing something they

00:10:30.820 want to do for whatever reason. But anything involving kids does not function by that logic at all,

00:10:36.400 right? So any image or video of an adult having sex with a five-year-old is simply the record of a crime,

00:10:44.880 right? Just full stop. And it is obviously a crime to anyone watching it. And yet, you know,

00:10:53.460 as appalling as it is that these crimes occur, it's almost more appalling that there's a vast market

00:11:00.500 for them. I mean, I'm prepared to believe that, you know, one guy in a million is going to abuse

00:11:06.420 his stepchild, right? But the idea that there are millions and millions of people with whom this

00:11:14.500 person could find an online dialogue and sell them the video record of this abuse. I mean,

00:11:21.560 that's just completely shocking to me. And the scale of it is completely shocking as you report.

00:11:26.840 So let's just, let's talk about the nature of the problem. What is, what's going on and how much of it

00:11:34.680 is out there? Well, I think you're absolutely right to draw a distinction between what we call

00:11:41.340 adult pornography and what the misnomer child pornography and what you said several times

00:11:48.680 hit the nail on the head, which is consent. I mean, these are, as you said, children. I mean,

00:11:57.600 even if we take away and we can come back and speak about self-produced material by teenagers,

00:12:03.060 maybe, or 17 year olds who might be engaging in sexual acts on film before turning the legal age.

00:12:12.360 These are not what we are discussing in the majority of our reporting. We are talking about

00:12:17.900 prepubescent acts of sexual crimes against children. There is no consent. They are unable to consent.

00:12:26.640 And there's no, there's no illusion of consent. You have to get your head around the depravity

00:12:33.420 of the audience here. And again, I mean, this is going to sound very judgmental, you know,

00:12:38.460 let's bracket for a moment, some kind of compassionate and rational understanding of pedophilia

00:12:44.060 that we might want to arrive at. It should be obvious that no one chooses to be a pedophile

00:12:49.480 or, you know, anyone who finds this imagery titillating. But there's one example in one

00:12:56.180 of your articles that this is not an especially lurid description of the crime, but just the

00:13:01.580 details give you a sense of how insane all this is. So this is lifted from one of your articles.

00:13:08.320 In a recent case, an offender filmed himself drugging the juice boxes of neighborhood children

00:13:13.380 before tricking them into drinking the mix. He then filmed himself as he sexually abused 0.78

00:13:18.240 unconscious children. So that's part of the titillating material for this audience. The

00:13:24.720 imagery, the video of this guy putting whatever narcotic he used into juice boxes and feeding 0.97

00:13:32.680 it to unsuspecting children and then performing sex acts on them. The criminality of this and 0.69

00:13:39.700 the evil of it is absolutely on the surface. The details are mind boggling.

00:13:46.100 There are definitely, I mean, a variety of extremely depraved things that may come up

00:13:52.960 in our discussion that I have learned are extremely hard for people to hear. They were hard for me to

00:14:00.540 even begin to comprehend when I was learning these things from law enforcement, from survivors,

00:14:06.060 from child advocates. I mean, the one you described was actually an example given by

00:14:13.740 special agent Flint Waters, who at the time was a criminal investigator for the state of Wyoming.

00:14:20.100 He was appearing before Congress when he was describing that video. And that was in 2007,

00:14:29.340 actually, before this crime has exploded in the same way and or in the way that it has. I mean,

00:14:38.320 for reference, in 2007, and I'm sure we'll get more into the total numbers, but there were fewer than

00:14:46.820 100,000 reports of online child sexual abuse material. In 2019, we just published a story on

00:14:57.460 this past Friday. In 2019, there were almost 17 million reports. So the explosion in content being

00:15:09.160 found is staggering. And to talk a little bit, I mean, the examples are all horrendous, hard to hear,

00:15:18.820 harder to imagine, nothing you want to think about or read about. But just to kind of take it to

00:15:25.460 the extent that we've learned is what's going on, there's also an active community engaged in committing

00:15:33.960 sexual crimes against what they call, the criminals, pre-verbal children, which is to say children who

00:15:42.300 cannot speak yet. And that means, obviously, usually children younger than two, younger than one,

00:15:50.520 instances of children days and months old, being molested, raped, being raped, filmed being raped. 0.95

00:15:59.520 And it is truly beyond shocking. And as we started to speak with the people who regularly engage with

00:16:08.940 this content, their lives are forever changed. Anybody who deals with this issue cannot get it out of their

00:16:18.900 minds? And it really speaks to why it has become such an interesting issue when it comes to law

00:16:26.600 enforcement and the Department of Justice and tech companies and this very interesting new privacy

00:16:34.240 issues and some of the other things that raise that naturally come out of this subject.

00:16:39.500 Yeah. So I want to talk about the scale of the problem insofar as you understand it and how

00:16:44.820 ineffectual the government and the tech companies have been thus far dealing with it. But just to

00:16:50.660 talk about your experience for a moment, how do you go about reporting on this? And in the course of

00:16:57.840 reporting, are you exposed to any of this material? Or do you actually, can you do all your reporting

00:17:03.420 without feeling the same kind of psychological contamination that the law enforcement people you

00:17:09.960 speak with? Experience? Great question. And one that also we had no idea going into this. So

00:17:18.060 it might be helpful if I, if I talk a little bit, how we stumbled into this subject and then how we

00:17:24.900 learned how to report on it. So I've been working here at the times investigating tech companies for

00:17:31.820 several years now. And that has been everything from bots and fake followers, Cambridge Analytica,

00:17:40.080 data deals that Facebook has struck. So I've been immersed in this field along with several colleagues

00:17:45.720 where these mammoth companies are tracking all sorts of things about you, web pages you like,

00:17:51.700 who your friends are, where you are, using this data to target you, things I know that you've discussed

00:17:57.260 at length with many of the people you've had on the show. But still, I felt often both in conversations

00:18:04.400 with editors here, as well as people outside the building, that I was having difficulty gaining

00:18:11.240 traction on issues surrounding privacy online and how important and how high the stakes are.

00:18:19.980 And so I started asking the small team I work with questions about, you know, what kind of actual

00:18:26.000 harm can we show? Because many people would argue that, whether it be Facebook or any other company

00:18:31.140 violating our privacy by sharing our data with another company or selling our data or whoever

00:18:36.700 might be doing what with our information, many would argue that the harm is in violating our privacy.

00:18:44.020 But that is still an abstract concept for many. And especially sometimes in a place like a news agency,

00:18:52.260 harm, when I'm working with people like Megan Toohey and Jody Cantor, who are investigating Harvey Weinstein and

00:19:00.600 crimes against women, and there's tangible harm there. And there's harm for some of my colleagues

00:19:07.080 investigating what's going on in Myanmar and the Facebook disinformation and people dying from that.

00:19:13.580 I mean, there's harm there. And so gaining traction around online privacy and harm was something that

00:19:20.040 I was looking for, what topic is really going to bring this to a point where people can start having,

00:19:28.020 it was like a fast forward, right? I wanted to short circuit this conversation about privacy online

00:19:32.880 to a point where we could actually begin discussing it in a way that has very, very real harm and

00:19:40.040 consequences. And so in that...

00:19:44.600 But here you're talking about the flip side of this, which is our commitment to maintaining privacy at all costs,

00:19:52.680 if we ever, you know, achieve that, you know, the full encryption of Facebook Messenger, for instance.

00:19:59.180 One of the knock-on effects of that will be to make these crimes more or less undiscoverable.

00:20:07.280 Absolutely. Absolutely. And we'll come back, I'm sure, to encryption and some of the potential,

00:20:13.160 I don't know, solutions for people's privacy and very, very high stake decisions for children

00:20:21.560 suffering this abuse and people trying to rid the internet of this type of material. So you're right,

00:20:28.420 I was coming at it from a privacy side. But I also knew that it was more complicated than that.

00:20:35.840 Yeah. And so we wanted to figure out where does this privacy line start actually,

00:20:42.620 like, where's the rubber meet the road? And one of the ideas was what we were calling at the time

00:20:47.840 child pornography. And that was not only because of the privacy thing, but we were also talking about

00:20:52.800 what has technology done over the last 10 years that has completely changed the world. And one of

00:21:00.220 those things is the ability to create and share imagery. I mean, look at Facebook, look at Instagram,

00:21:06.000 all of these different types of social platforms and other things that have YouTube that have spun up.

00:21:12.400 I mean, so much more images and videos are being created and shared and stored, etc. That we,

00:21:20.780 it was just a hunch. I mean, what's going on with child pornography? And A, nobody wants to talk about

00:21:26.320 it. So as an investigative reporter, that is actually helpful when you encounter a subject

00:21:32.480 that really nobody wants to touch. But the second thing that happened, the second thing that happened

00:21:37.160 that also... I want to return to that point, though. I don't want to derail you, but we have to

00:21:43.160 return to why people don't want to talk about this and the consequences of that. Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:21:50.120 But the second thing that came in, which actually, in its own way, interestingly ties back to the

00:21:55.400 encryption discussion and everything, is the New York Times has a tip line that I actually helped set

00:22:00.960 up in 2016. And this tip line has multiple ways people can send us information. Some of those ways are

00:22:08.500 encrypted. Some of those ways are regular emails. Some of them are through the paper mail. And we

00:22:15.480 received a tip from a man. And I believe it just came in over email. I don't think he was concerned

00:22:21.600 with protecting his own identity. And this tip said, look, I was on Bing, Microsoft Bing search engine.

00:22:28.740 And I was looking up bullet weights. So literally the weight of bullets, which I understand are measured in

00:22:37.680 grains. And I'm not going to say the specific term he was looking up, or that he was actually looking

00:22:45.020 at bullets, but a certain weight of bullet. And he said, you know, I typed this in and all of a sudden

00:22:50.660 I'm seeing images of children being sexually assaulted. And I've reported this to Bing and it's been

00:23:02.260 days or weeks. And they're still there. And I don't know what to do. So I'm telling you.

00:23:08.160 And so we had already been thinking about this issue. And here in mid-February, we get this tip.

00:23:14.780 And I asked my colleague, luckily, as the small team leader of this technology investigations team,

00:23:22.980 I'm sometimes able to pass a tip on and ask one of my fellow reporters to try to run it down.

00:23:29.260 And so in this instance, I was happy to do that. And in this instance, it was Mike Keller. And I said,

00:23:35.360 Mike, check it out. You know, do me a favor and check it out. So Mike writes me back maybe half an

00:23:42.080 hour later and says, yeah, I typed in the exact terminology that the guy sent in. And I only looked

00:23:49.960 at it for half a second, but there were definitely very disturbing images that came up. And so we were

00:23:58.580 shocked, first of all. But second of all, we immediately reached out to our head legal counsel

00:24:04.860 at the New York Times. And there's a lot of benefits for work in the New York Times. But one of really

00:24:11.000 the best things is that we have excellent legal representation in-house. In this case, it's David

00:24:18.520 McCraw, who's relatively famous in his own right for his dealings, both with President Trump, as well

00:24:24.380 as many other people, Harvey Weinstein, et cetera. And David says, look, it is extremely important

00:24:32.040 that you both understand that there is no journalistic privilege when it comes to child

00:24:36.600 pornography. And he sent us the statue and he sent us some news stories where reporters had in fact

00:24:44.120 gotten in trouble for reporting on this subject. And so what we had to do immediately, because Mike had

00:24:50.080 in fact seen images, is report those images to the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited

00:24:57.560 Children. Because not many people know this, I don't think, but it is one of the only crimes,

00:25:05.240 if not the only crime, that you have to report if you see. I mean, you don't have to report a murder

00:25:12.800 if you see it. But if you see an image of child sexual abuse, you have to report it or you are

00:25:20.440 breaking the law. And that stands for everybody. So we filed a report with the National Center and we

00:25:27.380 filed a report with the FBI. And we then began embarking on this investigation, knowing, first of

00:25:35.760 all that, A, we did, of course, we did not want to see any of this material. But B, if we did see it,

00:25:42.980 we had to report it. And along the way, we even received emails from the FBI saying, hey, reminder,

00:25:52.780 you're not allowed to collect this information. You're not allowed this material. You're not allowed

00:25:57.880 to look at this material. You are, there is nothing you can do around this that is legal, which really

00:26:03.760 did cause a complicated reporting process. That's interesting. It somehow seems less than

00:26:10.860 optimal, but it's also understandable. I don't know. I mean, what do you think? Do you think

00:26:14.980 they have the dial set to the right position there or should, or would there be some better way to

00:26:21.000 facilitate your work or your whatever role you as a journalist can play in solving this problem?

00:26:28.540 I mean, I think probably it's in the right spot, to be honest. I think that while it was difficult,

00:26:36.540 it was, I mean, there are, we reviewed hundreds and thousands of court documents. And these court

00:26:43.560 documents include search warrants and complaints and a variety of other things. And when you have a

00:26:51.160 search warrant, so when an investigator, let's say, based on a tip from the National Center or based on

00:26:58.260 investigative undercover work, discovers somebody with this type of material on their system,

00:27:06.280 they file a search warrant. And when they file the search warrant, they have to describe probable

00:27:11.740 cause. And this probable cause nearly always is descriptions of a handful of the photos and videos.

00:27:20.000 And speaking, I've been speaking with a variety of both advocates and people involved. And while I

00:27:26.860 have been personally lucky enough to have never, ever seen one of these images or videos, I've read

00:27:32.880 descriptions of hundreds, if not more than a thousand. And it is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing to

00:27:40.580 read. And some people have said reading it is worse than seeing it. Now, I don't know. And I can't make

00:27:45.860 that comparison. But I don't feel like I would gain much in the reporting process by actually seeing

00:27:53.800 these things. I mean, just as you, you've only read them in our reports. And I'm sure that's even

00:28:03.640 more than enough for you to understand the gravity. And so I don't see what would be helpful in my being

00:28:10.960 able to see them in any kind of journalistic privilege. And I think that would also likely

00:28:16.920 be abused if it existed.

00:28:19.900 Yeah, I guess the only analogy I can think of is the ISIS videos, you know, the decapitation videos

00:28:25.860 and the other records of their crimes, which, you know, journalists have watched and anyone can watch.

00:28:31.120 And, you know, I've spent a lot of time, as you might know, railing about the problem of jihadism.

00:28:35.580 And, you know, I'm just aware that I, to know, you know, how bad ISIS was, I'm reliant on people

00:28:45.080 who are paying, you know, firsthand attention to their crimes. You know, someone like Graham Wood

00:28:50.160 over at The Atlantic is actually watching these videos and confirming that they're as bad as is

00:28:55.320 rumored. So I don't have to. And so essentially, you have the cops doing that work for you. It seems,

00:29:02.400 I can't imagine the information is getting lost or corrupted there, given that there's so much of

00:29:07.840 it. But it just would be odd if someone like Graham, in the process of, you know, writing his

00:29:14.300 articles on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS and our misadventures in the Middle East, had to, at every

00:29:21.620 turn, worry that he could be thrown in jail for having discovered an ISIS video online. That seems like

00:29:29.000 an extra piece of overhead that he doesn't need to do his work. Yeah, it was, I mean, it was nerve

00:29:33.980 wracking. It was uncomfortable. And again, I mean, we did every single bit of our reporting consultation

00:29:40.180 with our lawyers. And we were also in close contact with the FBI, the Department of Justice,

00:29:47.720 you know, local law enforcement throughout the country, international agencies dealing with this.

00:29:53.680 So that doesn't provide any cover, certainly. But I was hoping, or I hope that it raised flags

00:30:00.840 everywhere to say like, you know, because I was Googling some pretty crazy terms at points, trying

00:30:07.420 to learn about this issue. And I mean, if you Google just child pornography on Google, literally search it

00:30:16.360 on Google, they will return messages telling you that this is an illegal thing to look for, providing

00:30:23.960 resources if you're inclined to look at this type of material. I mean, there is active messaging around

00:30:31.560 people looking for this type of imagery. So I wanted to make sure I didn't end up on some list

00:30:38.240 somewhere, which I, which I, I hope I'm not on. But basically, we wanted to make kind of as much

00:30:44.920 noise as we could as investigative reporters, we're not trying to tip other people off that

00:30:48.520 we're doing this story. But so that law enforcement knew that we were actually trying to engage in this

00:30:54.860 in a real journalistic way. And, and that there wasn't any sort of anything else going on.

00:31:02.040 Okay, so what do we know about the scale of the problem? You know, you explain that at one point

00:31:07.760 in 2007, we had 100,000 reports. I'll remind people, 2007 was, was a time when we were all online.

00:31:16.500 That's not 1997. You know, 2007 is certainly well into the period where the internet has subsumed

00:31:23.740 all of our lives. So that you have 100,000 reports then, and now we're up to 18, 19 million reports.

00:31:31.660 But how much of this is just more looking and finding the ambient level of abuse that was always

00:31:37.360 there? Or how much do we know about the growth of the problem? Because it seems like the judging

00:31:44.440 from your articles, the, the reporting around the issue is increasing something like exponentially,

00:31:51.440 whereas the number of arrests, and the amount of resources being put towards solving the problem

00:31:56.280 are more or less flat, which is a terrible juxtaposition there. So what do we know about how big a problem

00:32:02.920 this is? Well, it's the right question. And unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to have

00:32:07.080 a completely satisfying answer. And part of that, everything around this subject in some way goes

00:32:15.220 back to the fact that nobody wants to talk about this subject. And so there isn't a lot of transparency

00:32:21.900 for a variety of reasons, whether or not it's the federal government not keeping the records and

00:32:28.040 reports that they should be, whether it's the lack of transparency from the National Center,

00:32:32.860 which is responsible for the collection and serves as the clearinghouse for this type of imagery,

00:32:38.220 or a variety of other things. So, so I'm not going to have, I can't answer your question completely,

00:32:42.900 but I can give us some idea. And so the tip line, the cyber tip line is run by the National Center for

00:32:50.780 Missing and Exploited Children, commonly referred to as NICMIC. And so NICMIC started the tip line

00:32:57.900 in 1998 when people started becoming aware of kind of what you were saying, like 97, 98, people are

00:33:05.080 coming online and law enforcement and Congress, other leaders are realizing that child sexual abuse

00:33:15.380 imagery is also coming online. And the internet was the biggest boon to child sexual abuse imagery

00:33:22.160 since the Polaroid camera. And so let's just spell that out for people that can't do the, um, the

00:33:30.500 psychological math so quickly there. So that the significance of the Polaroid camera was that

00:33:34.800 you didn't have to figure out how to get your film developed by a stranger anymore. You could just

00:33:41.760 develop it yourself. And that took a lot of friction out of the system of documenting the abuse of

00:33:48.300 children because unless you were a, a, you had a dark room, it was kind of mysterious how people

00:33:54.740 could produce a ton of this material in the first place. Right. And, and, you know, according to the

00:33:59.680 law enforcement we've spoken with in the eighties and nineties, I mean, they were pretty comfortable.

00:34:05.100 I mean, eighties and early nineties before the advent of the internet, they were, they were pretty

00:34:09.480 comfortable saying that they were, they had a good handle on this problem and they were actually like

00:34:13.640 stomping it out. I mean, child pornography, child sexual abuse material used to really be the domain

00:34:19.260 of, uh, law enforcement in the U S postal service because that is how it was traded. It was traded in

00:34:25.960 parking lots. It was mailed. And that is how the majority of it was caught and detected. But with the

00:34:33.660 advent of the internet, and this is, again, this is even before digital cameras for the most part,

00:34:40.000 I mean, certainly cell phones. So they opened this tip line, 1998 in 1998, they receive 3000,

00:34:48.560 just over 3000 reports of what the legal term is child pornography, which is also why it's a bit

00:34:55.040 confusing when, when talking terminology, most of the laws refer to it as child pornography. So there's

00:35:02.820 just over 3000 in 1998. By 2006, seven, we're at 83,000 reports, 85,000. And then something happens

00:35:18.500 and nobody can say with certainty, but the numbers start exploding with the invention of the smartphone.

00:35:29.100 The iPhone's introduced in 2008, a bunch of other phones also start to be produced that have

00:35:37.180 high quality cameras, broadband connections. And so by about 2015, actually 2014, we break a million for

00:35:49.480 the first time. And it's a big jump. 2013, there's less than half a million reports. 2014, that number

00:35:56.640 doubles. 2015, that number quadruples, we're over 4 million reports. And by 2018, we're at 18 and a half

00:36:06.700 million reports. So the numbers are growing exponentially. And but there's something we need

00:36:15.300 to tease apart here, which is there are reports to the National Center. And the vast majority of these

00:36:21.260 reports, more than 99% come from what they call our electric service providers, Facebook, Twitter,

00:36:29.340 Google, etc. But each report can can contain a number of files. So this is not a one to one. So when

00:36:39.140 there's 18 and a half million reports in 2018, that does not mean there was 18 million pieces

00:36:45.660 of content found. In fact, there were 45 million pieces of content found in 2018. And it was about

00:36:53.400 split between images and videos. And we and we'll certainly come back to the discussion of videos

00:36:58.340 because there's something startling going on there. But the numbers that we just published a few days

00:37:04.100 ago, for the 2019 numbers, really start to tease apart these differences between reports and numbers

00:37:11.300 of files. So in 2019, for the first time in over a decade, the number of actual reports went down.

00:37:21.620 So the number of reports received by the National Center in 2019 was just shy of 17 million. So we're

00:37:29.520 looking at a drop of about one and a half million. And we can talk about why that happened in a minute.

00:37:35.880 But the number of files reported in 2019 was just under 70 million. So we've gone from 45 million in 2018

00:37:47.320 to 70 million in 2019. And again, as recently as 2014, that number was less than 3 million.

00:37:56.620 So I want to talk about why this is so difficult to even focus on and what explains the failure of

00:38:05.600 our response thus far. But I don't want to lose the thing you just flagged. What's the distinction

00:38:11.320 between still images and videos that you wanted to draw there?

00:38:16.140 The thing that we've seen, so the rise in all photos and videos detected, and we should very much

00:38:23.340 get to that, which is the fact that these are only known images and videos that they are detecting.

00:38:28.320 The systems they have to catch this content are trained to match only images and videos that have

00:38:36.740 been identified previously as a legal material. So we're not talking about new material almost

00:38:43.220 whatsoever. This is in near completeness, previously seen images and videos.

00:38:48.880 But to speak specifically to videos, the technology for detecting video child sexual abuse is nascent

00:39:01.220 compared to image abuse. And for that reason, they've detected as recently as 2017, there were

00:39:11.420 only three and a half million videos reported to the National Center as compared to 20 million

00:39:17.200 images. Last year, there were 41 million videos reported as compared to 22 million. No, I'm sorry,

00:39:27.660 27 million images. So I know these are a lot of numbers, but what we're seeing is videos are

00:39:32.940 exploding. Well, the number of videos detected. And that's almost wholly due to Facebook. And Facebook

00:39:42.400 started scanning aggressively for videos in late 2017. And by 2019, they were responsible for by far the

00:39:55.880 majority of video reports. I think they were responsible for 38 million of the 41 million videos

00:40:01.880 reported. So the numbers are rising. The reports we'll come back to in a second, but the numbers of files

00:40:08.820 and videos are rising. But as to your initial question, what does this tell us about A, how much

00:40:15.560 content is online, and B, how much is being produced? It tells us nothing about either of those for a few

00:40:24.980 reasons. Not nothing, but it paints a very incomplete picture. The first reason is, as I said, they're only

00:40:31.000 detecting previously identified imagery, which means they're not detecting anything that is being newly

00:40:38.340 created. That process is a very slow process to get added to these lists of previously identified

00:40:45.120 imagery. It is because of funding issues and a variety of other things. The list of previously

00:40:52.380 identified imagery is growing very slowly. But the number of recirculating images and videos

00:40:59.320 is as high as ever. So we don't know a lot about how much new content is being produced.

00:41:06.360 And we also don't know, because of that, we don't know if this problem is, as you said,

00:41:13.460 always been there. And we're just finding it because more companies are actively looking for it,

00:41:19.360 or if it's actually growing. Now, conversations with law enforcement amongst others say that the

00:41:27.060 problem is growing. And even common sense, as I said, with cell phones, broadband, cloud storage,

00:41:33.660 social media. I mean, the internet is built to share videos and content and files. There's platforms

00:41:40.400 that are billion-dollar platforms completely dedicated to this. The fact that we don't know

00:41:48.040 exactly how much is out there is evident in Facebook being responsible for 90% or so of all

00:41:58.480 reports. And other companies, we're not sure exactly. The whole industry, certainly before our

00:42:06.180 reporting, and still to a certain extent, was very cloaked in secrecy. And people were happy for that to

00:42:14.020 be the case, because nobody wanted to ask. Yeah, well, I want to talk about what the tech companies

00:42:19.620 are doing and not doing. But one wonders whether Facebook is responsible for much of the problem,

00:42:28.840 or just given their scale, given that they've got 3 billion people on the platform, and given the

00:42:34.860 sophistication of their tools that allow them to find the problem to the degree that they do that,

00:42:40.800 it's hard to know whether we're just penalizing them for looking and discovering the enormity of

00:42:47.080 the problem on their side. But you would have a similar problem anywhere else you looked if you

00:42:52.200 deployed the tools on any of these other platforms, whether it's Dropbox or Tumblr or any of these other

00:42:58.520 companies you mentioned in your articles. That's totally right. And I actually want to make sure

00:43:03.720 that it's clear that I don't think Facebook should be penalized for having the highest number of

00:43:10.580 reports. I mean, there's a lot of nuance around the number of reports. And for example, we were we

00:43:18.300 fought tooth and nail with the National Center for them to disclose the number of reports by company in

00:43:24.380 2018. And they would not do it. And none of the other tech companies would disclose it either.

00:43:32.100 All we knew was that there were 18 and a half million, nearly 18 and a half million reports.

00:43:36.820 We didn't know who they came from. We didn't know what companies were detecting imagery versus video.

00:43:42.580 We don't know when they were scanning for that. And there was a variety of reasons for that. But the

00:43:46.800 biggest reason, there were two biggest reasons. One is the National Center for Missing and Exploited

00:43:51.740 Children is actually a private nonprofit. And that has come under judicial review. And we can talk

00:43:59.240 about that more later if we want. But what that provides them is we are not able to file Freedom

00:44:05.320 of Information Acts to receive information from them. So even though they're sitting on the

00:44:11.740 canonical database of child sexual abuse reports that are that's a federal crime, it's an extremely

00:44:21.180 important statistic that in most instances, we would file a Freedom of Information request and be able

00:44:27.300 to learn some of that some of the information around that big number. When we we cannot file a Freedom of

00:44:34.380 Information request to NCMEC, and they would not tell us. So that was that was that was a number one

00:44:40.800 challenge. And then none of the other tech companies would tell us either. And finally, we had a source

00:44:47.180 who I can't disclose who, come to us and say, Look, you would not believe that the number of that is

00:44:57.000 coming from Facebook. And, you know, long story short, we found out that the number just from Facebook

00:45:03.740 Messenger was 12 million. After we reported that number, the federal government had a conference or a

00:45:10.440 presentation, they said that it was in total 16 million from all parts of Facebook. And at first at

00:45:17.240 first blush, you think, damn, I mean, Facebook is absolutely riddled with this content. Now, let me be 0.98

00:45:27.600 clear, any company online that has images or videos is infested with this content. It just that is the case.

00:45:38.420 So Facebook does not stand alone in having this issue. The very interesting part about those numbers is that

00:45:48.280 they actually reflect Facebook taking an extremely aggressive stance in looking for this imagery. I mean, they're

00:45:56.660 scanning every photo that gets uploaded. Since late 2017, they're scanning every video that gets uploaded. And

00:46:03.300 they're aggressively reporting it to the National Center. So those very high numbers actually reflect a very

00:46:09.640 conscientious effort to find and remove this imagery. I mean, we spoke with Alex Stamos, who is a former, I

00:46:18.940 think, chief security officer for Facebook. He was also the same position at Yahoo. And I mean, he said that

00:46:27.520 if this, if other companies were reporting the same way that Facebook was reporting, we wouldn't have,

00:46:34.240 you know, 16 million reports last year, we'd have 50 or 100 million. So Facebook actually, and when we

00:46:42.820 can come back to Facebook Messenger, because that's where things get interesting with Facebook. But I think

00:46:47.980 by any measure, Facebook is actually an industry leader when it comes to finding and reporting this content.

00:46:54.520 Right. I know that people hearing this are going to feel, once they absorb the horror of it, they

00:47:04.420 will feel somewhat powerless to do anything to help solve the problem. And so one question I was going

00:47:10.820 to ask you at the end is, you know, are there any nonprofits that you recommend we support who are

00:47:17.200 working on the front lines of this? But, and so you just said something somewhat equivocal about the

00:47:23.540 National Center, which is really at the center for this, and they're a nonprofit. What, what do you

00:47:28.100 recommend people do here? I mean, is there, should we be giving money to the National Center for missing

00:47:34.540 and exploited children? Or is, is there some better option for people who want to help here?

00:47:40.420 Sure. It's a, it's a good question. We, you know, I'm generally not in the business of,

00:47:45.620 it's lucky as a reporter. A lot of my problem is, or a lot of my job is pointing out problems and

00:47:52.640 not necessarily finding the solution to them. But I do think the National Center is full of great

00:47:59.980 people. Really? I mean, you can't work on this and not be a compassionate person. This is a labor of

00:48:10.280 love that these people are doing. That said, there are definite issues. I mean, the fact that it is a, it has

00:48:17.740 this, you know, quasi governmental status that has come up, you know, Justice Gorsuch, when he was a judge

00:48:26.540 in the 10th Circuit, ruled that the National Center was in fact, a part of the government. They get 75% of their

00:48:33.880 funding in general from the federal government. That's about $30 million a year. But at the same

00:48:40.580 time, they are absolutely overwhelmed. I mean, this, this problem is overwhelming the National Center.

00:48:46.980 It's overwhelming law enforcement. It's overwhelming a lot of tech companies. So, so, you know, while it's

00:48:53.380 complicated, I do think that their heart absolutely is in the right place and their efforts are in the

00:48:59.120 right place. They're just behind. They're really, they're, they're behind. Now you could give money

00:49:04.660 to them and that would be good. There are other nonprofits that also are doing great work. The

00:49:09.700 Canadian Center for Child Protection, who we reported on and who is one of the leaders in starting this

00:49:18.020 idea of what they call naming and shaming tech companies. Because of the, the cloak of silence that's

00:49:24.020 been around this, because we haven't been able to hear what are you actually doing to combat this

00:49:28.800 problem. The Canadian Center has taken the lead in trying to push that process forward there. You

00:49:34.800 could donate money there. You can donate money to Thorn, which is also a nonprofit that is developing

00:49:41.400 software for smaller companies, which is a challenge. If you're a smaller company, building these kind of

00:49:46.720 systems to scan and detect content is expensive. And they're sometimes unable to do that.

00:49:53.200 Why wouldn't there be an open source effort to develop this technology that anyone could use? I

00:50:02.700 mean, why would there be any proprietary angle on this at all? Why wouldn't Google or Palantir

00:50:08.780 or, you know, Facebook just break off some of their expertise and say, here are the tools. This is how you

00:50:15.960 find child pornography in your databases, you know, use them freely.

00:50:20.340 Right. Again, a great question. Now, part of what's going on is, and look, Google sits on Nick

00:50:28.600 Mick's board. Facebook sits on Nick Mick's board. Nick Mick gets in-kind donations from Palantir. They've

00:50:34.720 essentially depended in large part on Palantir and Google to upgrade their systems over the past few

00:50:40.180 years, even though they, you know, have a not insignificant sum of money coming in from the federal

00:50:46.100 government. But the detection system most commonly used is something called photo DNA.

00:50:54.280 So photo DNA was invented in 2009, which many experts would say is at least five years too late

00:51:00.280 when they knew what the problem was. But all the same, invented in 2009, it was a partnership between

00:51:06.320 Microsoft and a person named Dr. Hani Farid, who was at Dartmouth at the time, now at Berkeley.

00:51:12.360 And it is proprietary, and we'll talk about that in a second. But basically what it is,

00:51:19.180 is it's a fuzzy image matching. And by fuzzy image matching, I mean, many of your listeners

00:51:24.860 who I know are adept at technology, you can take what are called cryptographic hashes of any type of

00:51:31.720 file. And a cryptographic hash will shoot out a string of characters, and that string of characters is

00:51:37.660 unique to that file. And if any small thing changes, that cryptographic hash will change.

00:51:44.600 And so for a while they were using cryptographic hashes to try to match known images of child

00:51:50.420 sexual abuse. The challenge became that the people who are trading this type of imagery often are also

00:51:57.360 pretty technological and literate in different technologies. And so they knew that even if they

00:52:05.040 saved the image at a different type of compression, or if they cropped it even slightly,

00:52:12.160 that that cryptographic hash would no longer match. So photo DNA was the solution to this.

00:52:18.040 And photo DNA is, again, they call it a fingerprint, you can call it a fuzzy match. But basically,

00:52:23.480 it takes into account a lot of these minor changes that can be made to an image. So even if you change

00:52:29.580 the color a little bit, you crop it a little bit, you write on it maybe a little bit, it's still going

00:52:34.780 to catch that image. That was invented in 2009. Now, the question of why it is an open source is a good

00:52:40.640 question. They would say that it would allow people who are looking to dodge the system to manipulate the

00:52:50.240 system, access to the algorithm, which would then allow them to find out how to do that.

00:52:55.300 Hmm. I don't know enough to say whether that's for sure the case or not. For example, Facebook last

00:53:02.360 year released an open source algorithm for video detection. Now, a couple weeks ago, I asked some

00:53:09.200 cryptologists, why would Facebook do that? And they said, well, it's probably not that very, that good of

00:53:13.920 an algorithm, to be honest. Dr. Freed will tell you that photo DNA is not some kind of top secret,

00:53:20.460 incredibly complex thing, but they still do keep it under wraps. Now, Microsoft, who owns photo DNA,

00:53:28.120 will license that to most companies from what we understand, if they ask. Now, there's been some

00:53:34.960 movement around that lately that complicates things. But for the most part, Facebook has a license for

00:53:41.520 photo DNA. Google has a license for photo DNA. All of the big companies have licenses for photo DNA,

00:53:47.480 and they use it on their system so that they can all share this list of what they call hashes,

00:53:54.320 a hash list, in between themselves, where they fingerprint photos and take a look at it.

00:54:00.620 Now, that technology is being developed, unfortunately, with video, which I mentioned previously. There is

00:54:07.040 no standard, and that has been confusing to us. It remains confusing to us. The National Center has said

00:54:13.200 that they would prefer there's a video standard just the same way there is an imagery standard.

00:54:17.020 But there is no video standard. So Google has their own hash fuzzy fingerprint system for video.

00:54:24.460 Facebook has their own system. Microsoft actually evolved photo DNA to have their own system.

00:54:30.880 And the government uses a different, law enforcement uses a different system. So now all of a sudden you

00:54:36.280 have this issue of a bunch of different proprietary technologies generating different types of

00:54:43.180 fingerprints that are incompatible and no master list of these fingerprints. So there's really a rabbit

00:54:48.940 hole to go down, which is not uncommon to technology as a whole. But again, in this instance, the ramifications

00:54:56.720 of it are stark.

00:54:59.520 Well, there's the effort of the tech companies and the effort of government. And there's something

00:55:07.660 mysterious here around how noncommittal people have been towards solving this problem. Because,

00:55:16.120 you know, as you say, in at least one of your articles, the US government has approved $60 million a year

00:55:22.720 for this problem, which is really a drop in the bucket. I mean, it's just that on its face is not

00:55:28.140 enough. But they don't even spend that amount every year. They set aside that amount of money,

00:55:35.040 but they spend something like half of it. And this is just totally mystifying to me. I mean,

00:55:40.480 if ever there were a nonpartisan issue where, you know, you could get Christian conservatives on the

00:55:47.160 one hand and progressives on the far left on the other to be equally animated about, it's got to be this. 0.82

00:55:55.840 So the issue is, let's figure out how to prevent kids from being raped and tortured for money. And let's 0.73

00:56:03.560 figure out how to hold people accountable who do this, and who traffic in this imagery. And yet, it seems that

00:56:12.440 even the money that's reserved to fight this problem isn't being deployed. How do you understand

00:56:19.120 that? It's hard to explain. But I do think that this is perhaps the right time to talk about people

00:56:26.440 just not wanting to discuss the issue. Yeah. So in 2008, people knew this was a problem. As I said,

00:56:34.040 that testimony that you had quoted earlier from Flint Waters, where he's talking about the man who gave 0.56

00:56:39.480 juice boxes to the children and then raped them. That was 12 years ago. That was 12 years ago, as of last year,

00:56:45.600 so 13 years ago now, 2007. In 2007, everybody knew this was a huge problem. And so a bill was put on the

00:56:56.240 floor by Joe Biden, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, bipartisan. I believe Cornyn was evolved either at that time or at

00:57:03.700 least by 2012. As you say, it was a bipartisan issue. I think it passed unanimously. It was called

00:57:10.440 the 2008 Protect Our Children Act. And it wasn't until a few, probably like a month into our reporting

00:57:17.120 that we realized that there was legislation in order to confront this issue. And the more we dug into that

00:57:25.600 legislation, what we saw is it was pretty good. It really foresaw a lot of the issues.

00:57:31.400 But then what we saw, which was really disappointing, to put it mildly, was that many, most of the major

00:57:43.700 aspects of the legislation had not been fulfilled by the federal government. So there were three main

00:57:51.600 provisions that were not followed through on. The first, and perhaps the most consequential,

00:57:59.240 is the one you discussed, which is Congress allocated only half of the $60 million that the bill

00:58:08.460 appropriated to fight this. That money is supposed to go directly to state and local law enforcement

00:58:14.440 in order that they can deal with this problem. And we haven't even spoken about them, but the short of

00:58:21.160 it is they're completely overwhelmed. They're having to do total triage. Many of them, that means they

00:58:26.720 focus only on infants and toddlers, leaving the rest of the cases unexamined. That's true with

00:58:32.920 the FBI. That's true in LA. So you have these, they're called Internet Crimes Against Children

00:58:38.400 Task Force, ICACs. All these ICACs begging for money. The money has been appropriated. For the last 10

00:58:47.040 years, it stayed almost wholly at $30 million of the $60 million. I might be using appropriated wrong,

00:58:52.960 might be authorized. I'm not sure what the term is. But basically, they're allowed to give up to $60

00:58:57.440 million. They're only given $30 million. We found another thing, that the Justice Department is

00:59:03.700 supposed to produce biannual, every two years, reports on these topics, or reports on this problem.

00:59:10.880 Now, these reports are supposed to have several pieces of information. They're supposed to compile

00:59:16.260 data about how many reports, where the reports are coming from, in order that we have an idea of the

00:59:22.160 scope of this problem. And they're supposed to set some goals to eliminate it. Well, only two of what

00:59:29.320 should now be seven reports have been produced. And finally, they were supposed to have an executive

00:59:36.940 level appointee, at least by 2012, when the bill was reauthorized for the first time. There's supposed

00:59:42.300 to be like an executive level appointee, essentially a quarterback, who's in charge of this issue. That

00:59:48.520 position has never been filled with the executive level person. It's been a series of short-term

00:59:54.380 appointees leading the efforts. And so it was stunning to see that they had foreseen this problem.

01:00:02.520 And they had actually set up a pretty good law meant to address it. And the only reason that we can

01:00:09.360 think of that these things were not followed through on is people were very happy to put the law in place

01:00:16.560 and then turn their backs. And the only, I can only chalk that up to people just literally not wanting

01:00:24.140 to pay any mind to this issue after feeling like they dealt with it.

01:00:29.640 It is truly mysterious. I mean, I don't know. Again, what we're talking about is a source of suffering

01:00:38.620 that is as significant as any we can think of happening in our own neighborhoods, right? This

01:00:50.400 is not happening in some distant place in a culture very unlike your own for which you, you know, the

01:00:57.740 normal levers of empathy are harder to pull, right? This is happening to, if not your kids, your neighbor's

01:01:05.560 kids and some guy down the block is paying to watch it. And it's all being facilitated by technology that

01:01:15.980 is producing more wealth than any other sector on earth, right? So you're talking about the richest

01:01:23.540 companies whose wealth is scaling in a way that normal businesses never do. And the money is not

01:01:31.920 being allocated to solve this problem. It's just, we need something like a Manhattan project on this

01:01:38.040 where all the tech companies get together and realize this is not something the government is

01:01:43.120 especially good at. Look at those Facebook hearings. And, you know, you have a bunch of geezers up there

01:01:49.640 trying to figure out what Facebook is while also trying to hold Zuckerberg to account for having broken

01:01:56.120 our democracy. And it's just a completely fatuous exercise, right? So clearly we need the best and

01:02:05.520 brightest to break off 1% of their, their bandwidth and wealth and figure out how to solve this problem.

01:02:14.260 Because what seems to be happening based on your reporting, correct me if I'm wrong, is that

01:02:19.420 there are troubling signs that tech is moving in the opposite direction. They're, they're creating

01:02:27.000 technology based on other concerns that will make it, make the problem harder to discover. And then the,

01:02:33.900 the example of this that you've written about is that Facebook is planning to fully encrypt

01:02:40.200 Facebook Messenger, which is one channel that where a lot of this material streams. And if you do that,

01:02:47.740 well then Facebook will be able to take the position that, you know, Apple has taken around

01:02:53.660 unlocking its iPhone, right? Like we can't unlock the phone because not even we can get into your

01:02:59.640 iPhone. So if that person's phone is filled with evidence of crimes against children, well,

01:03:05.920 it really can't be our problem. We have, we've built the technology so that it will never become our

01:03:10.400 problem. And there are many people who are understandably part of a, a cult of privacy now,

01:03:17.740 that have so fetishized the smartphone in particular and other channels of information

01:03:23.940 as, you know, sacrosanct and have to be kept forever beyond the prying eyes of government,

01:03:30.520 no matter how warranted the search warrant is, that a lot of people will line up to say, yeah,

01:03:36.440 I really don't care what might be in, in the Facebook Messenger streams of others or on

01:03:44.820 another person's iPhone. I do not want it to be the case that you can ever get into my iPhone

01:03:53.240 or my encrypted messaging. And I don't know how you feel about that. I mean, I think I've heard the

01:04:00.040 arguments specifically with the case of the iPhone. Frankly, my intuitions have been kind of

01:04:06.180 knocked around there such that I actually don't have a settled opinion on it. But I'm pretty sure that

01:04:12.280 if you tell me that, you know, there's somebody who we know is raping and torturing children and

01:04:17.800 we have the evidence on his iPhone, but we can't open it. 99% of my brain says, okay, that's,

01:04:25.320 that's unacceptable. No one has an absolute right to privacy under those conditions. Let's figure out

01:04:30.900 how to open the iPhone. But many people will disagree there for reasons that, you know, in another mood,

01:04:36.680 I can sort of dimly understand. But, you know, for the purposes of this conversation, those reasons

01:04:41.820 seem sociopathic to me. How do you view the, the role of tech here and, and our looming privacy

01:04:48.920 concerns? Right. Well, it's, it's interesting to hear somebody such as yourself, who I know has

01:04:54.900 a lot of experience with many of these issues, not child sexual abuse, but privacy technology and

01:05:03.900 the tech companies. But let me go back to a few things you said, and then I'll address the

01:05:07.980 encryption bit. We were shocked to find out how many people actually are engaged or looking at this

01:05:15.340 type of material. Just one statistic or one quote I can actually give you is we were speaking with a

01:05:20.100 guy, Lieutenant John Pizarro, who's a task force commander in New Jersey dealing with this type of

01:05:25.660 content. So Lieutenant Pizarro says, look, guys, you got 9 million people in the state of New Jersey.

01:05:34.020 Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000.

01:05:38.220 Okay. So he's just saying that 5% of people look at child pornography online. Is that, I mean,

01:05:44.940 that's how I interpret that. That's right.

01:05:47.140 Okay. So, I mean, that just seems, it just seems, it seems impossible, right? It's like.

01:05:52.220 I mean, you've struck, I mean, it's part of the challenges with reporting on it. You know,

01:05:55.700 like it's a, nobody's going to tell me they look at this stuff. I actually did have

01:05:59.440 a series of encrypted chats with somebody who ran some websites that did have this material,

01:06:05.380 but figuring out how many people look at it or don't is very difficult for a reporter.

01:06:11.020 But law enforcement and, and there is an agenda on law enforcement. We'll get to that when we talk

01:06:16.600 to encryption. But what they say is three to 5% of any, any random population will be looking at this

01:06:25.100 material. And that's not all pedophiles. And in fact, a large number of those people are not

01:06:31.380 pedophiles. And that's one of the issues with having this kind of content even available is that

01:06:37.280 many of the child advocates will say, you know, you have, you spoke a little bit about adult

01:06:42.660 pornography earlier and the wide range of adult pornography and just the insane prevalence of

01:06:49.500 pornography. I mean, when, when certainly you and I were growing up, I didn't have access to

01:06:54.480 pornography. Now pornography is everywhere. And, and, and just like everything internet, it's driven

01:07:00.820 more and more extreme. There's more and more types of classifications, whether it's BDSM or,

01:07:07.080 or teen pornography or any of these types of things. And, you know, again, according to

01:07:11.980 interviews and law enforcement and specialists we've spoken with, they say that this will drive

01:07:16.860 people towards child sexual abuse. So that I just wanted to start, but you noted that, you know,

01:07:23.120 there's a lot of people there is, it seems to be a much larger problem than we previously knew.

01:07:29.400 Now, second with the tech companies and why aren't the tech companies and why haven't they done

01:07:33.280 something? So again, I have to initially come back to the fact that nobody was really telling

01:07:38.600 them they had to, because nobody wanted to deal with it. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Nobody was

01:07:43.140 asking them questions about it. I mean, I know there's been articles written about this in the past

01:07:47.640 several years, but there has not been an investigation such as ours in probably a decade or so.

01:07:54.660 It's a very, very easy subject to look away from. But in the course of my reporting, I did go back

01:08:02.060 years and found employees, former employees at Twitter, former employees at Snapchat, former

01:08:07.640 employees at Facebook, because those are the people who had insight in, let's say, 2012, 13, 14,

01:08:13.820 when the problems started really getting big. And from every single person at every one of those

01:08:19.560 companies, I heard the same thing, which is that the teams responsible for dealing with that

01:08:25.160 material, which are generally called trust and safety teams, are totally underfunded and basically

01:08:31.840 ignored. So an example, one former Twitter employee told me in 2013, when Vine, which was Twitter's

01:08:42.180 short-lived video, like video tweets, six-second, eight-second tweets, in 2013, there were gigabytes

01:08:50.560 of child sexual abuse videos appearing on Vine, and they were appearing more quickly than this one

01:08:56.580 person, there was one person charged with this, could take them down. So the idea that this is a new

01:09:03.320 problem is totally absurd. All the companies have known about it for a long time, but they've been

01:09:10.060 happy to not answer questions about it. There's one, this, I think this appeared in a few of your

01:09:16.440 articles, but there's one sentence in one of these articles that I read and reread, and I'll just read it

01:09:24.440 here, and you'll have to explain this to me. So this, I'm just quoting one of your articles. Police records and

01:09:31.320 emails, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen law enforcement officials, show that some tech

01:09:36.760 companies can take weeks or months to respond to questions from authorities, if they respond at

01:09:42.660 all. Now, to my eye, that sentence doesn't make any fucking sense, right? I mean, how is it that the FBI 0.94

01:09:51.560 could be calling Tumblr, or Facebook, or Dropbox, or AWS, or any other platform, saying, listen,

01:10:00.720 we've got crimes in progress being documented on your servers? Toddlers are being raped, and this

01:10:08.920 information is being spread to the world through your servers. Call us back. How is it that the cops 0.95

01:10:17.520 aren't showing up with guns kicking in the door, getting a response, if they don't get a timely response?

01:10:25.020 I mean, part of the problem, Sam, is that there's too much. The cops are overwhelmed.

01:10:30.720 So what's often occurring, we found, is that there is so many reports coming in to a local

01:10:38.200 task force that they have to spend, A, a significant portion of their time triaging these reports,

01:10:48.120 trying to find, I mean, the number one thing they want to do is identify if there is a child in imminent

01:10:53.540 harm. Because again, a lot of this material is recirculated material. These are children who are

01:11:00.620 abused 10 or 15 years ago, who have been since rescued, saved, and the images are being found

01:11:08.600 and reported, but there's no imminent harm. So they're going through and they're triaging. And

01:11:12.340 again, we're talking tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of reports for a task force.

01:11:18.100 So what we found was occurring, which I agree is incredibly disturbing, is the law as it stands now,

01:11:25.780 and there has been a bill that has been introduced subsequent to our reporting to address this.

01:11:29.840 But as it stands now, the law says that tech companies, as soon as they become aware of this

01:11:36.920 content, must report it. So first of all, tech companies are not legally obligated to look for

01:11:42.260 this content. And there are real and difficult to manage Fourth Amendment issues around that. But

01:11:48.580 putting those aside, tech companies are not legally obligated to look for this content, but they are

01:11:53.020 legally obligated to report it as soon as they know about it. So they will report this content and

01:12:00.000 then they are only allowed to store, whether it's the imagery or anything about this, they're only

01:12:06.800 required to store that for 90 days. After 90 days, they have to get rid of the imagery. There's no way

01:12:13.220 they can keep a hold of the imagery, which leads to significant challenges for training things like

01:12:17.680 artificial intelligence classifiers. Okay, so they have to get rid of this. And that that in itself

01:12:22.980 issues a challenge. And second, a lot of the time, because law enforcement is so overwhelmed, because

01:12:28.900 there's so much content, because they're having to figure out what's an actual threat. By the time they

01:12:34.040 go to the tech company, many times they've gotten rid of the information. And so it's a dead end.

01:12:40.660 You have certain companies like Snapchat, where their whole business model is based on getting rid of

01:12:45.580 all kind of any kind of logs or data or anything around imagery. So there were several instances

01:12:52.720 where law enforcement would go to Snapchat, and they wouldn't have it. We found cases where Tumblr,

01:12:58.440 for a certain period of time, I think in 2016, was in fact informing people who they found this content

01:13:05.440 that they had reported them. And we talked with law enforcement who said that that gave criminals

01:13:11.900 ample opportunity to delete the evidence to destroy devices. So yeah, it's absolutely nuts. And it's

01:13:22.260 because the overwhelming amount of content, the inability for the National Center, whose technology is

01:13:30.180 literally 20 years old, to properly vet and filter and triage the content. So some of they do,

01:13:39.300 they try. Some of that then falls on local law enforcement, who again is overwhelmed. And by the

01:13:45.560 time they get to some of these things, it's often gone. So a bill was introduced in December that would

01:13:52.460 double the amount of time, at least I believe, that the companies are required to hold on to this

01:13:57.500 information. So that's one positive step, I think. But I want to get back really quick to the idea of

01:14:04.120 why tech companies maybe aren't inclined to deal with this issue the way I think most of us would

01:14:11.860 expect. So think about these trust and safety teams, right? Their job is to identify pieces of

01:14:19.500 content and users to remove from the platform. Now, I'm sure you know that the way that many of these

01:14:28.400 companies, if not all of these companies, certainly the public ones, and the ones who are looking for

01:14:32.700 funding report their success is by number of users. Daily active users, monthly active users,

01:14:39.980 whatever it is. So you have this team within your organization whose job it is to remove users and

01:14:46.860 to flag users. And yes, I think it's very easy for all of us to say, well, no shit, and we're better 0.98

01:14:54.780 off without them. But I mean, unfortunately, what reporting, and again, this is across several 0.99

01:15:00.220 different organizations, several different people, this is not one anecdote, this is not two anecdote,

01:15:05.340 this is several people saying, we were underfunded, it wasn't a priority. And as I think we've seen

01:15:13.600 with Facebook in recent years, as well as other companies, until it becomes a public issue, a public

01:15:19.980 problem for them, they're not inclined to put any resources towards anything that is not in some way

01:15:26.040 driving the bottom line. And so that brings us to encryption.

01:15:30.560 Before we go there, let me just kind of message to the audience here, because I know that many people

01:15:37.080 who work at these companies listen to the podcast. In fact, I know many of the people who started

01:15:42.600 these companies, I can reach out and talk to many of the principal people here. So I know many of you

01:15:50.700 are listening. At every level in these companies, you have to figure this out. The fact that this is

01:15:58.620 the status quo, that so little attention and so few resources are going to solving this problem,

01:16:04.780 when the problem itself is being materially facilitated by your companies, right? I mean,

01:16:11.620 the problem couldn't exist at this scale, anything like this scale, but for the infrastructure you

01:16:18.920 have built, and upon which you are making vast wealth, right? It's just, it's completely understandable

01:16:26.920 that it's a daunting task, right? But if you're working for these companies, and you're spending all

01:16:34.260 your time trying to increase their profit, and spending no time at all, I mean, like, when was

01:16:42.420 the last time you, as an employee at Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or AWS, or Dropbox, any of these

01:16:52.840 companies, have thought about the problem we're now talking about? Please do something. You know

01:16:59.560 better than I do what you might do to make noise within your company about this, but prioritize

01:17:04.980 this. Google lets its employees spend some significant percentage of time just thinking

01:17:11.060 about problems that interest them. Well, become interested in this one. We're going to look back

01:17:15.880 on this period. I mean, of all the things that are going to seem crazy in retrospect, the deformities

01:17:22.320 in our politics, and in culture at large, born of our just not figuring out how to navigate our use

01:17:29.060 of these tools. You know, the fact that we spend half of our lives ignoring our friends and families

01:17:34.260 because we're looking at what's happening to our reputations on Twitter, because we've put a, this,

01:17:39.900 you know, slot machine in our pockets, and take it out 150 times a day, right? All of that is going to

01:17:45.960 seem insane, and once we correct for it and find some psychological balance, we'll be better for it.

01:17:52.820 But nothing will seem more insane than the fact that we did not address this problem in a timely way.

01:18:00.540 So, you know, with that PSA to my friends in tech, back to you, Gabe. What do you have to say about the

01:18:07.500 prospects of encryption and related issues? Right. Well, let me follow up on that just so I can give

01:18:13.500 your listeners a little bit of information as to what companies are doing what. And this won't be

01:18:19.620 a full rundown, but just so people know. So, there's a pretty big distinction between somebody

01:18:25.440 like Facebook, who's scanning every single thing, their social media company, they're doing it

01:18:29.300 aggressively, and places like cloud storage, okay? So, Dropbox, Google Drive, they tend to have very

01:18:37.760 similar policies. And those policies are, they don't scan anything you upload. They're only going to scan

01:18:44.020 a file when you share that file. That's their policy. Now, that's an interesting policy, but in our

01:18:51.280 reporting, we found that people easily circumvent that policy. They do that by sharing logons, they do that

01:18:57.520 by leaving public folders open available. So, they're choosing, and these are all what the companies would say

01:19:03.660 are privacy-based policies. So, Dropbox and Google only scan on share. Now, let me tell you a little

01:19:10.660 bit for these first numbers that were only released to the New York Times about 2019. Dropbox only filed

01:19:17.260 5,000 reports last year in 2019. Now, while we were doing our reporting in 2019, we said to Dropbox,

01:19:25.000 do you scan images? Do you scan videos? And after weeks of them saying, well, we can't tell you that,

01:19:31.200 we won't tell you that for whatever reason. At one point in, I believe, July of 2019, they said,

01:19:37.620 scanning videos is not a priority. Not a priority for us. We don't feel that videos are the medium

01:19:44.380 of choice necessarily, and that's not a priority. By the time we published our article, literally in

01:19:50.180 the days before, Dropbox said, oh, oh, we're scanning video now. Okay, so they start scanning video,

01:19:56.080 let's say in the last quarter of 2019. What the numbers show is that of the 5,000 reports Dropbox

01:20:03.360 filed to the National Center, there were over 250,000 files. 5,000 reports, 250,000 files.

01:20:11.540 The majority of those files were video. Okay, so Dropbox starts scanning for video,

01:20:16.580 they start finding a lot of video. Amazon, Amazon's cloud services handle millions of uploads and

01:20:23.500 downloads every second. Millions every second. They don't scan at all. They scan for no images,

01:20:31.320 they scan for no videos. Last year, they reported zero images, zero videos. You know, we could go on,

01:20:38.480 those are some of the bigger ones. You have Apple, Apple cannot scan their messages app,

01:20:43.480 and they elect not to scan iCloud. So once again, their cloud storage, they don't scan their cloud

01:20:48.160 storage. Now, I've gone back to them. Some of these companies are starting to do it. I think that

01:20:54.980 there's nothing like, you know, the exposure of a company to motivate them to begin doing this.

01:21:01.920 But there are certainly things they can be doing. And they will tell you that they do dedicate a

01:21:07.140 significant amount of resources. But let me address that as well. So Microsoft, who again, invented or

01:21:14.080 sponsored and invented the photo DNA, the creation of image scanning, has long been seen as a leader

01:21:20.420 in this field. And remember, this all started with a tip from a user saying that they were able to find

01:21:26.440 child sexual abuse on Microsoft. So my colleague, Michael Keller, both of us have computer science

01:21:32.740 backgrounds. He wrote a program. And this computer program used what's called a headless browser,

01:21:38.800 which means you can't actually see the browser. And he programmed this headless browser to go on

01:21:46.540 Bing, to go on Yahoo, to go on DuckDuckGo, and to go on Google, and search for child sexual abuse 0.82

01:21:52.520 imagery using terms that we both knew were related to the to child sexual abuse, as well as some others

01:21:58.920 that were sent to us as tips. And the program, I mean, again, we had it very heavily vetted by our

01:22:06.000 lawyers. It even blocked the images from ever being loaded, just so you know. So not only could

01:22:10.800 we not even see a browser window, but the images were stopped from ever loading. But what we did is

01:22:16.880 we took the URLs that were returned from these image searches. And we sent those URLs to Microsoft's

01:22:24.480 own photo DNA cloud service. So essentially, this is a cloud service that we signed up for with

01:22:31.120 Microsoft, saying very clearly, we're New York Times journalists, we're reporting on this issue.

01:22:35.940 And we'd like access to your API to check for images of child sexual abuse. They gave us access

01:22:42.120 to the API. We wrote a computer program, it searched Microsoft Bing, using terms, we then sent those

01:22:50.380 URLs to Microsoft Photo DNA, and found dozens of images. Dozens of images. This is a trillion dollar

01:23:00.540 tech company. So not only that, we found dozens of images. And that's before, we just cut it off.

01:23:05.860 I mean, again, with letters coming in from the FBI saying, be careful. And we weren't trying to make

01:23:11.400 a massive collection or prove that there are millions. We found 75 before we were like, okay,

01:23:18.240 there's plenty here. So then what we did is we went and told Microsoft. We said, this is what we did.

01:23:23.900 This is exactly what we did. These are the search terms we use. They said something akin to,

01:23:29.320 a bug, a problem. Okay. Three weeks later, we did it again. And we found them all. We found

01:23:36.220 different ones. We found more. So the idea that these tech companies cannot find, I mean,

01:23:44.440 they should be able to do this themselves, obviously, when two journalists at the New York

01:23:48.920 Times can do that. So the idea that they're doing, and this isn't just Microsoft, right? It was also

01:23:54.580 found on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Now, both of those are powered by Microsoft search engine. So the default

01:24:01.300 lies largely with Microsoft. We did not find any on Google. So that says two things. One, Microsoft is

01:24:07.980 not realizing that their own system is indexing and serving up imagery that its own technologies can

01:24:14.380 identify. And two, it's doable. You can stop this. Google's done it. However, Google did it in their

01:24:20.780 search. And I'm not saying it's impossible to find it. Again, we didn't do some kind of exhaustive

01:24:25.580 search, but it wasn't turning up on Google. So there is some extremely uneven commitment to this issue.

01:24:33.860 And also there's this, the issue we flagged in discussing Facebook a while back, where if you

01:24:39.860 don't look, you don't have any bad news to report. If Facebook looks, they find, you know, 16 million

01:24:47.060 instances of the problem. AWS doesn't look, and they don't pay a significant price for not looking.

01:24:55.920 The not looking has to become salient and an instance of terrible PR for anyone to be incentivized

01:25:03.160 to look, it sounds like, beyond actually caring about this issue.

01:25:06.000 Right. Well, now we're running up against exactly what you described earlier, which is

01:25:09.860 the privacy advocates and the encryption, essentially absolutists.

01:25:15.200 Right. And let me start this part of the conversation by saying, I'm a reporter. I don't

01:25:22.380 offer my opinion on exactly how this problem should be solved. My point is that this is the clearest

01:25:31.500 example of where privacy has stark and terrible consequences for a group of people. Okay. But

01:25:43.120 that said, you're right. Amazon, Apple, they seem to pay very little price for filing almost zero

01:25:52.240 reports of child sexual abuse. And meanwhile, Facebook gets a bunch of initially negative headlines

01:25:58.900 for filing an enormous amount. Now, as we've discussed, those numbers are actually indicative

01:26:05.240 of them doing a very good job. But as you said, in March of last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced

01:26:13.520 plans to encrypt Facebook Messenger. Now, let me put some context around Facebook Messenger and just

01:26:22.100 how commonly it's used to share images of child sexual abuse. In 2018, of the 18 million, a little

01:26:32.540 more than 18 million reports made to the National Center, nearly 12 million of those, about 65%,

01:26:38.560 two out of three, were from Facebook Messenger. Right. In 2019, Facebook Messenger was responsible

01:26:47.020 for even more. 72% of all reports made to the National Center. So, I mean, whenever I tell people

01:26:55.060 these facts, the response is almost always, who are these idiots that are trading child sexual abuse 1.00

01:27:02.120 on Facebook? I don't know the answer to that, but there's lots of them. Now, if Facebook encrypts 1.00

01:27:09.660 Messenger, which again, Mark Zuckerberg has said they're going to do, they will almost completely

01:27:17.040 lose the ability, they'll lose the ability to do any kind of automatic image detection, which is what

01:27:21.700 everybody fundamentally relies on to do this. And while they will say that they're going to use other

01:27:26.940 signals, the experts and people I've talked to anticipate that there will be nearly 100% decrease

01:27:33.540 in reports from Messenger. You know, maybe they'll be able to use some of these other types of

01:27:39.720 indicators, which I would actually be encouraging them to be using anyways. Maybe they are, but to

01:27:44.500 find this, and these are signals, what they call, which are messages that are sent from one to many

01:27:50.060 people, or adults messaging children, things that are, again, I think they should hopefully be using

01:27:56.280 anyways. But the fact that they plan to encrypt Messenger, which Jay Sullivan, product manager,

01:28:03.540 and project management director, I'm sorry for messaging privacy at Facebook, in the fall of

01:28:09.860 last year and prepared remarks said, you know, private messaging, ephemeral stories and small

01:28:14.980 groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication. And so by saying that,

01:28:20.720 what he's saying is that this is what our users want. Our users want encrypted messaging, our users

01:28:25.660 want privacy, our users want everybody to stay out of their living room, to use an analogy that

01:28:32.880 they often use. But the truth is, and people are really terrified by this, that if they encrypt it,

01:28:41.220 not only are they not going to be able to see CSAM, they're not going to be able to see all the other

01:28:45.660 kinds of crime and grooming and sextortion and everything else that is occurring all the time

01:28:53.280 on their platform. So obviously, there's a serious conversation that has to be had around tech's role

01:29:01.420 in this and the incentives and this cult of privacy and its consequences. And we have to, I mean, that's

01:29:07.520 its own ongoing topic of conversation that we're not certainly not going to exhaust it here. I guess

01:29:15.580 the best use of our remaining time is just to give a, as clear a picture as we can of the urgency and

01:29:22.660 scope of this problem. I mean, because again, it's when you give me a, a factoid of the sort you did

01:29:29.500 from, from New Jersey. So you have a law enforcement official in New Jersey who says, you know, we've got

01:29:33.960 9 million people in the state of New Jersey. And based upon our statistics, we could probably arrest

01:29:40.060 400,000 of them, right? These are 400,000 people who he imagines have looked at this material in some

01:29:49.980 way online. Now, whether they saw it inadvertently, whether some of them are New York Times reporters

01:29:54.540 doing their research, discount all of that, it appears that there's an extraordinary number of people

01:30:00.120 who seek this material out because this is what gets them off, right? This is not, these are not research

01:30:09.020 papers. And we have a culture. I mean, what do we know about the culture of pedophiles and all of the

01:30:18.080 elaborate machinations they have to take to not get caught producing this material, trading in it, viewing

01:30:25.340 it? First of all, how do predators get access to kids that they abuse in the making of these videos? I mean, yes,

01:30:32.740 apparently there's the, there are truly evil parents and step-parents and caregivers, but how much of

01:30:41.840 this is a story of abductions and other horrific details? What do we know about what's happening,

01:30:50.240 you know, among the culture of people who produce and consume this content?

01:30:55.580 Sure. Let me, let me, I don't want to go on about encryption too much, but let me just raise

01:31:00.860 a few things that I think would be helpful to the conversation, especially with your audience.

01:31:06.180 Because often when you come to the idea of encryption, it's this position of either yes

01:31:11.900 encryption or no encryption, right? Either yes encryption, or somehow there's going to be a back

01:31:16.760 door into encryption. And I will say that I do feel that the government, and this is one of the

01:31:21.080 challenges of being a reporter, I do think the government is using our reporting and using the

01:31:27.140 issue of child sexual abuse as kind of the new terrorism. That, that now, like a week after we

01:31:34.900 put out our first report, Attorney General William Barr held an event at the Department of Justice,

01:31:41.380 and the event was entirely about how encryption is enabling child sexual abuse and how they need a

01:31:48.300 back door into encryption because of this. Now, what that event did not discuss at all were the

01:31:55.400 multiple other failures of the federal government in dealing with this issue. So I do feel like there

01:32:01.420 is some disingenuous behavior, not only on their part, also on the part of people who, there's a lot

01:32:10.220 of, this is becoming a weaponized topic around, around encryption. Well, this is so grim because if ever

01:32:16.840 there were an attorney general who did not inspire confidence for his ethical and political intuitions

01:32:22.660 and his commitment to protecting civil liberties, it's William Barr. So, yeah, I mean, that just makes

01:32:31.280 me think that the answer has to come more from tech than from government, at least government at this

01:32:38.100 moment, right? I mean, obviously government has to be involved because we're talking about crime in the

01:32:42.920 end. But yeah, it's easy to see how fans of Edward Snowden and, you know, everyone else who wouldn't

01:32:50.660 trust the current administration as far as they can be thrown will just say this is completely

01:32:56.500 unworkable. You can't let these people in because they obviously can't be trusted to protect civil

01:33:03.760 liberties. Right. And even Snowden has weighed in on this series specifically about saying he thought one

01:33:10.840 of the stories we wrote was particularly credulous to law enforcement and to this argument against it.

01:33:16.460 But you're right. I do think there are things to be done and we'll focus on Facebook solely because

01:33:21.180 of this messenger example, right? Now, I think one of the most compelling things I've heard from people

01:33:28.020 when really, who are really willing to engage on this issue is maybe encryption should not be deployed

01:33:36.100 against all types of platforms. So, for example, Facebook is a platform where children are at a

01:33:42.460 distinct disadvantage to adults, not only for all the reasons that children are always at a distinct

01:33:48.180 disadvantage. They're younger. They haven't learned as much. They don't have as much life experience.

01:33:52.580 But literally, I found dozens, at least, and by far from an exhaustive search of examples of adults

01:34:00.580 going on Facebook, creating profiles that say they're 13 or 14, befriending other children,

01:34:07.980 getting that child to send them an image of what is child sexual abuse, whether it's self-generated or

01:34:14.160 not, coercing them into it, sometimes by sending that child other images of child sexual abuse that

01:34:20.860 they've collected. And then as soon as the child sends them an image, they'll say, actually,

01:34:27.100 I'm a 25-year-old guy. And if you don't send me more images, I'm going to post this image on your

01:34:33.740 Facebook wall and tell your parents. So then you have a 12 or 13-year-old, I guess you're not supposed

01:34:40.740 to be under 13 on Facebook, although we know those rules get bent and broken all the time. Now you have

01:34:45.600 a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old saying, holy shit, I don't know what to do. I'm going to send them more 0.98

01:34:51.980 photos. I'm so terrified if they tell my parents, if they post that on my wall. This happens all the

01:34:58.880 time. It's called sextortion. It's one of the biggest issues coming up. So now you have this

01:35:04.000 platform where adults and children can interact at a distinct advantage to the children. Children

01:35:09.220 are discoverable, despite the fact that Facebook says you can't search for them in certain ways,

01:35:13.260 which is true. There's still plenty of ways for an adult to find children on Facebook and message

01:35:19.840 them and coerce them. And Facebook knows it's a huge problem. We're not starting from a place where

01:35:25.320 they don't know it's a problem. They know it's a huge problem. Now, at the same time, Facebook has

01:35:30.540 an encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp. And if we look at the number of reports to the National

01:35:36.120 Center from WhatsApp versus Facebook, of course, it's not even close. WhatsApp isn't even a fraction

01:35:41.460 of a percent of the reports that Facebook sends. But that said, Facebook could,

01:35:46.260 there's one hypothesis, one possibility, not something I'm advocating necessarily,

01:35:52.240 but an interesting thought. Facebook could direct people, say, look, Messenger is not encrypted.

01:35:58.400 We're not encrypting it. These are not encrypted messages. Law enforcement has access to these

01:36:02.960 messages. Shout it from the hills. Everybody knows. If you want to have an encrypted chat,

01:36:10.200 we own a company. WhatsApp, go use WhatsApp. We'll kick you right over to WhatsApp. Use WhatsApp.

01:36:15.560 Now, that would make it substantially harder to coerce children. Because at that point,

01:36:23.220 what you have to do, in order to even have WhatsApp, you have to have a phone number.

01:36:27.420 So the child has to have a phone. The child has to have WhatsApp on it. And WhatsApp,

01:36:32.360 as opposed to Facebook, doesn't have the same sort of discoverability issue. You can't just go on

01:36:38.540 WhatsApp and start finding children, right? Certainly not in the same way you can on Facebook.

01:36:44.200 So maybe there should be more discussion around what types of platforms should be encrypted.

01:36:52.260 What types of platforms are children at a distinct disadvantage? Like, do I believe? I believe privacy

01:36:58.880 is a fundamental human right. So I absolutely believe that there should be encrypted messaging.

01:37:04.400 But has this course of reporting shaken to my core how that should happen? Absolutely. And has it caused

01:37:15.680 me to say, like, wow, how do we have a technology such as encryption, which by definition cannot have a

01:37:24.600 backdoor, and still protect children? And what I find to be counterproductive when I start talking about

01:37:31.920 these discussions, Sam, is that privacy absolutists, which is a term I use for them,

01:37:40.080 who have been thinking about this issue for years, they will immediately chastise me. I mean,

01:37:45.260 I tweeted out this idea, probably in October, after we had started thinking about it and developing it,

01:37:50.840 my colleague and I, and I'm sure we're not, you know, the first people to think about this. But I

01:37:55.340 said, you know, shouldn't there be a discussion around what platforms should be encrypted?

01:37:59.200 And I was attacked. I was attacked by people who said, I've been thinking about this problem for 20,

01:38:05.980 30 years. I've analyzed it from every single point of view. I've run every scenario down and every

01:38:13.080 single one ends in encrypt everything. Now, I don't know if that's the right answer. I don't know what

01:38:18.820 the right answer is. But what I do know is that at this point in time, when the general public is

01:38:25.780 just starting to become aware of privacy implications online, just starting to understand

01:38:32.540 what it means to have private messages, what it means to have social media platforms, what it means

01:38:38.640 to broadcast your life to everybody or choose not to, the worst thing you can do is come in and tell 1.00

01:38:47.020 people they're idiots for thinking about these things out loud. And so I would just like offer 1.00

01:38:53.680 that message to a community that I very much respect and enjoy communicating with. Like, again,

01:39:01.300 I helped start the New York Times tip line. Like we implemented secure drop technology, which is

01:39:06.840 encrypted technology. You can send us messages on WhatsApp and signal. You can get to us in untraceable

01:39:13.020 ways. I very, very much understand the importance and value of encryption and private communications.

01:39:20.520 But I do think there is room to discuss where those are implemented, how those are implemented.

01:39:26.640 Should those be implemented when you know there is a problem? Should those be implemented when you know

01:39:31.880 children are at a distinct disadvantage? And still, the answer might be yes. I don't know the answer.

01:39:37.540 But I would just say that now is the time to help people start having these conversations.

01:39:45.220 And if you've already run every scenario and you know the answer, we'll help people get there

01:39:49.580 in a way that's constructive because the other ways are going to drive people away from it.

01:39:56.140 I should echo a few of those thoughts in that, you know, I am also very concerned about privacy

01:40:00.080 and I would be the first to recoil from the prospect of someone like, you know, A.G. Barr having any more

01:40:08.760 oversight of our lives than he currently has, right? So it's just, it's easy to see how an ability to pry

01:40:16.700 into our private lives can be misused by an ideological government. And yet, we're talking about more than that.

01:40:25.760 We're talking about the fact that at this moment, you have some sadistic lunatic mistreating children

01:40:34.100 who, for whatever reason, he has access to and shooting his exploits on an iPhone, uploading it to AWS,

01:40:46.120 you know, posting some of this stuff, you know, on Tumblr or wherever else. And Apple built the phone

01:40:53.040 and Amazon runs the server and Tumblr just got acquired by Automatic. And you have people

01:41:00.220 getting fantastically wealthy on this technology. And this technology is what is enabling

01:41:07.000 the lone maniac in his basement to accomplish all of this. If he just had a Polaroid camera, yes,

01:41:17.080 he could, you know, walk that single photo in a brown paper bag to the parking lot of a shopping mall

01:41:24.640 and trade it for $100 with some other nefarious stranger and risk getting caught that way.

01:41:32.500 But these companies have built the tools to bring all of this to scale. So presumably, people are making

01:41:38.760 a fair amount of money trading this material now. And they're managing to essentially groom a very large

01:41:48.160 audience of vulnerable people. I mean, you have to imagine that the audience for this

01:41:53.500 is growing the way the audience for kind of weird adult porn is also apparently growing because people

01:42:01.200 are getting numbed, you know, to various stimuli, right? People are, you have access to every possible image

01:42:08.700 online. And certain people are vulnerable to just needing more and more extreme images to even find them

01:42:16.660 to be salient, right? So I would imagine at the periphery, if we're talking about, you know, 400,000 people in

01:42:22.560 New Jersey downloading this stuff, not every one of those people 30 years ago would have been trying to find who

01:42:30.960 they could exchange Polaroids with in a parking lot. And so this is a kind of a cultural contamination,

01:42:38.640 again, much of which is redounding to the bottom line of these companies that are getting fantastically

01:42:44.520 wealthy for, you know, the use of their bandwidth for these purposes. So you can't be a privacy

01:42:49.700 absolutist here. We have to figure out how to change the incentive structure around all this so that the

01:42:55.720 companies themselves find some way to make this much harder to do and to make it much more likely

01:43:02.060 that someone will get caught for doing it. Yeah. And, and, and I know that I do want to speak about

01:43:08.320 pedophiles and education and finish up there, but we haven't even discussed a few things that when you're

01:43:13.560 talking about what people could use their 10% or 20% time or just what these extremely bright people

01:43:20.680 work at these companies, right? We have a, a part of one of our stories, it's just almost too terrible

01:43:26.100 to talk about, about live streaming. And this live streaming is going on, on zoom, where there's

01:43:32.400 over a dozen men sitting around watching another man, rape a child and cheering him on. And the only 0.65

01:43:40.880 reason, the only reason I was able to report this case out is because a Canadian undercover officer

01:43:47.560 happened to be sitting in the zoom chat room because it was known that this was a problem on

01:43:53.140 zoom and recorded it. And the police the next day went and saved that child, right? So that's a

01:44:00.820 wonderful story. But the fact is when that case went to trial, which is kind of unbelievable that it

01:44:06.720 went to trial, but it did go to trial. What the prosecutor said, the federal prosecutor, a man named

01:44:11.500 Austin Berry, he said that the offenders know that live streams are harder to detect and that they

01:44:18.960 leave no record. And then quote, that's why they go to zoom. It's the Netflix of child pornography.

01:44:26.660 So there's things we haven't even discussed, like live streaming and new content and classifiers that

01:44:32.720 need to be built for that, that it's a, it's hard, you know, like this is a hard, complicated,

01:44:38.940 technical task. And, and the implications and, and what people were absolutely going to respond to

01:44:45.260 is the idea of walking into a surveillance state, which I know you've had multiple conversations.

01:44:50.040 And I, that is why we did the reporting on this subject. That is why we did it because it brings

01:44:54.620 these questions to a head is how do we deal with this? Now, now the, the answer for you of how we deal

01:45:00.940 with this right now, as far as I'm concerned is education. So I was in Amsterdam. I was actually

01:45:09.500 in the Hague in the Netherlands late last year doing some reporting because this is an international

01:45:14.860 problem. And some of the laws in the Netherlands make this, make it more common for this type of

01:45:21.400 material to be stored on servers in that country. But that said, while I was there, I ran into some law

01:45:27.340 enforcement, some international law enforcement. And I ran into a, a Finnish, basically Homeland 0.93

01:45:32.560 Security agent. And we were having a couple of drinks and I was talking to him. I told him what

01:45:38.200 I was there for. He didn't believe me for a while. I thought I was a Russian spy. That was interesting.

01:45:43.300 Once I had finally convinced him that no, I'm actually a reporter and I'm reporting on this subject.

01:45:47.780 He told me that he was actually there for a conference on that subject, which I knew I was there

01:45:53.780 for the same reason. And he said he had two small children. And I said, all right, man, you know,

01:46:00.560 so what do we do? Like, what is the answer to this? And he said, the only thing you can do is educate

01:46:07.440 your children. Like you need to sit down with your children. You need to explain to them that

01:46:12.660 they don't know who they're talking to online, that they cannot assume that that's another child,

01:46:18.220 that they should not be sending images of themselves. They should not be live streaming images of

01:46:22.960 themselves. And even more importantly, if they do, they should feel totally comfortable

01:46:30.160 knowing that you will protect them and support them, even if they've made that mistake.

01:46:36.080 That as of right now, there is no tech solution to this problem. And honestly, it's not in the near

01:46:42.040 future. We also didn't get the opportunity to talk very much about survivors. And that is, I mean,

01:46:47.940 absolutely heartbreaking. I remember I spoke with a 17-year-old girl who had been raped by her father

01:46:53.560 who invited another man to rape her when she was seven years old, videotaped it and put it online.

01:46:59.720 The confusion this young woman feels that her father would do something. She then lost her father.

01:47:06.080 And not many people know this, but people who have been identified in these images and videos,

01:47:10.520 every time their image or video is found on an offender's computer or cloud drive or whatever,

01:47:16.400 they get a notice from the FBI. And this notice is to allow them a chance for financial compensation

01:47:24.340 during the trial, which is often a few thousand dollars maybe. But they get these hundreds of

01:47:30.780 notices a year. So every year or every day, their parents, or often a lawyer because their parents

01:47:38.580 cannot bear it, get these notices saying that it's been found again, it's been found again,

01:47:44.140 it's been found again. So it's really important as we talk about the technology companies and the

01:47:49.860 efforts that need to be made and everything, that the first generation of children who have been

01:47:57.060 sexually abused and now have to deal with that every day of their life, constant reminders.

01:48:05.200 And this isn't a reminder that like one, you were once physically assaulted, like in a fist fight

01:48:12.040 and that video is online, which I'm sure would be terrible. This is the knowledge that you being

01:48:18.140 sexually assaulted as a child is serving the sexual pleasure of other deviants online is just, 0.78

01:48:26.620 I mean, I came out of that interview and I was devastated. And so it's very important.

01:48:32.600 We keep the survivors in mind because it's not just the child that it's happening to when it's

01:48:39.160 happening. It's the, again, a whole generation now of children who are growing up every day. I mean,

01:48:47.240 they change their appearance because people try to find them later into the future.

01:48:51.120 They can't speak out about it because it is such a stigmatized thing. It's just,

01:48:58.440 it's an unbelievable pain. And so the thing that in law enforcement and yes, we hope tech companies,

01:49:04.940 and there are huge battles ahead, whether it be encryption, whether it be building classifiers

01:49:09.440 that can detect new content, whether it be trying to figure out how to stop children and young adults

01:49:16.460 from sending photos of themselves that can then be weaponized against them. All of those things,

01:49:21.360 fundamentally for the next few years at the very least, the onus is on the parents to do

01:49:28.500 a better job educating their children, to realize that when their children are playing Minecraft

01:49:33.600 or Fortnite, that there are adults on there trying to coerce them that no matter what platform your

01:49:41.060 child is on, the unfortunate truth is there are monsters on that platform trying to do terrible

01:49:48.040 things. And so while the tech companies, which I really hope, figure out how to deal with this,

01:49:54.380 it is on the parents to educate themselves and their children on how to be aware and avoid these

01:50:02.040 problems. Yeah, although that really only addresses a peripheral problem here. The sexploitation thing

01:50:10.980 is a problem, I'll grant you. And obviously any parent should communicate with their kids around this,

01:50:17.320 you know, don't send images of yourself, realize who you could be talking to an adult. Obviously

01:50:21.640 don't agree to meet people in the physical world based on these online contacts and all that. But

01:50:27.600 apart from the problem of possible stranger abduction being facilitated by that kind of online

01:50:34.900 communication, that doesn't really bring us to the bottom of this hellscape, which is the sort of

01:50:43.180 thing you described happening on Zoom, right, where you have an adult who for whatever reason has access

01:50:49.720 to a child who is then raping that child to produce video for people who have happily gathered to consume

01:51:00.640 it, right? So there's a culture of this. You're right. You're right. It doesn't address that. But I don't 0.84

01:51:06.000 want to stray from the idea that, A, a large part of the community feels that any of these types of

01:51:12.100 videos and images, the more that circulate, whether they're coerced or self-produced, the more it drives

01:51:17.300 people down that hole that we just discussed to more and more extreme content. And B, there are

01:51:22.900 several examples, many examples of children. Again, it's almost impossible for me to even imagine,

01:51:28.580 but being 11 years old, having made the mistake of sending an image of my genitals to somebody

01:51:35.980 thinking they were 12, and then having them say that they're going to tell everybody in my whole

01:51:40.720 world that I've done this, and not only that, show them. That has resulted in children abusing,

01:51:47.140 often it is very common to bring in their siblings. I mean, the amount, the way it spreads, and then to

01:51:54.580 actually sexually abuse their own siblings, which then leads to more extortion. So I completely agree

01:52:00.600 with you. It does not solve the dark, dark, dark, depraved things that we mentioned quite a bit in our

01:52:07.420 articles. But sexploitation and sextortion are the fastest growing number of child sexual abuse images

01:52:15.540 online. So it is in no way a panacea, but it is one opportunity to help stem the problem.

01:52:22.360 Hmm. So take me back to the Zoom case. What was revealed about it? Were the people who were

01:52:29.860 watching also arrested, or was it just the perpetrator? No, they were. So let me, I have

01:52:36.600 it in front of me here. So what happened was, it was a man in Pennsylvania who was, it was not the

01:52:43.780 first time this had happened, in fact, that he had, I believe it was his nephew, honestly, but it was a

01:52:50.100 six-year-old boy. And there was, I think, about more than a dozen men. And these, these men were

01:52:55.740 from all around the world, speaking to the point of what we're talking about, the technology. They

01:53:00.240 were all around the world. Now, I think a dozen or so were in the United States, but all around the

01:53:04.000 world. And what was this? Was this monetized in some way? I mean, how does... No, no. In fact, a lot of

01:53:10.100 it's not monetized. Once you get to the dark web, sometimes it can be monetized in a variety of ways,

01:53:16.440 but that's actually one of the, one of the ways that they've helped shut down other types of

01:53:22.020 dark market crimes, like drugs, and some of those things that are traded on, on, on the dark market,

01:53:28.600 which is by Bitcoin transactions. Like whenever you're even, even those can be traced to a certain

01:53:33.740 extent. So there is certain types of things that go on, like Bitcoin mining that they leverage other

01:53:40.920 people's computers to do. They do sell some of this stuff online, but actually what we found,

01:53:46.680 certainly on the open web and on the platforms we've been talking about, is a much greater

01:53:51.000 predilection to just share it with one another, to share and stockpile. So they create these huge,

01:53:57.680 huge stockpiles, often stored on their cloud storage. I mean, we found cases where there are

01:54:02.740 millions of files on their cloud storage, but these people, I mean, it is truly horrendous. The men

01:54:10.440 are sitting around, almost always men sitting around. They have, they have a rule. Okay. In 0.54

01:54:16.960 these, it's known that they have to have their, their webcam on because in their minds, a police

01:54:22.960 officer would never sit there with their webcam on. So it's a, it's the rule is cams on. So they're

01:54:29.120 all sitting there. They're rooting this, this man on while he rapes the boy. They're masturbating as 0.99

01:54:33.840 they do it. The, the detective, I think it's detective constable, Janelle Blacketer, who is a 0.95

01:54:41.100 Toronto police department. She was in the room. She recorded the stream that night. She sent the file

01:54:47.980 to special agent, Austin Barrier, Homeland Security Investigations. They then subpoenaed Zoom,

01:54:55.940 who is very compliant. I mean, when the companies learn about this, they almost always are very quick

01:55:01.620 to react. Zoom sent him information. Turned out the man is in Pennsylvania. The man's name is William

01:55:07.540 Byers Augusta. He's 20 years old. The next day Homeland Security shows up, is able to identify the

01:55:14.960 setting based on the video footage they've seen. They identified certain objects that were also in

01:55:19.480 the room. Saved the six-year-old boy. 14 men from multiple states have been arrested and sent to

01:55:27.320 prison. And Mr. Augusta, who, he received a sentence of up to 90 years in prison.

01:55:34.800 Okay. So it worked in that case, but... It didn't work because the tech companies caught it.

01:55:40.460 Right. It worked because law enforcement caught it. Exactly. And I mean, first of all,

01:55:45.020 just to say something to the privacy absolutists here, I mean, wouldn't you as a user of Zoom

01:55:50.920 be willing to let your conversations be searchable if you knew you could prevent this sort of thing

01:56:00.700 from happening, or you could actually bring the people who are doing this sort of thing

01:56:05.020 to justice? For me, it's just, it would be trivially easy to agree to that in the terms of service.

01:56:12.240 It's like, of course. I just don't understand how you get to, and what is it that you're doing in

01:56:17.280 your life that you think absolute privacy under any conceivable scenario is important to you?

01:56:27.340 What are you doing on Zoom that you can't imagine the government or the tech company ever being able

01:56:35.480 to search it, even just algorithmically, to vet its content? It's a religion. It's a fetish of some

01:56:43.440 kind of absolute, first of all, it's just, it's nothing that human beings have ever had

01:56:48.380 a right to this kind of privacy. I mean, there's no place in the real world where you've ever done

01:56:54.520 anything or said anything that has given you an absolute right to privacy. It's physically

01:57:01.160 impossible, right? There's no room in your house that could hold all your secrets and never be unlocked

01:57:07.780 by a third party, no matter what you had done in the world, right? And yet, it's somehow in digital

01:57:13.360 space, some of us have convinced themselves that we need these rooms, right? And it's, again, for the

01:57:20.660 purposes of this conversation, I've completely lost touch with the ethical intuitions that suggest that

01:57:25.940 we need an absolute right to privacy.

01:57:28.460 And it's the reason we do it. It's the reason we're doing this reporting, is because, again,

01:57:33.780 it was a shortcut to the conversations that I think need to be have around privacy on the internet,

01:57:41.120 around, you know, should companies be scanning people's photos? Should companies be scanning

01:57:46.560 people's videos? Should they be detecting, doing natural language processing to detect grooming?

01:57:52.180 Should they be doing all these things? Like, let's have these conversations. And as you're saying,

01:57:56.940 should Zoom, at what point does your expectation of privacy go away? Like, so you're in a room

01:58:02.660 with 16 other people around the world. Is there an expectation of privacy up until 30 people,

01:58:09.720 up until 50 people? At what point, and again, these are just, I'm sure that people are going to attack

01:58:18.200 me for even raising these questions, but they're honest questions about at what point do these things

01:58:25.300 start to affect people in ways that are, in fact, detrimental, if that is the case, if that would happen.

01:58:32.660 But I think we need to move beyond a little bit of the conversation. Yes, there's some harm in

01:58:38.540 Facebook, let's say, giving our likes to Cambridge Analytica. But there's far, far greater harm,

01:58:45.740 I think we'd all agree, in people being able to trade child sexual abuse material under the cloak

01:58:52.200 of encryption. So let's have that conversation.

01:58:54.360 One other question here, which trips a lot of ethical intuitions one way or the other,

01:59:00.060 what do you think about the prospect of allowing entirely fictional production of similar material,

01:59:08.840 you know, animated child pornography or the CGI version of it, such that it could answer to this

01:59:16.880 apparent appetite in many people without being at all derived from the actual victimization of

01:59:26.080 children? I mean, at the moment, I'm assuming all of that material is just as illegal as anything

01:59:31.860 else that is a real record of a crime. Is anyone arguing that if we could only produce this stuff

01:59:37.040 fictionally, the real problem would be at least diminished?

01:59:41.380 There are people arguing that. I'm not going to say the name of the company because

01:59:45.820 I think that is very questionable. It is illegal in the United States for any kind of like drawings

01:59:54.480 or depicted imagery, I believe. But I think this gets to a very interesting point. And I want to talk

02:00:01.160 specifically about pedophiles. And so before we did this reporting, and even in our first story,

02:00:07.200 as soon as we published, we got lambasted by several people saying that we had used

02:00:11.280 the term pedophile inappropriately. So to speak specifically, pedophiles are people who are

02:00:17.520 attracted, sexually attracted to children. There is a whole nother group of people who look at child

02:00:23.680 sexual abuse imagery. These are people who are not necessarily attracted to children. They are

02:00:28.700 extremists. They are wandering down rabbit holes. They are addicts. And they are a huge part of the 0.99

02:00:35.320 problem. But let's speak about pedophiles, because I do think there is, when I'm talking with child

02:00:40.740 advocates and some of the other people, I say, in grappling with this problem, I think the same way 0.99

02:00:44.960 that you're starting to grapple with it or have been grappling with it, which is, holy shit, what do 0.99

02:00:49.620 we do? I think you have to think about attacking it from all angles, right? And that also means 0.98

02:00:55.140 dealing with the people whose natural attraction is to children. I do want to, I mean, sympathy is

02:01:02.360 probably the only word I have for it. There is a group of people, and I'm not going to get into

02:01:07.480 citing any of the studies. As soon as you cite a study, you have a million people telling you why

02:01:11.600 that study was garbage. But there is a group of people who, when they go through puberty, 0.95

02:01:18.200 begin to realize that they remain attracted to children of a certain age. And that is the very,

02:01:25.620 very common report of a true pedophile, is that they turn 12, 13, 14, and as they continue to grow

02:01:33.840 older, as they go through puberty, they realize something is wrong. They realize they are still

02:01:38.840 attracted to children. So how do you deal with that? Now, first of all, according to some of these

02:01:43.980 studies, you then have a few years, right, where this child, this young adult, now knows that they

02:01:51.160 have some sort of issue. And so that's an opportunity. That's an opportunity to intervene if we can find out

02:01:57.740 a way to do that. And the second thing that I often think about, and this is a bit tangential

02:02:04.360 from what you're saying, I don't know. And I put the same question. It's a good question. I put the

02:02:08.800 same question to these people about, should there be imagery that would help satisfy this? I mean,

02:02:15.080 imagine as soon as we get to virtual reality, the different types of implications there.

02:02:19.740 Right.

02:02:20.740 I don't know. I think it's worth talking to scientists, talking to people who study this,

02:02:25.360 to see if that would, if that would stop them from offending, then perhaps that's a path worth

02:02:31.680 walking down. I think other people would say that that would simply drive the number of people

02:02:38.780 interested in this higher. Now, if they're still not actually assaulting children, that's a good

02:02:44.300 thing. But I could see the argument, or perhaps if a study were done saying it would drive them to

02:02:50.160 actually want to do this in real life, I'm not really sure. But what I do think adds another layer

02:02:55.240 of complexity, because it's very easy. What I just told you is that a bunch of these men

02:03:00.840 who were arrested for watching another man assault somebody on Zoom, they received very lengthy

02:03:07.600 sentences. I mean, they're getting sentences of 30, 40, 50 years for simply consuming and trading

02:03:14.840 this material. And I don't mean simply to say that it's not serious. I just mean they're not actually

02:03:20.440 doing the abuse. Now, I will get jumped on for that as well. Yes, they are re-victimizing

02:03:25.960 the person in it. But simply to say, they are not the person physically abusing the child.

02:03:31.680 And they're getting prison sentences of 30, 40, 50 years. Previously, I worked at a place called,

02:03:37.620 I helped start something called the Marshall Project, which is a criminal justice website.

02:03:41.060 And we dealt a lot with this idea of rehabilitation, crime, punishment, rehabilitation.

02:03:45.560 I do not know if a true pedophile, somebody who's truly attracted to children, is going to be any less

02:03:56.480 attracted to a child or any less able to constrain themselves from doing this type of thing when they

02:04:04.580 get out of prison 30 years later. And in fact, we have, the sentencing is all over the map, whether

02:04:10.760 it's not at state or federal level. So some of our survivors who we spoke with, they had somebody

02:04:15.480 who went to prison. Remember, they get these notices, went to prison because they had, he had

02:04:20.100 their imagery on his computer, got out, went to prison again. And again, their imagery was found on it.

02:04:28.100 So I don't know exactly how to honestly help people who have attractions to children.

02:04:35.820 Because if it was you or I, and I think about the people I'm attracted to, I, there's nothing I do

02:04:43.960 to be attracted to that person. And I don't think there's anything I could do to not be attracted to

02:04:49.540 some of the people I'm attracted to. I mean, this is a instinct, it's natural, it's whatever it is.

02:04:54.980 And I do feel sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, are attracted to children. And I see that

02:05:03.220 as an opportunity to somehow get in front of the issue at that point. And whether it's with

02:05:10.640 animated 3D models, virtual reality, whatever it might be to help them live as normal a life as

02:05:19.060 possible. And, and with the number one absolute goal of not harm a child, then I think those options

02:05:26.020 should be explored. Yeah, well, I think we, again, we have to differentiate pedophilia from

02:05:33.180 some of the rest of what we're talking about. So because pedophilia is this, is a very unhappy

02:05:39.100 sexual orientation, essentially, right? It's one, the implications of which pitch you into something

02:05:44.960 that's illegal, non-consensual, and, you know, therefore non-actionable if you're an ethical

02:05:52.080 person, right? So you're, you didn't pick who you're attracted to. As far as I know, the research

02:05:56.900 on this suggests that it's undoubtedly, it's partially genetic, but I think it also has to do

02:06:02.380 with what happens to babies in utero. You know, I think there's, I think it's developmental, but

02:06:08.780 obviously we don't understand exactly how someone becomes a pedophile, but we should understand that

02:06:13.520 they didn't make themselves. So they have this, they're, they're profoundly unlucky on some level

02:06:19.160 to find that their, their sexual attraction never matures to being attracted to adults who could

02:06:25.800 consent to have sex with them. And yet that doesn't fully capture or even explain the picture

02:06:35.740 we're seeing when you describe something like that Zoom atrocity, which is you have people who know that 1.00

02:06:42.340 they're watching a child getting raped and they're happy to do this. I mean, that's, that's analogous

02:06:49.440 to a heterosexual man being invited to watch a, a woman, you know, who he, he's attracted to women. 0.96

02:06:57.320 He can be invited to watch a woman being raped on camera, you know, in a Zoom session. What sort of 0.96

02:07:04.340 heterosexual man is a part of that project, right? That's the culture of unethical pedophiles that 1.00

02:07:14.560 has to exist for this whole problem to exist. You have to know that you're, what you're doing is,

02:07:22.900 is, is facilitating, motivating, enabling the mistreatment of, and in many cases,

02:07:31.000 torture is not the wrong word for it. Torture of children. That's where we can be far more

02:07:36.200 judgmental of what's happening here. I don't know if you have anything to say about that.

02:07:40.100 I mean, absolutely. No, absolutely. Just absolutely. I don't mean in any way for me saying that

02:07:44.760 I have sympathy for somebody who is born a pedophile.

02:07:47.620 Yeah, I wasn't taking it that way. Yeah. I share your sympathy. 0.96

02:07:49.940 And, and I totally agree that even if somebody is born a pedophile, there is no room to trade or

02:07:58.020 share or actually abuse a child. I am deeply sorry if that is your position. If you are a pedophile,

02:08:07.120 I am sorry. I still feel extremely strongly. There is absolutely no circumstance in which it is ever 0.98

02:08:16.080 okay, whether you film it or not, to abuse a child. There is no consent. It's right where we started.

02:08:23.200 There is no consent. There is no opportunity for this child to agree. They would, I mean,

02:08:29.400 some of these, and whether they're pedophiles or just terrible people, not to say that those are

02:08:35.300 the same thing, whether they're terrible people or not, some of them will bend over backwards to say

02:08:39.300 that the children like it, that this is called loving a child, that these are things that if you

02:08:45.960 could only see it, I mean, you wouldn't imagine the amount of times that some of these people told me,

02:08:49.960 if you could only see it, you would see how much they enjoy it. To that, I say, you're doing

02:08:56.740 terrible things and you need to be punished for them. Right. And we need to figure out a system.

02:09:03.300 Well, clearly, so the people who are saying that sort of thing, and that's why I have these questions

02:09:07.980 around, around the culture of this, because anyone who's saying, listen, we pedophiles are a happy

02:09:15.120 lot and we treat children well. And if you go back to ancient Greece, this was a norm, right? You know,

02:09:21.780 presumably Plato was doing this to the boys on the block and no one minded. So, you know, get over

02:09:28.000 yourselves, 21st century people. Presumably, even these people can't say with a straight face that,

02:09:35.640 as you report in one of these articles, you know, an infant being anally raped is enjoying 0.94

02:09:41.700 this. Right. I mean, it's just like, there's no way. I mean, like I put the question to you. I mean, 0.97

02:09:47.780 are there pedophiles who are saying, who are acknowledging that part of this picture is every

02:09:54.220 bit as horrific as we think it is, then they're pointing to some other part of the picture that

02:09:58.640 they consider benign or are they not making those concessions? I mean, the one who I spoke with

02:10:05.060 most extensively insists that the children enjoy it. And the only distinction I could start to get

02:10:17.120 them to draw is prepubescent versus postpubescent. I mean, I said, okay, let's leave aside postpubescent,

02:10:25.080 even though it's still incredibly wrong to take advantage of any child. But let's leave aside the

02:10:32.400 people. Like, how can you say that these prepubescent children are consciously making

02:10:39.120 the decision and understand the ramifications and even further enjoy this activity? And I mean,

02:10:49.180 if there's such thing as privacy absolutists, there are child sexual abuser absolutists. And actually, 0.97

02:10:55.600 Sam, it's a big part of the culture. It's similar to many other internet cultures where they radicalize

02:11:01.040 one another. That's what's going on in that Zoom room. That's what's going on in there. They're 0.82

02:11:04.780 radicalizing one another. They're trying to normalize their behavior. They're trying to

02:11:10.680 share it amongst other people in order to make themselves feel like it's more normal. And when

02:11:16.180 I was speaking with this person and he finally came to understand that there was no way in hell I was

02:11:21.020 going to look at any of this type of imagery and that all I was trying to do, honestly, all I was

02:11:25.440 trying to do is find out more information about how he was managing to keep his site up and running

02:11:29.660 and listening to his beliefs system happened to, unfortunately, come along with that bit of

02:11:36.320 reporting. But there are people who fundamentally are telling themselves that this is an okay thing.

02:11:43.040 Well, Gabe, we have gotten deep into the darkness together and I just want to thank you for taking

02:11:49.880 the time to educate me and our listeners and, again, anyone out there who has any even a semblance of a

02:11:58.780 privileged position with respect to working in tech, having a brother or sister who works in tech.

02:12:06.880 Please start putting your shoulder to the wheel here and figure out how to make this a prominent

02:12:12.360 problem that will be emphatically solved at some point in the near future. Because clearly,

02:12:19.320 if we don't have the technology that can solve it today, that's coming. And if we incentivize

02:12:24.900 ourselves to produce it, we'll do so and we can get the policy right. But clearly, what we have now is

02:12:30.720 something bordering on a moral catastrophe. So again, Gabe, thank you for all your hard work on this.

02:12:38.560 Thank you so much, Sam. I'm sincerely grateful for the opportunity to discuss it with you.

02:12:42.940 Well, as I said at the top, this conversation was a few months old and I've gone back and asked

02:13:03.120 Gabriel if anything has happened in the meantime. The biggest update was actually the results of

02:13:10.160 all the New York Times coverage Gabriel produced. Apparently, there are two additional bills that

02:13:16.080 have been introduced in Congress. The first was introduced by Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal

02:13:21.380 and it's called the Earn It Act. And if it passes in its current form, companies will lose their

02:13:28.260 Section 230 protections when it comes to child pornography. The second bill was introduced by Ron Wyden

02:13:37.140 and it seeks $5 billion in funding, which would be amazing for law enforcement and others who are on

02:13:45.220 the front lines. And I believe that funding would be over 10 years. So this is a hopeful sign. Once again,

02:13:52.740 thank you to Gabriel and his colleagues for doing so much work here. They certainly brought this problem

02:13:58.020 to my attention. And now I brought it to yours. Thanks for listening.

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