**TESTIMONY OF**

**ERNIE ALLEN**

**President & CEO**

**THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR MISSING & EXPLOITED CHILDREN**

**for the**

**UNITED STATES SENATE**

**COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE AND TRANSPORTATION**

**"Protecting Children on the Internet"**

**July 24, 2007**

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Committee, as President of
the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), I welcome
this opportunity to appear before you to discuss crimes against children
on the Internet. NCMEC joins you in your concern for the safety of the
most vulnerable members of our society and thanks you for bringing
attention to this serious problem facing America's communities.

Let me first provide you with some background information. NCMEC is a
not-for-profit corporation, mandated by Congress and working in
partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice as the national resource
center and clearinghouse on missing and exploited children. NCMEC is a
true public-private partnership, funded in part by Congress and in part
by the private sector. Our federal funding supports specific operational
functions mandated by Congress, including a national 24-hour toll-free
hotline; a distribution system for missing-child photos; a system of
case management and technical assistance to law enforcement and
families; training programs for federal, state and local law
enforcement; and programs designed to help stop the sexual exploitation
of children.

These programs include the CyberTipline, the "9-1-1 for the Internet,"
which serves as the national clearinghouse for investigative leads and
tips regarding crimes against children on the Internet. The Internet has
become a primary tool to victimize children today, due to its widespread
use and the relative anonymity that it offers child predators. Our
CyberTipline is operated in partnership with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation ("FBI"), the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE"), the U.S. Postal Inspection
Service, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Justice's Child
Exploitation and Obscenity Section and the Internet Crimes Against
Children Task Forces, as well as state and local law enforcement. Leads
are received in seven categories of crimes:

● possession, manufacture and distribution of child pornography;

● online enticement of children for sexual acts;

● child prostitution;

● child-sex tourism;

● child sexual molestation (not in the family);

● unsolicited obscene material sent to a child; and

● misleading domain names.

These leads are reviewed by NCMEC analysts, who visit the reported
sites, examine and evaluate the content, use search tools to try to
identify perpetrators, and provide all lead information to the
appropriate law enforcement agency. The FBI, ICE and Postal Inspection
Service have "real time" access to the leads, and all three agencies
assign agents and analysts to work directly out of NCMEC and review the
reports. The results: in the 9 years since the CyberTipline began
operation, NCMEC has received and processed more than 500,000 leads,
resulting in hundreds of arrests and successful prosecutions.

However, despite this progress the use of the Internet to victimize
children continues to present challenges that require constant
reassessment of our tools and methods.

As technology evolves, so does the creativity of the predator. New
innovations such as webcams and social networking sites are increasing
the vulnerability of our children when they use the Internet. New
technology to access the Internet is used by those who profit from the
predominantly online market in child pornography and seek to evade
detection by law enforcement.

Today, NCMEC is working with leaders in many industries involved with
the Internet in order to explore improvements, new approaches and better
ways to attack the problems. We are also bringing together key business,
law enforcement, child advocacy, governmental and other interests and
leaders to explore ways to more effectively address these new issues and
challenges.

Last year, six Internet industry leaders, AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft,
Earthlink and United Online, initiated a Technology Coalition to work
with us to develop and deploy technology solutions that disrupt the
ability of predators to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic
in child pornography. The Technology Coalition has four principal
objectives:

1\. Developing and implementing technology solutions;

2\. Improving knowledge sharing among industry;

3\. Improving law enforcement tools; and

4\. Researching perpetrators' technologies to enhance industry efforts.

Bringing together the collective experience, knowledge and expertise of
the members of this Coalition, and applying it to the problem of child
sexual exploitation, is a significant step towards a safer world for our
children.

In June 2006, NCMEC hosted a Dialogue on Social Networking Sites here in
Washington, D.C. We did this to respond to the increased attention to
these hugely popular sites that permit users to create online profiles
containing detailed and highly personal information, which can be used
by child predators to forge a "cyber-relationship" that can lead to a
child being victimized. This vigorous and informative discussion brought
together leaders from the technology industry, policy makers, law
enforcement, academia and children's advocacy groups. We learned a lot
about why children are drawn to these sites, the technological
capabilities and limitations of the site operators who are concerned
about the safety of their users, and how law enforcement sees these
sites as both a danger to kids and a useful source of information in
investigating cases. NCMEC is continuing to work with several social
networking sites on ways to make children less vulnerable.

Another challenge is the widespread use of the webcam, which offers the
exciting ability to see the person you're communicating with over the
Internet. While this has many benefits, such as allowing divorced
parents to have "online visitation" with their children in distant
states, it, too, can be used to exploit children. The reports to our
CyberTipline include incidents involving children and webcams. Many
children are victimized inadvertently, by appearing on their webcams
without clothes as a joke, or on a dare from friends, unaware that these
images may end up in a global commercial child pornography enterprise.
Other children are victims of blackmail, threatened with disclosure to
friends and family if his or her 'performance' before the webcam doesn't
become more sexually explicit. Too much technology and too much privacy,
at a sexually curious age, can lead to disastrous consequences.

But the most under-recognized aspect of the Internet is how it is used
to distribute child pornography. It is not an exaggeration to state that
this is a crisis of global proportions.

Following the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in [Ferber v. New
York]{.underline}, holding that child pornography was not protected
speech, child pornography disappeared from the shelves of adult
bookstores. The U.S. Customs Service launched an aggressive effort to
intercept it as it entered the country and the U.S. Postal Inspection
Service cracked down on its distribution through the mails. However,
child pornography did not disappear, it went underground.

That lasted until the advent of the Internet, when those for whom child
pornography was a way of life suddenly had a vehicle for networking,
trading and communicating with like-minded individuals with virtual
anonymity and little concern about apprehension. They could trade images
and even abuse children "live," while others watched via the Internet.

Then law enforcement began to catch up, and enforcement action came to
the Internet. The FBI created its Innocent Images Task Force. The
Customs Service expanded its activities through its Cyber Crimes Center.
The Postal Inspection Service continued and enhanced its strong attack
on child pornography. Congress created and funded the Internet Crimes
Against Children (ICAC) Task Forces at the state and local levels across
the country. There are currently forty-six ICAC Task Forces and the Adam
Walsh Act, enacted one year ago, will create ten more. Child pornography
prosecutions and convictions have increased.

But we should have no illusions about the impact of these initiatives on
what has become a financially lucrative industry.

The Internet has revolutionized the commercial markets for virtually
every type of goods and services that can be sold. Unfortunately, this
also includes goods and services that subsist on the victimization of
children. In a recent case investigators identified 70,000 customers
paying \$29.95 per month by credit card for Internet access to graphic
images of small children being sexually assaulted. In our experience,
most of the consumers are here in the U.S., and we have found that of
the 820 identified victims in NCMEC's Child Victim Identification
Program, a startling number of these children are also here in the U.S.

A recent report by McKinsey Worldwide estimated that today commercial
child pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, fueled
by the Internet. There is also strong evidence of increasing involvement
by organized crime and extremist groups. Its victims are becoming
younger. According to NCMEC data, 19% of identified offenders had images
of children younger than 3 years old; 39% had images of children younger
than 6 years old; and 83% had images of children younger than 12 years
old. Reports to the CyberTipline include images of brutal sexual
assaults of toddlers and even infants. These are images that no one here
could previously even imagine. But they have become all-too-common in
the new world of child pornography and child sexual exploitation.
Children have become, simply put, a commodity in this insidious
commercial enterprise.

New technology has allowed this industry to stay one or two steps ahead
of law enforcement. Many distributors of child pornography are using
peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, which does not use a central server,
thereby depriving law enforcement of an identifiable Internet Protocol
(IP) address, which is key evidence in investigating and prosecuting
these cases. When we receive these reports to the CyberTipline, it is
almost impossible to identify the perpetrators responsible for trading
the illegal files. The anonymity of recent peer-to-peer technology has
allowed individuals who exploit children to trade images and movies
featuring the sexual assault of children with very little fear of
detection.

Wireless access to the Internet permits predators to "piggyback" on
others' wireless signals, trade images, and remain undetected by law
enforcement because of the difficulty in locating the piggybacking
activity, compounded by the increasing use of wireless access cards
manufactured overseas which use radio channels not authorized by the
Federal Communications Commission. Wireless technology has also enabled
the trading of these images via cell phone -- making the operation of
this enterprise not only mobile, but also able to fit inside a pocket
and easily discarded to avoid detection.

Another obstacle to overcome is the reporting of child pornography found
on customers' accounts by electronic service providers (ESPs) to NCMEC.
Though apparently mandated by federal statute, 42 U.S.C. §13032, not all
ESPs are reporting and those that do report are not sending uniform
types of information, rendering some reports useless. Some ESPs take the
position that the statute is not a clear mandate and that it exposes
them to possible criminal prosecution for distributing child pornography
themselves. In addition, because there are no guidelines for the
contents of these reports, some ESPs do not send customer information
that would allow NCMEC to identify a law enforcement jurisdiction. As a
result, potentially valuable investigative leads are left to sit in the
CyberTipline database with no action taken. Together with the U.S.
Internet Service Providers Association (USISPA) we developed 'best
practices' reporting guidelines to address this problem. The major ESPs
are following these guidelines -- for example, AOL, Microsoft, and
Yahoo. However, these are voluntary rather than mandatory, so there is
no enforcement mechanism for those who choose not to follow them.

This reporting statute also constrains NCMEC in that it permits us to
forward the CyberTipline leads only to U.S. law enforcement. This is a
real problem, considering the global nature of the Internet. As an
example, there is a portion of one major ESP system based in the U.S.
that is used primarily in Brazil. This ESP wants us to send information
about child pornography they find on their customers' accounts to
Brazilian law enforcement. But we are prohibited from doing so.

There is also another necessary yet missing link in the chain from
detection of child pornography to conviction of the distributor. Once
the CyberTipline analysts give law enforcement all the information they
need about specific images traded on the Internet, there can be no
prosecution until the date and time of that online activity is connected
to an actual person. There is currently no requirement for ESPs to
retain connectivity logs for their customers on an ongoing basis. Some
have policies on retention but these vary, are not implemented
consistently, and are for too short a time to have meaningful
prosecutorial value. One example: law enforcement discovered a movie
depicting the rape of a toddler that was traded online. In hopes that
they could find the child by finding the producer of the movie, they
moved quickly to identify the ESP and subpoenaed the name and address of
the customer who had used that particular IP address at the specific
date and time. The ESP was not able to provide the connectivity
information. To this day, we have no idea who or where that child is --
but we suspect she is still living with her abuser.

We think this is just not acceptable.

One of our new initiatives treats this industry like the business that
it is. Our goal: to eradicate commercial child pornography. Our mission:
to follow the money. This new initiative is the Financial Coalition
Against Child Pornography.

First, we will aggressively seek to identify illegal child pornography
sites with method of payment information attached. Then we will work
with the credit card industry to identify the merchant bank. Then we
will stop the flow of funds to these sites. The Coalition is made up of
major financial and Internet companies, including MasterCard, Visa,
American Express, Bank of America, Citibank, Microsoft, America Online,
Yahoo and many others. We are working to bring new members into the
Coalition every day, especially international financial institutions.

The first priority in this initiative is criminal prosecution, through
referrals to federal, state, local or international law enforcement in
each case. However, our fundamental premise is that it is impossible to
arrest and prosecute everybody. Thus, our goal is twofold:

1.  To increase the risk of running a child pornography enterprise; and

2.  To eliminate the profitability.

NCMEC is working hand-in-hand with both law enforcement and industry
leaders to explore the best techniques for detection and eradication,
and serves as the global clearinghouse for this effort, sharing
information in a truly collaborative way.

Mr. Chairman, I don't come before you today with a quick, easy solution
to the problem of child sexual exploitation, but I can state
unequivocally that the advent of the Internet has provided predators
with the means to both entice children into sexual acts and sustain a
lucrative commercial enterprise that demands the heinous victimization
of children. We suspect that the problem of child pornography will
continue to increase as distributors search for lower risk avenues with
a lower possibility of being detected. Federal, state and local law
enforcement are more aggressive than ever before, but they must overcome
significant barriers. I hope that you can help us remove some of those
barriers and help us identify and prosecute those who are misusing the
Internet for insidious, criminal purposes. Too many child pornographers
feel that they have found a sanctuary, a place where there is virtually
no risk of identification or apprehension.

NCMEC urges lawmakers, law enforcement and the public to take a serious
look at the dangers threatening our children today, and to move
decisively to minimize the risks posed by those who exploit new
technology and target our children.

Now is the time to act.

Thank you.