On September 13th 2023 Raven members, John Pizzuro and John Madsen, attended the The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance who held a hearing relating to the rise of CSAM within the United States. The hearing examined the horrors of child sex trafficking and how social media companies are perpetuating the problem.
John Pizzuro, Raven’s CEO, gave testimony during the hearing alongside other experts in the child protection space.
During his testimony Pizzuro explained how legislation to protect our children is falling behind and how Tech companies are doing the bare minimum, on a voluntary basis, to protect children on their platforms. It could be argued that behind the guise of privacy to the user, they are in fact making it easier for offenders to remain protected. Making cut backs within their trust and safety teams, along with the moves to end to end encryption and hiding behind VPN’s, these platforms and Apps are putting the ‘privacy’ of offenders over the protection of the vulnerable.
Legislation must be updated and put in place to ensure that Tech companies are accountable and improve the quality and quantity of Cybertips to NCMEC. Law Enforcement are overburdened and under resourced and currently have to spend time triaging thousands of tips to get to those that are actionable.
“Protecting our Children should be our priority.”
Further reading and video of the hearing can be found here
