PerspectiveChild Exploitation and the Future of Encryption

Published 3 October 2019

On Sept. 28, the New York Times published a harrowing, in-depth investigative story on the prevalence of child pornography on the internet. The piece describes a staggering increase in the number of reports flagging child sexual abuse imagery online from an already-high one million in 2014 to an almost unfathomable 18.4 million in 2018—an increase of almost 1,750 percent in just four years. a full 12 million came from just one service, Facebook Messenger. But this vital stream of evidence may soon come to an end. The Times notes that, as part of a controversial effort to become more “privacy-focused.”

On Sept. 28, the New York Times published a harrowing, in-depth investigative story on the prevalence of child pornography on the internet. The piece describes a staggering increase in the number of reports to the federal National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) flagging child sexual abuse imagery online from an already-high one million in 2014 to an almost unfathomable 18.4 million in 2018—an increase of almost 1,750 percent in just four years. The number of individual images reported is even higher because a single report often identifies multiple offending images.

Alan Z. Rozenshtein writes in Lawfare that of these reports, a full 12 million came from just one service, Facebook Messenger. Disproportionate as this number may seem, it is, as former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos noted, actually to Facebook’s credit: “companies that report the most [child exploitation materials] are not the worst actors, but the best,” because they are the ones doing the most to find and report harmful content, thus helping law enforcement investigate and prosecute those responsible.

Rozenshtein wtites:

But this vital stream of evidence may soon come to an end. The Times notes that, as part of a controversial effort to become more “privacy-focused,” Facebook is planning to deploy end-to-end encryption on Messenger as the service’s default setting (as is already the case with Facebook-owned WhatsApp). This kind of encryption (frequently also referred to as “strong encryption”) would make the content of messages inaccessible to third parties, including law enforcement and Facebook itself.

But whereas previous moves by technology giants to expand encryption have been met with universal acclaim by those in the technology community, Facebook’s encryption plan has received a decidedly ambivalent reaction. Casey Newton writes in the tech website The Verge that the fears around Messenger encryption are “straightforward and rational” and describes the issue as a “tough debate.” Ben Thompson, author of the popular Stratechery technology newsletter, asks, “[M]ight it be the case that Facebook’s decision to encrypt conversations is not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?” This skepticism marks an important shift in the conversation about encryption and gives a preview of the future of the encryption debate.