CDT: STOP CSAM Act Purports 'False Choice' Between Privacy and Children's Safety
The STOP CSAM Act of 2025 doesn't make kids safer online, a Center of Democracy and Technology (CDT) blog said Friday. Instead, the legislation, which aims to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, undermines the tools that protect kids online, said Tom Bowman, CDT policy counsel for Security & Surveillance and the blog's author.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the CSAM Act unanimously. Several other consumer advocacy groups have opposed the legislation (see 2503110071).
"The core problem with the STOP CSAM Act is its false choice: either protect children, or protect privacy," Bowman said. "In reality, the two go hand in hand. The more we undermine encryption and incentivize invasive surveillance technologies, the more we expose everyone -- especially children -- to the threats of stalking, exploitation, and abuse."
The part of the bill that holds providers liable for "reckless" behavior pressures them to break encryption, as it would force providers to remove certain lawful speech on topics like sex education and LGBTQ+ advocacy, Bowman added, since "recklessness is a much lower legal threshold than knowledge."
"Essentially, providers could be held liable even when they have no knowledge of specific instances of CSAM on their platforms and no ability to detect or remove such content due to encryption," the blog said. "The bill appears to offer some protection for providers of encrypted services, but the protections are wholly inadequate to safeguard encryption."
On Thursday, the CDT joined more than 20 technology policy and civil society organizations, led by the ACLU, in a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the act. The letter alleges that the removal of end-to-end encryption will allow the government and others to spy on private communications, and "would severely jeopardize the rights of Americans to communicate online freely, and privately" without truly benefiting children.
"The bill, as reintroduced in the 119th Congress, walks back a number of important privacy protections that had been included in a previous version of the bill," the letter said. "The current bill creates enormous incentives for platforms to stop offering encrypted services that are critical for enabling all of us to have private conversations and securely store files from our most personal moments, like photos from a child’s birthday." Since transmission of child sexual abuse material is already illegal, "these modifications to the bill do nothing more than undermine privacy and security."