Prosecutorial Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of Children Act of 2003

PROSECUTORIAL REMEDIES AND TOOLS AGAINST THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN ACT OF 2003

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise today in support of S. 151, the Prosecutorial Remedies and Tools Against the Exploitation of Children Today Act, or the PROTECT Act, a critical piece of legislation which is desperately needed to fight the war on child pornography.
    
And make no mistake, the fight against child pornography is indeed a war. It's a worldwide war being fought out largely on the worldwide web. Child pornographers are organized and spread across the globe, but the globe is a lot smaller now that the Internet reaches from Antwerp, Belgium, to Antwerp, New York, and everywhere in between.
    
As I speak, prosecutors across our country are fighting an exponential growth in child pornography, from here and abroad, and they are struggling to keep up with the wily tactics of the child pornographers.
    
To fight this critical fight, our prosecutors need new, more, and better weapons. Just as our local police in so many communities are taking to the streets outgunned by drug dealers, our cybercops are working at a technological disadvantage as they go after cybersmut purveyors.
    
The enemy does not sit still and neither should we. The PROTECT Act gives prosecutors more of the weapons they need.

    
We cannot and we will not permit child pornographers to hide behind the courts or modern technology. We cannot and we will not permit them to continue to abuse children, real, live children, children from all races, backgrounds and creeds.
    
We must send child pornographers the message that Congress will not tolerate child abuse or child pornography, today, tomorrow, or ever, no matter what the state of technology is. Technology is intended to help children, not hurt them. This bill helps us take a big step in that direction.
    
The PROTECT Act goes a long way toward strengthening federal law against child pornography.
    
For starters, it creates two new crimes which target distributors of child pornography and people who entice new children to engage in it.
    
The bill provides tough punishment with both of these crimes carrying a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison for a first offense and double that for repeat offenders. Only through serious measures like these can we show that we are serious about fighting this war on child pornography.
    
Like our anti-terrorism laws which deal with the threat from overseas, the PROTECT Act deals with the threat to our children from those who make child pornography overseas then bring it into the United States. This new law will say that if you force a child to participate in pornography and intend to send that pornography to the United States, you are committing a crime and answerable to our system of justice. In short, you are going to jail, and you're not looking at a short stint in any country club prison. You are doing serious time.
    
The PROTECT Act specifically increases penalties for people who commit repeat acts of sex offenses by expanding the types of crimes which can trigger mandatory minimum sentences. In this bill, we back up our tough talk on penalties by requiring the U.S. Sentencing Commission to fix a disparity in the current sentencing scheme.
    
Believe it or not, under current law, under some circumstances you can get less jail time for having sex with a child than you'd get for possessing child pornography. The PROTECT Act fixes this absurd disparity.
    
The PROTECT Act also provides protection for the true victims of child pornography, the children who are used and abused to make it.
    
A recent New York Times article highlighted the horrific truth about who these children are. In the article, in the Sunday New York Times from February 9, 2003, the author wrote that "most children depicted in child pornography are prepubescent, with most of them appearing to be from 6 to 11 years old" and "many of the victims appear to be toddlers or infants." These are real children, our children, children who need to be protected from this despicable evil.
    
And as its name implies, the PROTECT Act protects these children. This legislation provides, for the first time, a "child victim shield provision" to protect the names of victims. Under this provision, the Government can file a motion in a child pornography case to keep the name, address, social security number and other nonphysical identifying information of the real child victim from being revealed.
    
This is critical to successful child pornography prosecutions. To get child victims to cooperate, we must protect their identities. To reveal the name of a child pornography victim without good cause and through a judge, would be to victimize that child twice. We cannot permit that to happen.
    
This bill also protects victims by creating, again for the first time, a new private right of action for victims of child pornography against those who produce it. We are hearing a lot about tort reform here these days, but I hope my colleagues will agree that victims of child pornography should have the right to collect punitive damages from their abusers. If anyone deserves punitive damages, they do.
    
But the bill does not stop there. It also addresses a subject that has been of some controversy in light of the Supreme Court decision last year, but which we need to address. That subject is the use of modern technology by child pornographers to attempt to hide the fact that their images are made using real children.
    
In the old days, child pornographers would ply their filthy craft by taking photographs and distributing them. With the advent of television, child pornographers began to take video images, images which displayed real, live children engaged in sick, perverted sexual or obscene acts.
    
With the development of the video recorder, child pornographers were able to store these images and distribute them more widely. With the development of the CD and DVD, the images could be stored on a disk which could literally fit in the palm of your hand.
    
The greatest growth in the creation and distribution of child pornography, however, has come in recent years with the development of the Internet and the digital image. These developments have permitted child pornographers to disseminate their product exponentially, not only across America, but around the world, with a few simple strokes of a keyboard.
    
As the New York Times observed, "the combination of digital photograph and high-speed home Internet across has set off what authorities say is an explosion of homemade child pornography in recent years, with growing numbers of victims." We need to stop the number of victims by shrinking the number of child pornographers.
    
In fact, today, it has become apparent through evidence submitted to Congress by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other groups that child pornographers use technology to disguise depictions of real children to make them unidentifiable and appear to be computer generated.
    
Some efforts are being undertaken to deal with so-called "virtual porn" which distorts the images of real children, but those efforts don't go far enough.
    
We need to do more to bring the law up to speed with the technology of child pornography. The PROTECT Act attempts to do so.
    
One of our Nation's biggest law enforcement problems is the failure of Federal authorities to work closely with their state counterparts. This is especially true when it comes to child pornography. There are countless cases where Federal officials have stepped on state officers' toes while conducting parallel investigations and never talking with each other. This bill requires a greater degree of Federal local coordination than has ever happened before in these kinds of cases.
    
In sum, the time has come to send a message to child pornographers. We are telling them that no matter how advanced their computers and cameras are, child porn makers and puveryors cannot run and hide from American law enforcement.
    
This is a 21st century problem in need of a 21st century solution. The PROTECT Act does not solve all of our problems in this area, but it's a step in the right direction.