The Threat the STOP CSAM Act Poses to Privacy

Every decent person deplores child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and supports every reasonable effort to destroy it. Existing laws already make it a crime for anyone – including social media platforms – to “facilitate,” “distribute,” “promote,” or “possess” CSAM.

Despite its good intentions, a Senate bill to combat CSAM would have the unintended consequence of degrading the privacy and encryption that shield women and children from stalkers, whistleblowers from wrongdoers, and journalists and dissidents from cartels and tyrants. 

The STOP CSAM Act has been quietly added to the latest defense authorization bill. This brings us to the same crossroads we arrived at in 2023, when Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) contributors Jason Kelley and Sophia Cope detailed why the bill is so problematic.

STOP CSAM could allow lawsuits that would threaten encrypted communications – and with it, the privacy of millions of Americans who simply wish for their digital communications to be as private as their conversations with friends in a park. Encryption itself isn’t a crime or a problem. In the digital age, it’s how we ensure true privacy.

Any bill that limits encryption – the last true guarantor of the precious anonymity upon which victims, whistleblowers, journalists, dissidents, and peaceful protesters rely – deserves to be transparently and vigorously debated in full view of the American people, not slipped into an enormous, must-pass defense bill.

Under the revised STOP CSAM Act, encryption alone would not provide a basis for civil liability, but it could still be used as evidence in litigation. This would pressure companies to scan messages, weaken encryption, or abandon encryption altogether. Such pressure would create the risk that ordinary conversations between teenagers, parents, teachers, doctors, and counselors would be mistaken for evidence of grooming or exploitation.
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We applaud efforts in Congress to eradicate CSAM and punish its purveyors. But this bill would create a system with so many uncertainties and financial threats that private platforms could be forced to become overzealous censorship agents.

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