Peter Dutton right on abuse, says US body for exploited children

National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children is warning of an impending ‘massive’ drop in the detection of abuse as tech giants employ end-to-end encryption.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton issued a broadside against Facebook last week for moving to expand end-to-end encryption by default across all its platforms, including Messenger and Instagram. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

The US organisation that refers online child sexual abuse mater­ial to global investigators is warning of an impending ­“massive” drop in the detection of abuse as Facebook and other tech giants push ahead with end-to-end encryption.

National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children vice-president John Shehan said that, as tech companies increased encryption in response to privacy and security concerns, the abuse of children would be undetected.

The NCMEC’s CyberTipline received 16.9 million reports of online child exploitation last year, and used information about upload locations to forward­ reports to the world’s law-enforcement agencies.

The organisation estimates more than half its CyberTipline reports will vanish with end-to-end encryption, a figure that law-­enforcement sources say is highly conservative.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton issued a broadside against Facebook last week for moving to expand end-to-end encryption by default across all its platforms, including Messenger and Instagram.

Facebook was facilitating child sexual abuse at “incomprehensible” levels, and would be starving investigators of referrals that had previously allowed them to remove children from harm, Mr Dutton said.

Mr Shehan said that without new technical developments, such as the ability to detect signals­ and indicators of abuse materia­l and grooming, “Australia’s Home Affairs Minister is correct about the referrals”.

“There will be a massive decreas­e in the number of Cyber­Tipline reports received from electronic service providers, such as Facebook and ­others,” Mr Shehan said.

“With no technological except­ion to end-to-end encryption, the dehumanising abuse of children will continue undetected. Their abusers and the people who trade the images and videos of this abuse will be protected.”

The vast majority of reports to the NCMEC last year — 15.8 million or 93 per cent — were referred by Facebook. With end-to-end encryption, which ­prevents any third party from viewing communications, those report numbers will plummet.

One experienced online child abuse investigator told The Weekend Australian that Facebook was “turning off the tap and we don’t know why”.

Mr Shehan said Facebook “leads the way” in identifying and reporting abuse. He did “not want to see a degradation”.

“It’s because of that massive investment by Facebook that NCMEC is most concerned about what will be lost without new tools to detect the activity in an (end-to-end encryption) environment­,” Mr Shehan said.

More than 33,600 reports of online child sex abuse were forwarded to Australian police by the NCMEC last year, resulting in a stream of arrests.

Facebook argues end-to-end encryption is the best defence against scammers, hackers and foreign interference and that creating a “back door” for law ­enforcement would weaken the system. “Facebook leads the industry in combating child abuse online and we’ll continue to do so,” a spokeswoman said.