Information & Ethics committee  Good morning, Madam Chair Shanahan and honourable members of the committee. My name is John Clark. I am the president and CEO of the U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, sometimes known as NCMEC. I am honoured to be here today to provide the committee

Information & Ethics committee  I'll jump in really quickly. At the National Center, we work with a lot of technology companies. Of course, we have encouraged their reporting, but of the thousands of Internet service providers, we only have about 170 that are actively reporting. Of those 170, there are only ab

Information & Ethics committee  That's a good question. We work with some of the Internet service providers to, first and foremost, make sure they have good content moderation, that there are actual human beings looking for and seeking to immediately take down items, illegal content, CSAM when it's first disco

Information & Ethics committee  We don't technically, as I said, have a partnership with Pornhub, although they have begun to voluntarily report, but I believe they are the only one. The others that we are working closely with are just large tech companies generally.

Information & Ethics committee  Understood.

Information & Ethics committee  I would just say from the U.S.-based look at this that the marketplace for CSAM is a global one, and it requires a global effort. As you might naturally believe and know, there are differences in laws around the globe that affect privacy issues and what Internet service providers

Information & Ethics committee  Their reporting to us has just been in recent times, within the last few weeks, probably.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, it's been the last few weeks. As was noted, I think, in my testimony, while they provided, I believe, around 13,000 reports, a lot of those were duplicative. We've also noted in some instances a very strong reluctance on their part to take down material that is called in fr

Information & Ethics committee  There is still a lot of work to be done there.

Information & Ethics committee  It would seem likely that they should have a record of it. Since NCMEC is a non-investigatory agency, we don't take further steps to investigate that relationship about what they are saying they did or didn't do when somebody reported to them about CSAM material or asked them t

Information & Ethics committee  I missed part of your question. You said that was Pornhub?

Information & Ethics committee  That is correct; they did not.

Information & Ethics committee  We send our CyberTipline reports to well over 100 countries around the globe. The ones that seem to work best are the ones that have a strong law enforcement involvement, judicial process, laws in place—

Information & Ethics committee  We're talking primarily about the Five Eyes as good examples of strong laws—not perfect, but very good laws.

Information & Ethics committee  On the enforcement side, I would say that's true as well. We send our CyberTipline reports to law enforcement organizations in those countries.