Marsha Blackburn wants a national database on child trafficking rings before she exits Senate
by Alex Swoyer, Stephen Dinan · The Washington TimesSen. Marsha Blackburn says the Justice Department doesn’t have a central database to catalog child trafficking rings.
Before she leaves the Senate, she wants to start building one.
Ms. Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, is hoping to win the governorship in November and end more than two decades in Washington, first in the House and eight years in the Senate.
She’s become a champion for children’s safety — thus her focus on combating trafficking rings, an area where the conservative lawmaker has forged common ground with Senate Democrats.
“We realized the Department of Justice does not have a database of where these trafficking rings are working,” Ms. Blackburn said in an interview for “The Sitdown With Alex Swoyer,” a Washington Times podcast. “If we had that information and we were aggregating it and sending it to local and state law enforcement, we would be able to facilitate more arrests and apprehensions for these predators and pedophiles and perverts and groomers.”
Ms. Blackburn has written the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media companies, video games, streaming and messaging applications to implement safeguards for users under age 17.
That would include guardrails to mitigate online harassment of minors and prevent tech firms from mining data on their online activities.
She said every other industrial sector has safety standards to protect children. But tech hasn’t.
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The senator pointed to Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, which agreed to a settlement with states last month to limit juveniles’ access and make a massive payout.
“Meta has admitted that they need to have a duty of care and a safety standard, and indeed in the court cases, the juries pointed out the virtual space doesn’t have that,” Ms. Blackburn said.
That’s a problem for an industry where users are the product the firms are selling.
“They are being data mined — as is every consumer — when they are online, and I think people are beginning to realize this with the advent of AI, how they are seeing chat bots used, how they are seeing AI systems work,” Ms. Blackburn said.
She’s also hoping to see action on her No Fakes Act, which would give people a recourse to demand that artificial intelligence-generated content mimicking their voice or likeness be taken down.
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She was particularly miffed by a federal appeals court ruling this summer that AI-generated child sex abuse images can be legally possessed inside the home under First Amendment precedents.
“How disgusting that you have individuals that would take a child’s image and then alter that and create pornography and distribute that and the child and their parents have absolutely no recourse,” Ms. Blackburn said. “We have to put in place protections so that an individual can protect themselves.”
Meanwhile, the senator has been a major proponent of cracking down on birth tourism, which sees foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to have babies — and earn their newborns U.S. citizenship.
She said Russian and Chinese women are particular practitioners in taking advantage of the U.S.
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“Our citizenship is not for sale,” she said.
Ms. Blackburn also celebrated the Trump administration’s deployment of federal agents to Memphis, Tennessee, to combat crime.
Local and state law enforcement worked with more than 30 federal agencies to make roughly 13,000 arrests, 1,400 of which involved gang members who were prosecuted. Two hundred missing children were also recovered through the effort.
“This is a template for how to make our cities safer,” Ms. Blackburn said.
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