Amber Legislation

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the conference report on the PROTECT Act, S. 151. As a conferee on that Conference Committee, I proudly support this important bill. It is undoubtedly, one of the most significant and comprehensive pieces of legislation ever drafted to protect children. By marrying the AMBER alert bill with the Senate's PROTECT Act, and the House's Child Abduction Prevention Act, we will be ensuring a greater measure of protection for our children and greatly impacting their safety.

I am proud to have been a cosponsor of the Senate's version of the PROTECT Act. This portion of the conference bill does many important things. Because of advances in modern technology, prosecutors and experts are finding it more and more difficult to determine which images of child pornography are of real children and which are computer generated. This makes it very difficult to prove that an image is of a real child in a criminal case. To solve this problem, the bill makes it illegal to possess any material that contains a visual image of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct. Because child pornography, including morphed child pornography, is used to seduce children, the bill also makes it illegal to try to induce a child, through any means, including by computer, to participate in any activity that is illegal. The bill also makes any identifying information of a child, with the exception of age, inadmissible evidence in a court of law. Finally, to combat a grave problem that is growing worse daily, the bill requires the Attorney General to appoint 25 additional trial attorneys that would focus on the investigating and prosecuting Federal child pornography and obscenity laws.

Another important inclusion in this bill is the Public Outreach Title, which deals with the AMBER alert and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Senate Judiciary Committee heard very poignant testimony about how the AMBER alert, had it been available, could have been used to save young children, like Polly Klaas. We also heard testimony of how the California AMBER alert was successfully used to find two Lancaster teenagers, last summer. That hearing built a good record for why we need a nationally coordinated AMBER alert communications network. Additionally, the Public Outreach Title increase the support for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; gives the US Secret Service the authority to render investigative and forensic support to missing children; and creates a cyber tipline. This title will greatly enhance the ability of law enforcement to find our Nation's missing children.

While the bill makes significant progress in strengthening Federal child pornography laws and in enhancing public outreach, so that missing and exploited children can be recovered, the bill also includes the Houses' tough on crime penalties for Federal sex offenses. The bill increases penalties for crimes like kidnaping, sex tourism, child abuse, and child torture. It also includes a "two-strikes" provision that would establish a mandatory life sentence for twice convicted sex offenders. This one provision alone will help keep some of the worst violent child molesters off the streets and out of the exploitation business. The bill also includes new rules for supervised release of sex offenders, so that criminals with deep-seated aberrant sexual tendencies will not just be released to the public without some measure of protecting the public once the criminal is let out of prison. Additionally, the bill removes the statute of limitations for sex crimes against minors. This provision will be particularly helpful in cases where there is old DNA evidence, but still no suspect. It is my hope that these new sanctions will have a tremendous deterrent impact, and when taken all together they will provide for greater security for America's most precious resource—it's children.

Although the underlying bill is an exceptional piece of legislation, I felt that there were a few additional provisions that would make the bill even better. I appreciate the way some members of the conference worked with me to include these additional provisions on the bill. First, I was able to get accepted an amendment to include child pornography manufacturers and distributors in the Federal sex offender registry. Because child pornography is a gateway to child molestation, just as marijuana is a gateway to harder drugs, those who deal in this type of material should be included in the offender registry, so that the public is on notice of these criminals.

I was also able to get approved a technical amendment to the Communications Decency Act. This amendment would conform the language of the CDA to the Supreme Court's decision in Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). The amendment strikes the indecency provisions, which the court ruled were unconstitutionally vague, and limits the scope of the CDA to obscenity and child pornography, which can be restricted since they do not benefit from first amendment protection.

The conference also accepted two sense-of-Congress provisions. The first provision expresses that it is the sense of the Congress that the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Department of Justice should focus its investigative and prosecutorial efforts on major producers, distributors, and sellers of obscene material and child pornography that use misleading methods to market their material to children. This provision was recommended in the 2000 report of the COPA Commission, a congressional commission tasked with studying how to protect children from pornography online. The second provision, which is also taken from the COPA Commission report, expresses that it is the sense of the Congress that the online commercial adult industry should voluntarily refrain from placing obscenity, child pornography, or harmful-to-minors material on the front pages of their Web sites. By taking this step, these Web sites will be helping to protect minors from material that may negatively impact their social, moral, and psychological development.

With improved child pornography laws, enhanced public outreach, and tougher sentences for sex offenders who victimize minors, this conference report will be essential to keeping our children safe from individuals who wish to do them harm. I urge my colleagues to vote for the conference report on S. 151, The PROTECT Act.