S.C. attorney general continues push for faster predator investigations
COLUMBIA, S.C. - South Carolina’s attorney general and multiple law enforcement officers gathered Wednesday morning to a Senate bill designed to streamline child predator investigations.
Senate Bill S.74, known as the istrative Subpoena Bill, would speed up the process of identifying adults who are sharing or ing child sexual abuse material, Attorney General spokesman Robert Kittle said.
“We are in a new age of electronic crime,” Sen. Greg Hembree, R - Horry, who sponsored the Senate bill. “Technology has created crimes that we didn’t even imagine 10 years ago. We now have revenge porn, AI child abuse. We have harassment and stalking done electronically now.”
Hembree said that while the law is really targeted toward internet crimes against children, it is a tool that can be used for emerging crimes.
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“Every day that es without S.74 becoming law is another day we risk leaving children vulnerable and giving child predators a head start,” Attorney General Wilson said. “This bill gives law enforcement the tools we need to act faster, protect more kids, and bring offenders to justice.”
Wilson described the current process for investigators when a cyber tip comes in from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the issues investigators face.
“Someone sees an email come across their platform or they’ll see a screen name or they’ll see an IP address, and they will identify some potential child sex abuse material,” he said. “With that information, what they don’t know is who that email, who that IP address or who that screen name is ed to. Who is the subscriber?”
To find out, Wilson said the Attorney General’s Office must go through the U.S. Attorney’s Office and ask for an istrative subpoena for electronic records or go through state courts, which can issue an istrative subpoena under federal law.
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Wilson said that process can take days, weeks or even months.
“It could shave several months off of us, our ability to begin an investigation,” Wilson said. “In some cases, it’s months before we can even get to the location, identify the location where the crime is occurring and by that time, the child has already been abused dozens of times or more, or God forbid, something worse.”
This bill would allow Wilson to issue the subpoena himself, saving time on the hundreds of cases processed.
A judge would still have to approve any requested search warrants, Kittle said.
Wilson addresses privacy concerns with bill
Wilson said a concern was raised last week on the House floor about how much power it would give the attorney general’s office and the possibility that people’s Constitutional rights could be violated.
“Now, here’s what this bill does not do, and I want to make this abundantly clear,” he said. “This does not give the attorney general or any law enforcement agency the ability to get your personal information. We don’t, we can’t get your text messages, we can’t get your emails, we can’t get things that personally belong to you.”
The only information his office would receive, he said, was the subscriber information behind the IP address, email or screen name.
“It doesn’t mean that that person is the one who committed the crime. It just gives us a location. Basically, it gets us to the start line faster, and once we get to the start line, that’s when law enforcement can start getting search warrants. And all the due process protections under our Constitution are in place,” he said.
Hembree said the bill takes an existing federal law and gives you a state version he says is “cheaper, faster, more efficient, but has the same due process protections as the federal law.
“I think it’s real important to understand that it does not expand the power authority of government in some profound way,” Hembree said. “The only thing that really changed is which doorway you go through to get the istrative subpoena.”
“These are time-sensitive investigations,” Rep. Travis Moore, R - Spartanburg, said. “There are children out there being exploited and victimized. Now we cannot wait weeks or moths to get this information.”
The state’s Senate and House have both ed versions of the bill, but lawmakers must agree on a final version.
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