00:03The Chair now recognizes himself for the second round.
00:06Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Take It Down Act, which I was proud to support,
00:11requiring online platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of a victim's request.
00:17The legislation tasks the FTC with ensuring the platforms comply with the law.
00:22What additional resources will be required by the Commission to enforce the Take It Down Act?
00:27We are really excited by the Take It Down Act. This is one of President Trump's priorities.
00:31We think it's going to do a lot of good for vulnerable Americans.
00:35This is a new front of enforcement authority for the FTC.
00:39It involves dealing with some oftentimes really horrible material in order to conduct investigation.
00:45So I think we basically need three things.
00:47The first is I'm going to need a sort of a segregated technology system to house this material when we're conducting investigations.
00:54We're not going to want that intermingled with the sort of other bread and butter data that the Commission brings on to conduct investigations.
01:01And second, I'm going to need to hire some specialist investigators that deal with this stuff.
01:05Dealing with this stuff takes a real psychological toll on investigators.
01:09But there are investigators and lawyers that have training dealing with this stuff as prosecutors or as civil investigators in other contexts.
01:17And we would want to bring some of those folks on to maximize our enforcement efforts.
01:21So those are the sort of the two buckets, three, specialist investigators and specialist lawyers to help enforce these things.
01:28Those are the three buckets, segregated IT, specialist investigators, specialist lawyers.
01:32And I'd love to work with you on making sure that we will have the resources to carry out this super important priority.
01:39As a recovering prosecutor, I understand how important it is to also maintain that as evidence.
01:44Yes, exactly.
01:45In these cases.
01:46That's right.
01:47And certainly one of the most shocking things you saw was in, say, the middle school, junior high school setting or high school where images get shot around and kids send them to each other.
01:59And next thing you know, you have 800 counts on 800 separate people for that type of juvenile pornography.
02:05So I think it's very important that they have the ability, you have the ability to make sure that stops immediately.
02:10I totally agree.
02:11And because some of this material will potentially be CSAM, it is really important that it is segregated from everything else that we do and that we have specialists that know how to deal with it.
02:22Advances in artificial intelligence have increased the ability of scammers, unfortunately, to deceive and defraud customers.
02:28How long, how have you seen the fraudulent schemes become more sophisticated and what are you doing to protect consumers from them?
02:35Yeah, so I think AI can be used particularly for certain types of schemes to sort of supercharge the fraud.
02:42AI makes it easier to impersonate someone else.
02:45It's actually, frankly, quite terrifying.
02:47I don't know if anyone on this committee has ever gotten a call of like an impersonated loved one.
02:51But I have friends that have gotten calls from like impersonated family members.
02:55It's like a truly terrifying experience.
02:57So we have the impersonation rule that we are bringing enforcement actions on to recover civil penalties for violations of this.
03:06We had a competition that we ran last year to encourage people to develop voice cloning technology that will allow law enforcers to detect when AI is being used to perform impersonations.
03:19This is going to require sort of a whole of government approach because we have to both stop it before it gets to the consumer through their phone.
03:25But we also, you know, we have to work because a lot of this is criminal activity.
03:29You need prosecutors to assist.
03:31A lot of this comes from outside of the United States.
03:34These are people who are not going to be super responsive to sort of the civil law enforcement component of the FTC since they're already taking tremendous criminal risks outside the United States to do this.
03:42But this is one of our top priorities, particularly given that this is often aimed at some of our most vulnerable populations.
03:49There are not enough schemes targeted at these elderly.
03:51That's exactly right.
03:53One of the things that I'm interested in as well is I know that it was used in the form of manipulating President Biden's voice to tell voters in the state not to come in the next day for the primary.
04:04In my time in Homeland, I attended a lot of cybersecurity ones and they said that that was the start.
04:11In 28, you could produce the whole candidate and somebody would never have to leave their house yet there would be images of them all around.
04:18So what I also have a concern with is competition and consolidation in this industry so you don't end up with just one sole source of this stuff.
04:26Do you have any thoughts on how you're going to prevent that from happening?
04:30Yeah, I agree. I mean, the United States is the AI leader right now.
04:34And part of that is because we have a competitive dynamic economy and competition breeds innovation and innovation is what gives us AI and is what gives us our advantage over China, for example, because we are competitive and competition breeds innovation.
04:48It is very important that the FTC be particularly vigilant to make sure competition problems don't seep into AI.
04:55At the same time, the other advantage that the United States has is that we don't reflexively regulate new technologies.
05:02We let them develop, we encourage innovation, we encourage experimentation, and we see how things go, and then we address problems as they arise.
05:09I think that is equally important. Protecting competition in this space is important. Equally important is making sure that government regulators don't intervene too early,
05:18particularly with a technology that is transforming constantly, faster than even its engineers can predict.
05:25We don't want regulators coming in heavy handed. By the time they even figure out what's going on, it will have changed.
05:30I think it's very important that that American entrepreneurial spirit be protected both from anti-competitive consolidation and from government over-regulation.
