Teresita was never a girly girl. Growing up in the choked urban sprawl north of Manila, she spent her childhood running wild with neighborhood kids, climbing trees, and shinnying around derelict lots. “I liked games that stretched my bones,” she tells TIME with a grin.
Teresita’s elder stepsister became the family’s chief breadwinner. In her late 30s, she started working online as a romantic companion, sending erotic pictures and videos to predominantly Western men she met via dating and pornography websites.
Those transmissions all took place using regular chat apps you likely have on your phone right now but remained hidden from law enforcement due to end-to-end encryption (E2EE), a secure communication method that scrambles data on your device and only permits a designated recipient to decrypt it. Technology that was designed to protect privacy had turned into an enabler of horrific abuse.
“I was disgusted with myself,” Teresita recalls. “I would ask, ‘why would I do this?’ I had shivers on my spine, but I just remember having to swallow all of that because we needed the money.”
Many do. In 2022 alone, nearly half a million Filipino children were sexually exploited in livestreams, according to a study by the International Justice Mission (IJM) NGO and the University of Nottingham Rights Lab. That’s equivalent to one in every 100 children across the Southeast Asian nation. The average age of victims is just 8 years old and abuses frequently include torture and rape.
Contrary to popular perception, it doesn’t primarily unfold in the murkiest recesses of the dark web. Nearly all of it takes place on the services that regular, law-abiding people use every day—including WhatsApp, Zoom, Telegram, and many others—but it remains hidden from view owing to E2EE.
There is hope, however. New AI tools can allow platforms to interrupt livestreamed abuse and alert law enforcement in real time while, advocates claim, preserving the privacy protections that E2EE provides for ordinary users.
The rise of livestreamed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has intensified a broader debate over how much responsibility technology platforms bear for safeguarding users. The debate gained new urgency in March, when back-to-back verdicts in California and New Mexico found, for the first time, Facebook parent Meta liable for products that inflict harm on young people. As AI tools transform every industry, child-safety advocates are urging tech companies to consider whether they can be deployed more aggressively to protect children online.
The question is how much privacy society is willing to trade for the protection of children. Supporters of stronger detection tools point to the limited intrusions people already accept in the name of public safety, from airport security searches to DUI checks. Privacy advocates argue that scanning private digital communications is different: a system built for one purpose can later be expanded for another.
“Children are being exploited and abused because Big Tech consistently prioritizes profits over people,” legislation co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin tells TIME. “Parents have been begging Congress to step in, and it’s time we do so.”
"When detected, we report [CSAM] to [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC], preserve evidence, remove access, and take appropriate enforcement action," Google said. "And, together with others, we advocate for effective legislation to keep kids safe online."
“What we need from these tech giants is not just reactive takedowns after children have already been harmed,” says Hontiveros. “We need safety built into their platforms by design, like proactive detection, especially for live-streamed content. These companies earn far more than they are investing in child safety. That has to change.”
“The youngest child that we rescued was two days old,” he says. “There was a newborn baby … and they were asking for the abuse of that child.”
“She turned on her camera and I see six tiny little children laying on a dirt floor,” recalls Conley. “And she said, ‘I will do anything you want to them for $15. Are you interested?’”
Conley’s laptop pings. It’s been 14 minutes since it booted. “That is a person calling me right now to sell children,” he says. “I'm not even involved in [undercover] daily like I used to be.” During that time, he would typically receive messages every seven minutes, he says. “That gives some indication of how prevalent this is.”
Given the clandestine nature of this crime, accurate global statistics are hard to find. But extrapolating from limited empirical studies paints a grim picture. In 2013, four researchers from Terre des Hommes Netherlands posed as pre-pubescent Filipino girls on 19 different online chat forums. Over a 10-week period, 20,172 people from 71 different countries asked them to perform a webcam sex show.
The democratization of Internet access with cheap smartphones and 5G has also regrettably seeded a CSAM wild west, whereby anyone with access to a child and dire financial problems can instantly solve their money woes.
Livestreamed CSAM is especially pernicious because it gives abusers the thrill of directing and interacting with victims while leaving little chance of being caught. While static CSAM has circulated online for decades—allowing for the creation of digital markers, or “hashes,” that can flag existing files and lead to their removal—livestreamed abuse disappears the moment a call ends. “The abuse didn't stop,” says John Shehan, vice president of the NCMEC. “The lights just went off.”
Investigators then cross-check incoming reports against previous cases, analyze patterns, and use open-source intelligence to tie online identities to real-world individuals. “We want to see if there's a Facebook profile, or someone’s trying to sell a car, or post something about their favorite band, to link that online identifier to someone in the real world,” says Shehan.
But AI is increasingly aiding abusers, too. It can subtly alter existing CSAM to evade hash detection and generate synthetic imagery altogether, complicating investigations already overwhelmed by sheer volume. According to Childlight, reports of synthetic CSAM surged 1,325% from 4,700 cases in 2023 to 67,000 in 2024.
Because livestreamed CSAM is shielded by E2EE, cases often surface only through indirect signals: suspicious financial transactions, user reports, or metadata. In Teresita’s case, investigators only identified her after one of the hundreds of men with whom she interacted was arrested in the U.S. with recordings of their calls. The FBI then traced his digital records back to Teresita's stepsister and alerted the Philippine authorities. But this type of reactive investigation only scratches the surface of the problem, meaning most cases slip through the cracks.
Financial records are a key avenue for investigation but increasingly problematic with the sheer abundance of services available. The other day, the HSI team in the Philippines were told about three remittance services that had become most prominent in livestreaming cases. “All of us in the room look at each other as we’ve never heard of these companies,” says Corey, an HSI investigator in Manila, who asked TIME not to use his full name for fear of compromising undercover work.
Asked by TIME why stronger technologies are not more widely deployed to combat live-streamed CSAM, most technology firms cited safety measures and privacy commitments, but offered little detail on specific product decisions.
Meta pointed TIME to a 2021 paper by cybersecurity experts warning that client-side scanning “creates serious security and privacy risks for all society while the assistance it can provide for law enforcement is at best problematic.”
"It doesn't go from one false positive and there's an arrest or a SWAT team,” explains David Rust-Smith, a senior staff data scientist at Thorn. “There's a whole spectrum of how to operationalize these predictions.”
Another option would be for digital communication providers to use AI scanning tools within Trusted Execution Environments, which are essentially hardware “secure enclaves” that allow for limited analysis of encrypted data while keeping it invisible and inaccessible to anything outside—including the operating system itself. While this would no longer strictly be E2EE, advocates say privacy can be maintained as a form of “end-to-end-to-end encryption.” It is controversial, however. “It depends how pragmatic your approach is and where your real concerns and trust lie,” says Rust-Smith.
A few years ago, Tsittakalakis was queuing at a coffee shop in New York City when he noticed the man in front had a picture of two nude children on his phone. “I just want to get my coffee,” he says. “But now I’m in this position where if I don't pursue this, it’s going to keep me up at night.”
While asking to inspect the phone breached the man’s privacy, it was also responsible and, many would argue, Tsittakalakis’s professional duty. Especially as the concern is not only what happens on screen. Another key takeaway from the 2025 IJM study was the link between livestreamed CSAM and realworld harm, with adult consumers six times more likely to have had sexual contact with a child.
While law enforcement can search your home or wiretap conventional phone calls with a court warrant, no U.S. government agency can compel digital communications providers to directly listen to E2EE voice or video calls in real-time or access recordings. The FBI can only use legal processes to obtain extensive metadata and, in some cases, content stored directly on a device.
“Why are privacy groups okay with protecting individuals from scams and malware and spam, but not protecting kids from the most gut-wrenching, horrific content?” asks Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and digital forensics at UC Berkeley, who partnered with Microsoft to create the PhotoDNA system of cataloguing known CSAM via a hash database used by NCMEC and others.
Increasingly, governments are stepping in. The U.K. and Australia have rolled out Online Safety Acts making platforms legally responsible for protecting users from harmful content. The E.U. is debating legislation that would require services to proactively detect CSAM and hold them accountable for breaches. “The civil liability component is what’s most potentially transformative,” says Nate King, director of U.S. Congressional Affairs at the IJM.
Activists say passing the STOP CSAM Act would be a start. It would then fall to the courts to decide whether the operating systems, communication services, or even the cloud networks that they all rely on should be held accountable. Or perhaps, just like physical safety, there should be multiple redundancies and all must play their part.
For Senator Durbin, the mandate is clear: “Anyone who is intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly hosting CSAM should be held responsible.”
Many of her former clients would seek out a personal meeting in one of the swanky hotels in Manila’s well-heeled Makati neighborhood, though only her stepsister’s vigilance made sure that never happened. “Every time a man expressed a desire to come here and spend the night with me my stepsister would block them and would not engage further,” says Teresita. “That happened often.”
“I'm not being dragged back by my experience. It’s not my identity anymore. I can embrace it as something that the Lord has used me for,” she says. “I've also forgiven her. I am not feeling any anger, I feel pity, because knowing her situation, she was only doing this to provide for us. I'm not justifying what she did, but I never thought of my stepsister as a bad person, just somebody who did something wrong. But she is still someone who can change.”
“The owners of these big companies should do everything they can to protect their users, especially children,” says Teresita. “It’s right to put pressure on these companies to find solutions.”
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