The Many Reasons Why NCMEC’s Board Is Failing Its Mission, From A NCMEC Insider

Yesterday we posted our latest podcast, with guest Don McGowan, former board member at NCMEC (the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children) and former general counsel or chief legal officer at Bungie and the Pokemon Company (where he would sometimes disagree with our coverage). In the podcast, he goes into great detail about why he left the NCMEC board, and why he felt the board had become rotten, captured by interests not aligned with the underlying mission of NCMEC, and more focused on making it look like they’re protecting kids than actually protecting kids.

Multiple people reached out to me last night after listening to it, noting that McGowan’s whistleblowing here is both explosive and extremely important for more people to know about. NCMEC is an important organization, and the work that it does is fundamental to actually helping to protect children. But its board has apparently been captured by extremists who support political positions and ideologies at odds with that mission.

Therefore, after receiving a few requests for a transcript, I put one together, and have highlighted some of the key points. In particular:

• The board has effectively zero technical expertise and is easily misled because of this. Its support for bills like FOSTA and KOSA were simply because it did not have the expertise to understand how those bills would function.
• A significant number of board members have motivations driven by wanting to be associated with the organization more than actually protecting kids. This includes some people who see “protecting the children” as being about “protecting the children from accessing content” the board members don’t like.
• Because NCMEC is funded each year by Congress, the board is wary of ever doing anything that might upset those in government, so it will not speak out on anything the government is doing that might lead to missing or exploited children.
• In the interview, McGowan calls out many failures of NCMEC, including its unwillingness to speak out on key issues like (1) protecting trans kids (who are some of the most at risk children in the country, which NCMEC knows and ignores), (2) protecting kids from being exploited in the workplace under what amounts to modern day slavery, and (3) protecting asylum-seeking kids who were being locked in cages and separated (sometimes permanently) from their families. Instead, it chose to support dangerous bills like FOSTA and KOSA, for which he apologizes.

The whole thing is incredibly damning and worth either listening to or, now, reading:

Mike Masnick:
Hello and welcome to the Techdirt Podcast. I’m Mike Masnick. A few months ago on the podcast, we had Shelby Grossman and Riana Pfefferkorn from Stanford talking about their really incredible and detailed report on the CyberTipline, its opportunities and its challenges. As we noted in talking about that, it really highlighted both some of how important the CyberTipline is, but also how there were a bunch of challenges not necessarily because of the CyberTipline itself, or NCMEC, or anyone in the process, but just the basic realities of how the CyberTipline works, how the Fourth Amendment works and laws around that. The CyberTipline, of course, is run by NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they do some really great work with the CyberTipline being one example of a few.

But over the years, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve grown somewhat frustrated by some aspects of NCMEC, including and maybe especially around its advocacy, in particular on some bills that I think were really problematic and actually, I think, put people in danger. For example, NCMEC advocated vigorously on behalf of FOSTA, which was a very problematic bill that became law and which I think has been a complete disaster since then, putting people’s lives at risk.

There are reports suggesting that many people have died because of this law. As far as I can tell, NCMEC has never commented on what a failure FOSTA has been and how it almost certainly did real harm to some of the people that NCMEC claims to want to protect. Similarly, NCMEC has advocated on behalf of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act that we’ve discussed many times and how it put many kids at risk, especially LGBTQ kids, by the nature of the way that KOSA is written. I’ve long wished that NCMEC would just focus on the actual good work that it does in the world rather than pushing for dodgy legislation.

So it caught my attention recently when Don McGowan wrote a thread on Blue Sky about quitting the NCMEC board. McGowan is a well-known lawyer who was most recently the general counsel at the video game company Bungie, and before that at the Pokemon company, and has also worked at Microsoft over the years. In his thread, he wrote about leaving NCMEC’s board for a variety of reasons regarding both the advocacy that the organization does and also some of the advocacy that it refuses to do, such as its refusal to come out against Project 2025 and its plan for opening up child labor laws to enable more kids to take dangerous jobs.

He also noted that in all the media interviews he’s done since leaving Bungie, few have asked him about this. So that struck me as something of a challenge to have him come on and talk about exactly this. So Don, welcome to the podcast.

Don McGowan
Thanks, Mike.

Mike Masnick
So I wanted to start out with the baseline of making it clear that I think both of us agree that NCMEC does some really good important work that does in fact save lives. So this is not a trashing of…

Don McGowan
That’s incredibly correct. I do my best when I go off about NCMEC to try and draw a bifurcation between the organization and its staff and the board. My off-going is against its board, which I think has been entirely captured by MAGA positions, and uses itself to make sure that no criticism will be drawn to those positions in ways that it can, and not to take action, not to say bad things with the CyberTipline, or any of the Code Adam work that the organization does, or any of the other great stuff that it does to help actual kids at actual risk. And if this was a video podcast, you folks listening to it would see, I am drinking from my NCMEC mug, or my NCMEC tumbler that was given to me by NCMEC for my time as a board member.

Mike Masnick
And how long were you on the board for?

Don McGowan
I was on the board for, well, I had a little hiatus in the middle because my first few years were on the board as a rep of Pokemon. And then after that, when I stopped being at Pokemon, I stopped being on the board for a few months. And then I went back on as just a regular civilian board member for about three more years. So my total years there were seven. I started my association with NCMEC during Pokémon Go.

Mike Masnick
That makes sense. I was looking at it, and it’s a fairly large board. And so how is the board constructed?

Don McGowan
In the charity world, are two types of boards, working boards and fundraising boards. The NCMEC board is more of a fundraising board than a working board. As for how does one get on it, I’m not on actual over the air radio, so I can use the technical term. It’s got a lot of people that are the usual DC-area cop fuckers. And a lot of people who want to be law enforcement adjacent. And some people who are there because their organizations have a relationship with NCMEC, like I was when I was at Pokemon. Although somewhat amusingly, Pokemon didn’t want me to talk about that association publicly, which will be a story in my upcoming book.

Mike Masnick
Wow, okay, okay.

Don McGowan
Yeah, I’m writing a book about my Pokemon years,

Mike Masnick
Interesting, very interesting. That will be something to look forward to. So let’s talk about the sort of advocacy that NCMEC has done. And I think, in my experience, as I mentioned in the intro, it really came to my attention when NCMEC came up very strongly in favor of FOSTA…

Don McGowan
I want to speak to that for a second, I’m sorry to interrupt you. You mentioned FOSTA at the jump. I was involved in the NCMEC work on FOSTA. I barely remember any of it because it was long ago, but I was involved. And I say this to say, feel free to take shots at it because I wouldn’t want you to get to the end and be like, ‘oh shit, I didn’t know, and I took shots at him right to his face.’ Nope, do it.

Mike Masnick
Okay. Okay. Excellent.

Don McGowan
I will spend my life expiating the sins of what I did in my past, and that’s a big one.

Mike Masnick
Okay, so it struck me as surprising, right? I mean, I had been aware of NCMEC. And in fact, at some point, a long time ago, I’d spoken to a board member at NCMEC in the early 2000s, I’d had a conversation with someone who was sort of explaining how NCMEC was functioning. And that person had indicated to me some dysfunction, but I hadn’t seen them really engage as much on the policy side outside of things directly related to NCMEC. Like I understood advocacy around things related to the CyberTipline. And, there was, as we mentioned, this report that Stanford did earlier this year, which recommended some legislative changes to help the CyberTipline, one of which was actually voted on and signed by the President a few weeks after that report came out.

That kind of advocacy, I totally get and make sense. It’s like, ‘how do we make the CyberTipline more effective, get around some of these problems that were discussed…’

Don McGowan
And that was a very good report. As somebody who knows how the sausage gets made. I read that report and I was like, damn, these folks, they did well.

Mike Masnick
Yeah. They put in a lot of work. I know they spent time at NCMEC for a few days and were watching over the shoulders of people working on the CyberTipline, understanding all of that, talking to people on all sides, all the different stakeholders. So that was great. And that kind of advocacy I get.

What surprised me specifically when the FOSTA situation came out was having, I think at the time it was NCMEC’s general counsel, go and testify before Congress that FOSTA was like this perfect solution and necessary and really, really helpful. And I felt personally that kind of misrepresented the law.

And I was kind of wondering why NCMEC, given the position it’s in, which is that it is a private nonprofit, but it is the only organization that is granted by law to be able to process child sexual abuse material as part of the CyberTipline, which leads to some people and some courts occasionally giving it quasi-governmental status. But it’s in this sort of unique position. I thought it was odd that it would then go out and publicly advocate for a law that seemed slightly tangential to its overall mission and what it was working on. And then that it was taking such an extreme position on it that went against what a whole bunch of other civil society folks were talking about and raising the concerns of this law. So I know that you said that was a long time ago and you might not remember the specifics…

Don McGowan
I’ll go back in. I’m hitting the memory banks as you were talking, and I’ve got some details.

Mike Masnick
So I’m curious if there was anything that you were aware of at the time that sort of led NCMEC to decide that they were going to go public and advocate for a bill like FOSTA?

Don McGowan
I’ll come at this a little bit obliquely. So, NCMEC is, as an organization, driven by its board. And aspects of NCMEC’s board are somewhat difficult to unpack unless you know the personalities of the humans sitting in the room and or if you’ve been in the room. And that’s always a shitty thing to say because you don’t get to be like, ‘you don’t understand because you’re not there.’ But there’s a little bit of it, except I was there, so I can tell you. How this stuff came about is: go back to what FOSTA was supposed to be and pretend you don’t understand what it turned into.

Mike Masnick
Okay.

Don McGowan
Okay, now remember, at the time it was a bill to cut down on human trafficking for the sex trade. And if it was that, I mean, one, protecting children is never a vice in American politics, and two, if it was that, that would have been a great thing to support.

Mike Masnick
Yes.

Don McGowan
And so you had people going, speaking up in support of it, who were speaking from the perspective of what they thought it would be. Now you and a lot of the civil society groups that spoke to it understood the actual mechanics of the law and what it would… You had a little bit of seeing into the future that you could do. You’re a little Nostradamus sometimes, Mike. A lot of us try to be, some of us succeed, a lot of us don’t.

I remember, you know, like that was one of the things was this bill, especially at that time and to a certain degree even today, NCMEC has no technical expertise in the building. They have a relationship with Thorn, which is Ashton Kutcher’s child protection charity. And Thorn does a lot of their technical work and carries the technical load in that space in a way that NCMEC’s just not set up to. And I chaired their tech committee for a few years, right? And so I actually co-chaired it with a guy who was a marketing manager at Charter. And he considers himself the tech brains of NCMEC, and he’s a marketing manager for an ISP.

So there was a guy in there, a guy on the board who ended up no longer being on the board, who was advocating for this geolocation app to help you know, like you’re walking down the street and it’ll ping your phone and say, a child was abducted here. And he thought this was such a fantastic idea, because it’d be great for awareness. I’m like why would anybody put this into your phone? This guy styled himself as the technical expert, right? So think about that. A guy who thinks that app is the greatest idea ever and should be the technical focus of the organization, is out there trying to set the guidelines.

This was a guy who we… there were a few of us who actually had a bingo game during board meetings of at what point is Lou going to bring up porn? And then we would work the word bingo into our next thing we said, and that would be how you would win bingo. If Lou mentioned porn at a time that you were ready to talk, you’d work it in and you’d win. If you’d picked that slot in the Squares game, you had first right to claim it for your victory, right? So we’re dealing with that level of sort of, you could write a script by this guy’s focus on this issue, fairly tangential to NCMEC’s mission. And so you had people setting that as a priority.

And so obviously, FOSTA was red meat to them.

Mike Masnick
Right. I mean, this is the problem with so many bills, right? You position them in one way. And if you don’t understand the mechanisms of how they’re actually gonna work, the bill sounds good. And even people today, the same with KOSA, right? You look at it and on its face, it sounds good. People want kids to be safe online. People want to stop sex trafficking. So these bills sound good. I guess I had assumed, apparently incorrectly, that NCMEC would have more sophistication than that regarding sort of the nature of these bills.

Don McGowan
You’d hope. There were traditionally a couple of board members from Facebook. And they were fairly displeased when NCMEC took that public position because that sort of happened without a lot of us knowing what was going on.

Mike Masnick
Interesting. The other thing that I had seen and I had written about this at the time and, maybe it was a little bit conspiracy theoryish on my part. But I did notice that the person who was chair of the board at that time was a lobbyist who happened to be lobbying for all of the major motion picture studios in Hollywood.

Don McGowan
Because that was Manus’s year, right?

Mike Masnick
Yeah, it was Manus. And that was coming out of what had been revealed…. I mean, all of these things connect in such weird ways, but had been revealed through the Sony Pictures hack years earlier that there had been this Project Goliath plan by some of the major motion picture studios to focus on sex trafficking as a way to pass laws that would undermine Section 230 and thereby harm Google. And so there’s this know, corkboard with red strings on it, where you could pull this Hollywood lobbyist connected to NCMEC, pushing for the bill that Hollywood had been talking about a few years earlier as its plan to get back at Google. I don’t know if you…

Don McGowan
Now, I’m going to interrupt Mike, because speaking of red meat, Mike and I have had some discussions over time. I have a slightly different attitude towards Section 230 than Mike does. I’m not going into that because it’s orthogonal to today’s conversation. But I can tell you, if there was an Always Sunny in Philadelphia murder stringboard going on anywhere, I never saw it. I don’t think that was Manus doing client work on the board. Manus was always very a two solitudes guy, right? And the streams never crossed.

Mike Masnick
So let’s get to this thread that you wrote on Bluesky. You posted about Project 2025, which…

Don McGowan
Well, yeah, didn’t specifically mean to be talking about Project 2025. It was more the thing that underlies that section of Project 2025, which is the let’s let kids do labor.

Mike Masnick
Right. So on the off chance that listeners aren’t unfamiliar with Project 2025, very quickly, it’s the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a new Trump administration. It’s basically a whole bunch of ex-Trump admin people, and they have this whole plan to like, these are going to be the policies, these are going to be the people that we’re going to put in place. Many, many of the policies are horrible in all sorts of ways. But specifically, the part that you called out, which is in there and is somewhat shocking, is this idea of changing child labor laws to allow for more kids’ access to dangerous jobs.

Don McGowan
It is to facilitate kids doing work that we thought we were done with in the 1800s.

Mike Masnick
Yes. And specifically, the way it’s framed is really kind of incredible because it says “some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs,

Don McGowan
The children yearn for the mines…

Mike Masnick
… but current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business.” So, it’s can you exploit your kids in the mines doing such dangerous jobs? And so they want to say, with parental consent and proper training young adults should be allowed to work in more dangerous occupations. So you called this out in particular. Do you want to describe what was your view on…

Don McGowan
Sure, so I’ll speak to that. I come at it from a slightly unusual perspective, which I’m not going to go deeply into except to say, as a child, my old man was a miner. He ran mining companies. And so I somewhat, legendarily to my friends at least, was airlifted into northern Canada and left by the side of a lake for two months to help my old man find places to mine.

Mike Masnick
My goodness. Wow. That is quite a background story.

Don McGowan
That’s exactly. So I got a background story of living off the land in Northern Canada as a 12 year old. So speaking of dangerous jobs, I feel like I got a perspective. But so I remember, because obviously this Project 2025 thing didn’t come out of nowhere. And I think we’re all aware that there’s been some amount of permissiveness coming into labor laws, especially in what I always euphemistically refer to (because it bugs the crap out of them) as Central America, otherwise known as the middle of the country, and not what we usually refer to as Central America. But so in the middle part of the country, there’s been some relaxation of labor laws. I noticed this while I was still on the NCMEC board and put forward… We had this board platform for board discussions. It’s called Boardable. Anybody who’s worked on a board may know it. And it’s basically a discussion board back and forth. And so I found one of these bills and I was like, hey, shouldn’t we be taking a stand on this?

And somebody came back and said, ‘why?’ And I said, well, it’s right there in the fucking name. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to which a different board member, the aforementioned comms manager at Charter Communications, came back and was like, ‘well, there’s no sexual exploitation in this bill.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t really know that the org’s name was the National Center for Sexually Missing and Sexually Exploited Children. Do we only help families after hurricanes when the hurricane raped the child?’

Mike Masnick
Oh gosh.

Don McGowan
And that got another board member to say, ‘you know, listen, like you’re going off on one of your crusades again,’ which I’ll come back to in a second. ‘But, you need to understand, I want my kids to be able to get a paper route. So it’ll teach kids responsibility.’ And I was like, ‘One, no, you don’t. You’re a corporate executive. And two, we all know this isn’t about paper routes. This is about teenagers working in meatpacking plants. And they’re gonna lose their fingers, like they’re gonna lose their arms, because it’s gonna get cut off in the meat cutting machines. And we should be taking a stand on this. I’m sorry that many of you support a political party that thinks it’s politically expedient to do this. But we should, this is exactly the kind of thing we should care about.’

If we have a policy as an advocacy committee, and we did at the time, I don’t know if they do still, but if we have a policy and advocacy committee, this is exactly the type of thing on which the nation’s legislators would look to us for guidance. We should provide it. To which the answer was me getting a call from the chair of the board saying, ‘Hey dude, step off. Be a little more collegial if you would please.’ I was like, ‘all right, fine.’

So at that point, that was when I reached the conclusion we were coming up on the… that NCMEC has three board meetings a year. We’re coming up on the April board meeting of last year. And I sort of put in my head like, okay, let’s see how this board meeting goes. It’ll probably be my last one at this point.

I mentioned a few minutes ago about how people made a reference to me going on one of my crusades. I had a separate issue that I was fairly vocal on, which is, as I would describe it, I think it’s terrible that we have a political party that in this country has decided it’s politically expedient to set aside a group of children, namely trans kids, for state-sponsored political persecution. We should care about this and we should be speaking out about it. I’m sorry some of you don’t like this. I’m sorry trans kids make you feel icky. But this is the kind of thing on which we should be providing moral leadership to the legislators of the country. And we should be saying wrong is wrong.

You know, there was a fair amount of disagreement at that last board meeting, that April board meeting, NCMEC got a grant from the state of Texas and the grant was subject to return if the money was unused or misused. And I was like, we got to find out what “misused” means. If the state of Texas has decided there is an entire population of children that should not receive any support… and if we use this money and some of it goes to their benefit, they may want their money back. And one of the board members looks over and he goes, ‘Thunk! You know what that is? That’s the sound of you beating a dead horse.’

Mike Masnick
Wow.

Don McGowan
I was like, OK, you know what? In my mind, I said, I just quit. Didn’t speak for the rest of the meeting. Let the meeting end. Said goodbye to everybody. Walked out. Never went back. Got home. Flew back to Seattle. Got home, walked in, wrote up a note of resignation to the general counsel of NCMEC. Went to that Boardable software, posted a note saying, ‘This was my last board meeting. There’s going be a lot of you that are going to be happy to see the back of me. What you may not realize is I’m just as happy to see the back of you.’ Send. Send resignation. Peace out.

Mike Masnick
Wow.

Don McGowan
I mean, NCMEC has data in its stat banks that say some of the kids most at risk in the world are trans kids. And they ignore that data.

One other thing, a thing that underlay my feelings about the child labor issue is, I mean, who are the kids that are gonna get put in the meatpacking plants? Two categories of them. One is kids of undocumented people who’ve been brought in and have to pay off the debt to the coyote that brought them across the border. And the second one, and I hate to say it because we said at the jump, NCMEC does a lot of great work. There’s another group of people in America who does amazing things, and that’s foster parents. But there are some really shitty foster parents out there who get the kids from the foster agencies so they can use them for sex trafficking and so they can use them for labor. Give those kids what I’ll euphemistically call access to a meatpacking plant, and now they can be put to work in what we would traditionally understand to be slavery.

And that’s exactly what I expect to see happen, is those bad foster parents who are there to use these kids as a way to make money for themselves and wreck those kids’ lives. We need the state to protect them, because those kids literally have nobody else. And instead, those state legislatures have decided to make it easier for those kids to be persecuted.

You can probably even hear it in my voice, but if you can’t, I’ll say it. And that’s the kind of thing that makes me just outraged to my core that a group of people who receive 90% of their budget from the United States federal government can’t bring themselves to say slavery is bad.

Mike Masnick
Yeah. That’s astounding. We talked about the states in the in the center of America. Arkansas in particular, I had written something about this because it was kind of incredible: at the very same time that they were pushing a law to allow kids to work in meatpacking plants, right after there had been some scandals regarding kids getting hurt in meatpacking plants. So the governor there was pushing this law for to allow kids to work in meatpacking plants. At that very same time, she was also pushing a law for kids internet safety. And so I couldn’t believe that they couldn’t put two and two together. They were saying we have to protect the children, we have to put in place all these laws to protect them from Facebook, but in order to send them into meatpacking plants to work. And the disconnect….

Don McGowan
Yeah. Protecting children takes on a very specific meaning in these circles.

It’s protect the children from the things we don’t want the children to see and have access to. Right? That was an, and I don’t even like using the word insight. That was a thing I discovered spending time among them. I now can process how they think. And it gives me, you know I mentioned earlier that you’re kind of a Nostradamus? It gives me the ability to see around some corners.

Mike Masnick
I sort of understood that there were activists who felt that way and definitely pushed kid safety as an excuse to keep certain information away from kids. I totally understood that. What is kind of shocking to me in this discussion is recognizing that those people are on the NCMEC board.

Don McGowan
That’s the thing, they go somewhere. It’s because a lot of them, the personality trait that goes along with it, is a lot of them are all cop fuckers.

I sit slightly on the left. I’m certainly going to tell you I was to the window to the walls yesterday. Certainly, you’ve mentioned earlier that I use a lot of Bluesky. I actually blew up my Twitter account one day picking a fight with the alt-right. And so I now spend my time on a niche left-focused microblogging site. It’s fun. But the idea of a lot of these folks… like I’m a lot more cop positive than a lot of people I know, because I’ve spent time with the cops that are doing the work at NCMEC, right? Like I have sympathies for those folks because I know what their job is and what they’re going through. I mean, these are cops who are out there trying to save kids from sex trafficking, right? There are liaison officers at NCMEC from most of the three-letter agencies. And you know, until I started this podcast, I had pretty good relationships with them. I hope I still will afterwards…

Mike Masnick
I think that’s sort of an important point that is worth underlining, and often gets lost in these discussions, which is, and we started out the podcast by talking about how there is good work that NCMEC does. And a lot of that is coordinating with law enforcement, doing the actual good things that you want law enforcement to do. This is not a universal condemnation of either law enforcement or NCMEC itself.

But within that, that opens up opportunities for people with sort of problematic viewpoints to abuse that system to their advantage. And that has always been my problem with… like going back to FOSTA. It was presented as, you know, you can present these things in a good way. Like stopping sex trafficking is obviously a good and important and virtuous goal overall.

But when you have people whose real mission, and this was true of many of the backers of FOSTA, was not to stop sex trafficking, but to stop all pornography, all adult content entirely, and as part of that, to end encryption and a bunch of other things. And they were using FOSTA and some of these other laws as a kind of stalking horse to begin that process. And they were not subtle about this. I mean, the National Center, what is it? Oh gosh, what’s NCOSE? It’s, they have a name that sounds like, kind of like NCMEC, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, I think, which is this nonprofit that, I think they used to be called like the Moral Majority or something like that, who had very strong belief that that there should be no pornography anywhere ever. And they were huge supporters and lobbied very strongly in favor of FOSTA and were quite open.

I mean, somehow I’m on their mailing list. So they send me all their press releases in which they are very explicit that that this was Step One in their goal of ending all pornography everywhere. They have a very very strong view on things, but the fact that they sort of wrap it around this idea of ‘we’re stopping sex trafficking’ when it’s really this other thing. But I had always sort of mentally separated out there are groups like that, which you know where they’re coming from and you know are staffed by crazy people. And I had hoped that NCMEC just wouldn’t have been captured by that side of things.

Don McGowan
So I’m going to speak obliquely to that by going to an entirely different topic, but you’ll see why I draw the connection in a minute. So a few years ago, we were under the regime of the host of Celebrity Apprentice, and there was a government policy to put children in cages. One might wonder, where was NCMEC on that?

Mike Masnick
That’s a good question.

Don McGowan
I’m about to give you the answer to that question.

Where NCMEC was on that was there were a collection of us inside who put some fairly significant pressure on the CEO at the time, who was a guy named John Clark, who had come to NCMEC after being the head of the US Marshals, to say, ‘hey, apparently the government is having trouble finding these kids’ families. Isn’t that what we specialize in? Let’s go do that.’

And so John eventually, you know, there were a number of board members at the time. I was not as alone as I was at the end, but there were a number of board members at the time who sort of shared that opinion and asked John like what the hell’s going on? And he finally came back and said, which is true, ‘we can only go where we’re asked.’ Right. Kind of like, you know, vampires and lost boys. We can’t come in the house unless you ask us. We couldn’t go because we weren’t asked. And we were like, well, please go start sending correspondence to the heads of the agencies to tell them: ‘We would like to become involved in this and help you find the families for these kids.’

Almost immediately, there became a board schism on that. And the board schism came from people who said, many of them turned out to be my adversaries in the discussions around where are we on the child labor issue. Their stalking horse for it was, ‘listen, our budget is funded by Congress. Congress is implementing these policies. Let’s not piss them off.’ And so we punched through that. And John Clark finally reached out to DHS and all the various agencies. And their answer was, ‘Yeah, thanks. We’ll ask you if we need you. If we’re interested, we’ll call. Did we call? No. So we don’t want your help. Thanks. If we need you, we’ll reach out.’

So that’s where NCMEC was on that issue, was very much a… those of us on the board who saw things a little differently than the other folks pushed to try and get involved but you know, obviously there was no discussion of let’s take a public stance. Because the people would have the number of votes on the board would have overpowered taking a public stance.

I remember there was some very strong advocates and some very some people who are my very good friends on the board stepped off after that because they were like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be involved here anymore because my advocacy and my money can be used better elsewhere. And my time can be better used than flying into DC for these meetings.’ And so, sort of obliquely, I think that’s the answer to the, ‘where were they on a lot of these issues?’ Why would they take such a strong stance on FOSTA? Well, because you have board members who were ideologically aligned with the people who were proposing the bills.

And so, what I said earlier about the board member who was obsessed with porn, right? Do we think that guy was ever going to vote against us taking a stance in favor of FOSTA? No. And, you know, I mentioned earlier, one of the things I’m doing now is expiating my sins. In particular, it’s the, did I not see it? Like, did I get played by these motherfuckers? And I think I did. Right? And that’s a terrible thing you to realize about yourself is I got played by people. And I got played, you know, there were some of them that I still like as humans, and I have to sort of wrap my head around that, you know what, I got played by these motherfuckers. Because they had an ulterior motive, but they didn’t know how to achieve it. But what they did know is how to use me to achieve it.

Mike Masnick
Huh. I mean, that’s a little harsh on yourself…

Don McGowan
But it’s true. So, you know, that’s one of the reasons I took such a… ‘Let me start burning it down around KOSA.’ Was, well, because, you know what? I’m not gonna get played twice. You know, how did George W. Bush put it? Fool me once, won’t get fooled again.

Mike Masnick
Right. It’s interesting as I’m thinking about it.. the argument that because so much of the funding for NCMEC comes from Congress… one sort of throughline in all of this is that NCMEC is unwilling to challenge child exploitation that is effectively blessed by the government, and is only willing to challenge it when it’s outside the government that is the problem. And some of that could be tied to the fact that so much of its funding comes from the government.

Don McGowan
I think that’s accurate.

And that to me is almost an argument of, then shut the fuck up about everything.

Mike Masnick
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s sort of how I feel…

Don McGowan
If you’re only ever gonna support government policy, shut the fuck up…

Mike Masnick
Yeah, because that leads you to bad places.

Don McGowan
Yeah, don’t try and pretend you’re taking a stance. ‘Yeah, we take stances on issues that protect kids, so long as the government likes them.’ Or more directly, so long as the Republican Party likes them. This is the point where I say out loud, I was around NCMEC for the QAnon years. Those fuckers did nothing for actual child protection. Right? The QAnon people don’t care about children.

What they care about is being able to say they care about children.

And so, you know, they never cared about actual children because the actual children who were at highest risk during those years were the children of undocumented immigrants. And they could not have wanted more to round those kids up, put them in cages, and send them back outside of the United States.

Mike Masnick
Are you suggesting that the board was sort of QAnon captured itself or just afraid to…

Don McGowan
I mean, we didn’t take any public stances against QAnon. And that was the one that made me start first thinking like, huh, what the fuck is going on here? Like, why? We all know these people aren’t actually helping actual kids. Why are we not saying anything about that?

And it’s funny, given what we all think, I’ll tell you, some of the most aware of the problem directors were the ones from Facebook. Given what the internet thinks… It’s funny, I mentioned my Bluesky habit, and you mentioned my Bluesky habit a little while ago. Jess Miers showed up on Bluesky and started to talk about tech issues and immediately got hammered by a collection of scolds who all thought they knew better than she did about the issue that she had spent her career working on and chased her away. And so, you know, I sort of watched that and I was like, okay, that’s what happens to the people who are willing to stand up and say, ‘hey, let’s look at this because it had the same name as an issue that these people cared about.’ And, you know, we all use words based on our experience of them. And not everybody always uses the word in a dictionary definition, et cetera. We are all at risk of that particular problem, I guess is where I’m going.

Mike Masnick
Fair enough. So I think to sort of round out the conversation, is there anything that can be done? Again, noting the good that NCMEC has done and the importance of the CyberTipline? Is there a way to fix NCMEC?

Don McGowan
I think there is. I think the challenge is, as a private nonprofit, it’s always going to have to have a board. And its board members are going to be the people who are attracted to those kinds of boards. And especially when it’s a fundraising board, it’s going to be people with a certain political bent. Not always, but it’s likely to be, especially given how law enforcement adjacent it is. And so I would say what should happen is the organization should be properly captured by the federal government, become an agency of the federal government, stand as an independent agency of the federal government, similar to the way so many of the boards, et cetera, are statutorily say that it stands separate from the federal government so you don’t end up with people, with the agency worried about, for example, ‘oh crap, we shouldn’t protect kids in meatpacking plants because we might lose our congressional funding.’ Hypothecate the funding, to use the technical term, and then the funding is just there, hypothecated, not subject to annual reauthorization.

Right now, I think that’s one of the biggest issues with NCMEC, is that it has its annual funding resolution that has to go through, and one of the great sponsors of NCMEC was a person who isn’t always loved on the internet, but Senator John McCain. Senator John McCain could always be counted upon to sponsor the NCMEC funding resolution. And somebody would sponsor in the House.

I’ll tell you the other thing. When I was at Pokemon and I was handling government affairs for that company, you’d think the Pokemon name would do it, but there was not a member of Congress on Earth that wouldn’t take a meeting with a member of the board of NCMEC. Right? That organization, carries a lot of weight in DC. Democrats right through Republicans, nobody wouldn’t take my meeting. The entire organization is under the halo of, I said earlier, I’ve got people that I still like there, even though I have remember that they weren’t always aligned with the way I think. That organization sits under the halo of John Walsh.

John Walsh, who is, by the way, one of the greatest people I know, and two, exactly like that in real life. If you’ve seen him on America’s Most Wanted or any of his other shows, he is exactly like that. My wife and I sometimes look at each other and go, ‘get those dirt bags!’ Because that was the great John Walsh expression, ‘dirt bags!’ That man in my mind is one of the good men on earth. His wife is one of the great Americans. I think segregating out the organization and its mission from the organization and its public persona, I think is the way to rescue and save it.

Mike Masnick
We could go down a rabbit hole, which is not worth it. I just want to note that like, the challenge of making it actually an independent government agency is then, especially for the CyberTipline, you start to run into Fourth Amendment issues over…

Don McGowan
The Fourth Amendment issues are already there. There’s already case law on NCMEC and the Fourth Amendment.

Mike Masnick
Yes, but not in every circuit, so there’s a possibility that it will… but yes, you’re right that they are already dealing with some of that already because it has been determined by Neil Gorsuch, in fact, that that they’re a wing of the US government…

Don McGowan
And so I’ll say two things to that. One, if you think Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch would say something different, and two, as is the issue for so many private organizations, the fact that it’s not in every circuit doesn’t leave anybody thinking that it’s not going to be. Any circuit court decision, take it from a guy who was general counsel slash chief legal officer for 20 years. Any circuit court decision is the law of America.

Because you don’t pray for circuit splits. Because circuit splits are expensive

Mike Masnick
That is that is absolutely true.

All right. Well, I will let you go. But this has been a…

Don McGowan
Thanks for giving me the chance to come on, Mike. I really appreciate…

Mike Masnick
Yeah, it’s a really fascinating discussion, a really interesting look into NCMEC. And, I hope that that this gets sorted out, because I would like the organization to continue to do the good work that it does. And it worries me when they when they start promoting this nonsense or not protesting against other nonsense.

Don McGowan
This stuff needs to have somebody who is on the inside who’s willing to talk.

Mike Masnick
Yeah. Yeah. And so thank you so much for being willing to step up and to explain it.

Don McGowan
Can I take one last minute of this to do a thing that I would appreciate being able to do?

To the folks out there who were hurt by FOSTA, I don’t have another way to put it, I’m sorry. I will spend my life trying to fix that sin.

Mike Masnick
Well, thank you. Thank you for saying that. Thanks again for doing this and for speaking out and hopefully making more people aware of all this.

Don McGowan
Thanks to you, Mike.

Mike Masnick
And thanks to everyone for listening as well. And we will be back next week with another podcast.