COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCSC) – South Carolina’s attorney general is calling on state lawmakers to pass a bill he says will help keep more kids safe from online predators.
Alan Wilson, the state’s top prosecutor, said S.74 is commonsense legislation that would cut administrative red tape to ultimately protect children.
“It makes it easier, it makes it more efficient, it makes it quicker for us to go after child predators,” Wilson said in an interview. “We’re trying to keep up with the bad guys, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of them out there.”
When investigators are looking into people they believe are uploading or downloading child sex abuse material from the internet, the information that is available to them is typically only an IP address, a unique, identifying number that every device connected to the internet has.
To get an internet service provider to hand over the name of the person and the physical address associated with that IP address, investigators need a subpoena.
Right now, they can only obtain that through the US Attorney’s Office.
This bill would allow South Carolina’s attorney general to also sign off on those subpoenas so investigators can then seek warrants for the actual devices.
“When you talk about hundreds of cases that are backlogged, those times add up over a period of time, and so it can be very cumbersome to have to send it down the street and then wait a couple of weeks, and then you can go, when we can just sign them off right here,” Wilson said.
Wilson noted this change would not infringe one anyone’s due process rights because investigators would still need to seek warrants to seize devices and get into them.
Sen. Greg Hembree, R-Horry and a former solicitor, filed the legislation at Wilson’s request.
He said it gives the attorney general another tool to fight a crime that is all too frequent.
“This is not granting some sort of new authority to law enforcement. It doesn’t. It really is just a matter of convenience and speed,” Hembree said.
This bill has already passed in the Senate unanimously and now awaits a debate on the House of Representatives floor.
If it passes there, it will head to the governor’s desk.
But lawmakers have just three weeks to get it done before time runs out on this year’s legislative session, which ends May 8.
Any bill that has not passed both chambers by then cannot be taken up until the General Assembly starts its next legislative session in January.
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