By Greg Jordan
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
CHARLESTON — West Virginia’s attorney general announced Thursday that the state was filing a lawsuit against a tech company for its part in distributing and storing materials showing child sexual abuse.
West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey spoke about the lawsuit during a press conference streamed live from his Charleston office. He said the consumer protection lawsuit involved the failure of Apple, Inc. to report child sexual abuse material.
McCuskey said lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleges that the company knowingly allowed its iCloud platform to be used as a vehicle for distributing and storing child sexual abuse material –CSAM – and for years chose to do nothing about it.
“And the basis for our complaint here today is that child explicitly sexual material which is called CSAM is able to be housed and transferred Apples end-to-end encrypted iCloud system in a way that deviates from their market competitors in a way that eliminates law enforcement’s ability to find these images and find the people who are proliferating them,” McCuskey said. “And Apple is profiting by virtue of the fact they made a conscious decision to not filter these images, not report them to the proper authorities and charge the people who are trying to keep and use these images for what are undoubtedly ugly, disgusting and illegal purposes.”
McCuskey turned to a television screen displaying text messages he said were shared between Apple executives.
The lawsuit reveals that Apple, in its own internal communications, described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn,” but took no meaningful action to stop it. Rather than implement industry-standard detection tools used by its peers, Apple repeatedly shirked their responsibility to protect children under the guise of user privacy, he said.
“Preserving the privacy of child predators is absolutely inexcusable. And more importantly, it violates West Virginia law. Since Apple has so far refused to police themselves and do the morally right thing, I am filing this lawsuit to demand Apple follow the law, report these images, and stop re-victimizing children by allowing these images to be stored and shared,” McCuskey said.
The attorney general then said that thousands of West Virginia’s children are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
“Here in West Virginia, I think one of the things that is really great is the fact that we are leading this from a national standpoint. We have a well-documented child welfare problem in West Virginia,” McCuskey said. “We know that we have thousands of kids who are at the greatest amount of risks to be exploited sexually because what the data tells us that kids who are in and out of foster systems, kids that have troubled home lives, kids who have parents who might be struggling with substance abuse disorder, these are the very kids who predators prey on.”
Federal law requires all technology companies based in the U.S. to report detected CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to the attorney general’s office. In 2023, Apple made just 267 such reports. In contrast, Google filed 1.47 million reports and Meta filed more than 30.6 million.
The complaint argues that because Apple maintains end-to-end control over its hardware, software, and cloud infrastructure, it cannot claim to be an unknowing, passive conduit of child sexual abuse material. Apple designed, built, and profited from the very system it allowed to be weaponized against children.
The consumer protection complaint, filed in the Circuit Court of Mason County, is the first lawsuit of its kind brought by a governmental agency against Apple over child sexual abuse material distribution, McCuskey said.
The West Virginia Attorney General’s Office is seeking statutory and punitive damages, injunctive relief requiring Apple to implement effective detection measures for child abuse material distribution and equitable remedies mandating safer product design going forward.
A message sent Thursday to Apple, Inc. for comment was not answered.
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