The most notable of those anti-trafficking groups pitching Covenant Eyes was Shared Hope International, founded by Linda Smith, who served in Congress from 1995 to 1999. Elected on a platform devoted to opposing abortion and gay and lesbian rights, Smith spent her post-Congress time promoting herself as a leader in the movement against “sex trafficking.” Smith was the keynote speaker at the same 2011 porn and sex trafficking summit where DeHaas asked the audience to imagine their teen daughter naked on the internet, delivering melodramatic testimony about an American man “buying a girl” in an undercover video, and the girl “looked like my granddaughter.” Shared Hope, like other evangelical Christian sex trafficking groups, also mobilized again porn as something that they said drove “demand” for sex trafficking. Covenant Eyes took up this messaging; in 2014, they published a guide they called Stop the Demand: The Role of Porn in Sex Trafficking. Announcing the guide, DeHaas wrote, “if child prostitution is the main act, porn is the dress rehearsal.” On the Covenant Eyes blog, posts about purported “connections” between porn and sex trafficking still feature prominently, claiming to reveal “how children are trafficked through social media” or declaring that “the trafficking industry is fueled by porn.” Anti-sex trafficking groups began promoting Covenant Eyes to their supporters, pitching it as something concrete they could do to fight trafficking—to “take an active stance against the demand,” to “lead by example” by installing Covenant Eyes, as one anti-sex trafficking men’s group put it.
The “end demand” rhetoric fit perfectly alongside DeHaas’s ongoing promotion of Covenant Eyes as an “accountability” tool to halt porn use. Covenant Eyes was software that churches or employers could install on all work devices, he has offered in his pitch, to ensure that employees obey a church’s policies prohibiting viewing “unacceptable” content. Rather than merely filtering content a church or employer wants banned, the app captures at least one screenshot per minute, blurs them, and stores all of them on a server. From there, they can be accessed by the users listed as “accountability partners,” who are also periodically prompted with alerts to review their “partner’s” activity. “I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” one member of an evangelical Southern Baptist church called Gracepoint, and who was asked to use Covenant Eyes, told Wired. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”
Covenant Eyes doesn’t merely capture screenshots of whatever it is you might think would be categorized as pornography. Even Mike Johnson joked that his son’s Covenant Eyes report showed a “clean bill of health,” despite one screenshot it flagged as problematic, which the speaker reviewed and said was just a picture of women talking. But the experience of one Indiana family using the software was much more frightening: Covenant Eyes captured screenshots of everything they viewed on their devices, from “images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law,” according to an investigation from Wired earlier this year. They learned this after one family member was ordered to install the software by his probation officers, who served as the “accountability partner.” While Covenant Eyes’ terms of service forbids this kind of use in a “premediated legal setting,” Wired’s reporting showed that courts in at least five states were using Covenant Eyes in just this way, monitoring people awaiting trial or on parole. All of which is to say: If you think Mike Johnson’s use of Covenant Eyes is merely creepy, consider how it’s been used against people, and how it has been embraced by churches and by law enforcement. Johnson’s odd father-son relationship may, in the end, be the least creepy thing about this app he endorses.