 Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for being so obedient right off the start and coming to your seats. My name is John Palfrey, and on behalf of the Harvard Law School, just delighted to welcome you here to the first public meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. We have been convened over the course of the, much of the course of the year, by 49 state attorneys general through a joint statement that they entered into with Myspace and others. We have been joined over the course of the year by about 30 wonderful companies, NGOs, others who care about the safety of children to work on this topic. And we're delighted to have a point in the process where we're able to welcome the public into our work and to show off some of the technologies that we have been assessing. So the run of show for today is that we have solicited over the course of the summer for anybody who has a technical solution to help kids stay safe online. We received about 41 submissions over the course of the formal process. And of those, we have selected about 15 who will be presenting to you today. That's a lot of companies and a lot of technologies to take in. I beg of you, those who are presenting, to keep to the few minutes that we've asked you to present in so that there will be time for questions with each presentation. And I will be a harsh taskmaster, I'm sorry to say, as we go through the course of the day to get us out of here by five. One to say also concurrently, we've invited anyone who submitted those who are presenting and those who are not to set up a poster session out to the side, as well as a chance to show off technologies. And we hope many of you concurrently or otherwise will take advantage of the generosity of these presenters in setting up a poster session off to the left. So I wanted, before we began with our technical presentations over the course of the day, to welcome two extraordinary public servants who are at the heart of this effort. We have the great pleasure of welcoming both our Attorney General, Martha Coakley, and the Attorney General of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, who have joined us here today out of extraordinarily busy schedules during campaign season no less. And to help give us some of the context for why they took this unusual approach of not using a regulatory process but rather a collaborative process with some of the key social networks in the space and key technologists and even some crazy academics like us to see what we could do by working together to see if we can keep kids safer online. So without anything further from me, I'd like to welcome an extraordinary public servant, our Attorney General, Martha Coakley, to give us some opening remarks. Thank you very much, John, one of my favorite crazy academics, as a matter of fact. I am going first only because I have the home court advantage. But I am delighted to be here with my colleague, Dick Blumenthal, and he's going to have a chance to speak to you also. When I became an Attorney General almost two years ago, one of the things I quickly realized is that among my colleagues, there were two tremendous leaders in this field that I cared so much about because I had so much to do with it as a district attorney in Massachusetts, including Cambridge, and a quarter of the state. I had spent a lot of time investigating and prosecuting cases where children were victims. And it became clear to me through the course of the 90s that we had a whole new frontier to worry about, not just the guy in the raincoat in the schoolyard who could go after children or the father or boyfriend who had physical custody of a child. But now we had a frontier where there was absolutely almost unlimited ability for predators to reach out to children. And frankly, very little risk of being caught, being identified, and it created enormous challenges for us on the front lines for all of you who are here today. And when I became Attorney General again two years ago, there was already a tremendous amount of work being done by A.G. Blumenthal's office, by other A.G.'s including A.G. Cooper, and I know someone from his office is here today, for some of the staff at the A.G.'s office in Massachusetts. And I think we all realized what a tremendously challenging problem this was. And I will say that the fact that we are here today talking about this in this forum, as John referenced, I think is an incredible salute to the common sense and the goodwill and the collaboration of everybody to get the right result. Would that we had one-tenth or one-hundredth of this relating to what's happening on Wall Street, for instance, we'd be way ahead of the game. But I think we saw the wisdom of trying to address this as a problem and figure out what was the best way to get a good result for the people we serve. And we appreciate that you all have contributed to that, particularly here today, but in an ongoing effort to get cooperation and good results for what we're looking for. When 50 Attorneys General, 4950, formed this coalition, we worked particularly around the social networking sites and we quickly recognized that there were going to be technical issues that would require solutions, particularly around age verification and implementing design and functionality safeguards to protect minors on sites. We had seen, for instance, from our own work in this field that regardless of what a particular site might say or not say, children still had access to, and more importantly, predators still had access to an unlimited range of contacts. We saw the results of those contacts in terms of solicitations, in terms of unwanted material, including pornography, and in fact, we saw contacts that occurred offsite as a result of online sites that resulted in child abuse and sexual assaults and physical assaults. The key principles around what the joint statement involved talked about developing the online safety tools, the design and functionality changes, which we are quite interested in, educational and other tools for parents, educators, and children in law enforcement cooperation. And the leadership in the industry, acknowledging that these were important goals, I think was key, and it was a crucial turning point in our negotiations to make sure that we were here today working on the solutions we are instead of being involved in legal or paralegal squabbles over where we should go. And so the fact that this piece today and the public offering of it is occurring here in Harvard and in my old county seat in Massachusetts is a matter of great pride to me, and I appreciate that we are able to continue to work with you to get some results, not just to congratulate ourselves that we've been able to reach the joint statement, but by undertaking a comprehensive assessment of all the technologies available, we expect that the internet's safety technical task force will offer recommendations on the technologies that can be used to develop age and identity verification tools for social networking sites, and indeed for the internet as a whole. I look forward to receiving your recommendations in the next few months and how we have as a task force proceeded, and most importantly, I welcome you here to Cambridge today, and I thank you for your work. John. General Coakley, thank you, and thank you to your staff. Scott Schaefer and others have been extraordinary to work with, and we're very grateful for the leadership you've shown in your office has as well. Now, to introduce Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, as General Coakley mentioned, this is one of the nation's leaders on this topic, someone who has, during his tenure as Attorney General in Connecticut, really been one of the outspoken leaders to protect kids online, and he's gonna give us a slightly broader statement about his goals for this task force and a charge for today. General Blumenthal. Thank you very much. First, let me thank John Palfrey and the Berkman Center and all of the staff there for the great work that they have been doing on this very difficult and challenging and crucially important issue, and I wanna thank General Coakley for her leadership from the very first day that she was in office. She was a national leader on this issue of internet safety and has devoted a great deal of time and attention and great creativity to it, and I want to thank members of our staff who will be here throughout the course of the day, and hopefully in contact with you as well, Anthony Genata of my staff and Assistant Attorney General in Connecticut, and Jay Chowdery of North Carolina, Roy Cooper's Chief Assistant on this effort, and of course Scott Schaefer, all of them have done great work. Roy Cooper and I have co-chaired this task force of Attorney General and he could not be here today, but he will be following I'm sure very closely the results of these deliberations and the report that will be produced. As I was coming here this morning, walking through the square, I had one of those flashbacks, I'm sure you've had them an exam or a paper that is due tomorrow and you haven't started it yet. I was an undergraduate here many, many years ago, and I had one of those flashes and then could calmly reassure myself that I didn't have to produce anything at the end of the day, but John Palfrey does at least at the end of the year. And as much as we may be sharing ideas and being creative today, we want a product from this task force. It's not an academic exercise, forgive the term. It is very goal oriented. The Attorney's General established this task force because we want better means to protect children. It's really about as simple as that to increase the level of internet safety. Many of you who have talked with us know the passion that we bring to this issue and it is a passion that has united Attorney's General as I've never seen before in 18 years in my office. Other than the tobacco effort, which Connecticut also helped lead, there has been no other multi-state task force that has attracted so much support and interest as this one and I want to really very sincerely thank Myspace, which was the first to reach a historic agreement with us as Attorney's General that led to this task force as well as Facebook, which became the second to reach an agreement with us and the Myspace initiative in putting together this task force I think has been critically important and so I thank them as well as the Berkman Center. The task force I understand is now becoming rather than the Myspace task force, the Berkman Center task force, which I think is a good thing because we have tremendous trust and reliance on the Berkman Center and on John and his staff. You know, we realize, and you know, there's no magic bullet here, there's no panacea that will bring internet safety to parents who are deeply concerned and who will raise the subject of internet safety in almost any form where we as elected officials go. Part of our passion, quite honestly, is the result of that grassroots feeling on the part of parents and citizens and law enforcement officials. This issue is very much a law enforcement challenge and another part of the passion that we bring to this issue comes from our local and state police who are deeply concerned about the lack of age and identity authentication and verification because it leads to opportunities for child predators. Myspace has taken the initiative in eliminating about 50,000 child predators who have established profiles in their own names. Child predators who are registered in the state, go online using their own names, having been convicted of a felony involving criminal sexual assault. And of course, as we've said again and again, for all of those 50,000, there are a lot more that don't use their real names. The anonymity of the internet is one of the great threats that law enforcement sees to apprehending and also preventing criminal assaults. So we have a very direct interest in our law enforcement role, as well as parents. I'm the father of four children, ages 22, 19, 16 and 14. Roy Cooper has young children, many others do. We see this problem very personally and closely as citizens and parents as well as law enforcement officials. I am tremendously excited about these 41 submissions and about the 15 presentations that we're gonna see today. But even more, I'm excited about the dynamic effort that's involved here. John was telling me that some of the submitters contacted him after a few months, after their initial submission, and said, could we update what we gave you? This whole area, the new technologies, I think are obviously, you know better than I, a work in progress. And what's exciting is the focus and the work being done. We don't expect to have a magic or final product, a final solution. On December 31, but this task force, I think has stimulated a lot of progress. And I think we'll have a very, very positive result. And this process that has brought us to a point on the trajectory, I think we'll go on and we hope to continue to support and encourage that progress. Ultimately, of course, the goal is not only to enable better law enforcement, but also to empower parents. We've said this again and again and again and again. When we're asked, how can you possibly replace parents as a source of responsibility? No, the objective is not to replace parents, not to in any way substitute for them or absolve them of responsibilities, in fact, to enable them to be more responsible and to empower them. And of course, to bring a greater measure of accountability to the social networking sites and to the issue of internet safety. Accountability is the antidote to the dangers of anonymity. And whether it's holding schools accountable, holding parents accountable, all who should be held accountable, we hope to do. So I think that this task force's work is really gonna be very profoundly significant to the State Attorney's General, to our constituents, to the parents of our country. And I want to thank all of you for participating, for your contributions here today. And for the product, for participating in the product that eventually we will have that is so important. Thank you very much. Thank you, General Blumenthal. We have about 10 minutes until our presentations begin. And General Blumenthal and Coakley have kindly agreed to take a few questions if anyone would like to ask them. Just a reminder, this is totally recorded completely on the record streaming as we speak. So just as a fair warning. But they'd be delighted to take a few questions and maybe at about 10.28 or so if the Aristotle team might start making their way up, we'll get started at 10.30. So maybe take any questions for... I'm only here in case General Blumenthal needs a lawyer. Does this question... I see, oh good, excellent. He's got a fabulous one. A local lawyer, in fact. Someone who knows the Cambridge scene well. I can't believe, after having led this task force for eight months, that there would be nobody standing up to have anything to say. We have put everyone to sleep. No, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Yes, please. Do you mind coming to your mic or can I give you one? And you have a right to remain silent. Yeah. Though being accountable and saying who you are would be great. I'm James Carmichael from Southern California. I represent ChatSafe. Something you said earlier, are you going to have representatives that we can speak to later during the course of the session and into the afternoon? Why don't Tony Jay, Scott, if you could just stand up. So people know who you are. Thank you. Where your hostage is. Absolutely. Tony Janata of Connecticut, Jay Choudhury of North Carolina and Scott Schaefer of Massachusetts, extraordinary assistant. I'm Kevin Trilley, Cert Ideas of the Company. I just had a question about, you're bringing the US perspective obviously to this, but yet we all know the internet's a very global forum. And just, how does that fit into your thinking with other countries in the world that are looking at this or just as the solutions that are proposed, how they can work within the US, without the US, and how's that criteria going to affect kind of how you look at this? Well, I'll attempt an answer and then if General Coakley wants to give a better answer, probably she will. You know, obviously there are global ramifications and we are not an island. It's a little bit like, forgive me for oversimplifying the financial crisis. You know, we can't deal with the whole world's recession or the whole world's credit sees up. We have to deal with what's happening in this country even though we are inextricably linked in the financial world as we are in the internet world with other countries, but we can set a model. And that's partly what we're doing in the financial area. We're setting a model of hopefully a new system that works better than the old as well as a temporary bailout. And we are very focused on what can be done with new technologies to authenticate age and identity or impose other safety measures. That will protect children and stop inappropriate content in a way that can set a model for the whole world. And you know, again, at the risk of seeming much too simplistic, Roy Cooper and I have both said, and I'm sure infuriated many of you when we said it, that if we can put a man on the moon, we can make the internet safer. And I think this task force in a way is living proof of it because you've made such progress, those 41 submissions and there are others that are not in the book, partly because folks didn't wanna make them public right now. I think a test to the progress that we can make moving on. So we need to set a model for the whole world in my view, even though we can't impose on the rest of the world these solutions, we can set standards and we can raise the bar. I agree with Duke, I think that's the right answer and I had a little bit of time to think while he was answering, but it seems to me that we've done that and we do that in other areas. The most obvious parallel is what we're trying to do to protect online identity theft. We know that there's a lot of rings in Eastern Europe, for instance, that trade in information both from here and around the world. Well, we're maybe not gonna be able to go after them, but we can make those transactions safer and we can give tools to consumers to make sure that their own information is protected. We should do a better job of keeping lead paint out of China, for instance, and so if we up, we're not gonna stop what happens in China around those toys, but we do have things we can do around the borders and what we do to protect what comes into the country, both literally and online and so the technology is there to do it and I think you keep in mind what we're trying to accomplish is a global in communication network, but we see it as a challenge, certainly, but not an overwhelming one and I think that the dick is exactly right, it's the technology that we're talking about now that will let us focus on keeping people who use it safe as opposed to worrying about what else is out there. If I might just respond on behalf also of the Berkman Center Task Force and how we've approached this in consultation with the attorneys general, we've adopted sort of a concentric circles approach here, which is, as General Blumenthal mentioned, he's most focused on identity authentication tools as the technology solution that we need to answer to, but we also came back and said, look, there's a lot of other stuff going on in the technology space, maybe more broadly even, identity on the internet or some of the other ideas we've heard about. So we've drawn a broader circle around that. Likewise, we've heard that social networks are their area of primary interest and that the joint statement makes that plane. On the other hand, we've said some of the research shows that in instant messaging or chat is where a lot of issues are happening. So we've drawn a broader circle around social networks to say the internet. The same is true with national and international. We came back and said, plainly, these are state attorneys general covering the United States, but we have some international participants. Bebo, for instance, is on the task force, and we've also recognized that this is a problem you can't just border around the US. So again, the broader concentric circle has international in it, so your concern has been noted and concerned. So I'm gonna do two more questions. Wendy Seltzer of the Berkman Center and then John Morris, and then we'll let you off the hook if that's okay. Thank you, Wendy. Thanks. So I hear a lot about keeping children safe while using social networking tools and one of the ways that it seems that these tools help children to make themselves safer is by giving them outlets for information where they can find things that their families or their local communities might disapprove of to learn information from their peers and from other trusted sources for which even children at times need anonymity and need privacy. How do we strike that balance, particularly as we hear some government pressure through cooperation to close down on anonymous channels? How do we keep enough room for anonymity that children and adults can explore? Well, you know, anonymity has its place even in a world of full disclosure and we live pretty much in a world of full disclosure or a much greater disclosure than I can ever remember and then I've ever read about. Ultimately, everything becomes public in the world we inhabit seemingly anyway these days, but there is certainly a place for anonymity when it comes to personal advice. You know, even in the law, there are privileges against testifying. There are confidentiality protections for documents and even when it comes to the government, there are protections for certain kinds of national security secrets. On the internet, I think there is a role for anonymity but it ought to be constrained or at least limited to accommodate the safety concerns that have been raised. Right now, it seems very much like Times Square where everyone moving around is anonymous and that's the analogy that is frequently drawn and I think what we want is perhaps some greater accountability where it can play a role in effective protection of children and also not only is it anonymity but it's actually outright falsehood. If somebody says he is 17 and he's actually 37, there ought to be a way to stop it or stop that prevarication, misrepresentation before it has damages. If a child says she is 11, if a child says she is 17 or 18 and she's actually 11, there ought to be some way to check that. Same with obviously identity, false identity. So I don't think that accountability necessarily is always adverse to anonymity where it's appropriate but the role of anonymity is a limited one. I think that's a fair question to ask and I think that that discussion is gonna continue as we have this new marketplace. I hear in the question, the concern about First Amendment and freedom of expression that's always been the discussion. That's always how it gets framed as it should be. And so I think and I know the attorneys general agree with me is that we're not trying to tamp down on that. People may disagree where those lines get drawn and that's why we continue to have the conversation but that discussion about the marketplace of ideas in this particular marketplace will continue. And so we have a job to do. We are advocates for safety. We know what the limits may be or should be and it's just a much bigger marketplace and we're gonna continue to have that discussion I think. Yeah. John Morris. Another question. Just one, John asked me very short so just I'll do it one sentence. Do you anticipate taking recommendations from this task force and attempting to implement them through mandatory legislation at the state level? Legislation regulation of social networks at the state level. That's a very good question and let me try to be brief. First of all, the idea of regulation as General Coakley just said, I think is one that is kind of a last resort to us governmental intervention or regulation or dictates from the government is really not a goal here. In fact, the whole purpose of the task force and of our agreements first with MySpace and then with Facebook and perhaps with others eventually is to achieve voluntary solutions. A lot of what we're doing here is simply enforcing the rules that the rules of service or the rules of participation that the sites themselves have and we want them to be enforced. So we see ourselves as partners and to answer your question, I don't envision these recommendations as being the basis for legislation. If they work, my assumption is they'll be adopted without regulation. Regulation is sort of the sort of Damocles that hangs over all of us. And by us, I mean we as well because when there's a regulation or a law, we got to enforce it. And as we've seen all too often, laws are only as good as they can be enforced and there are a lot of laws that are not enforced which I think undermines the credibility and structure of our entire legal system. So my hope is the recommendations will be credible and sound and will be adopted voluntarily, not by governmental fiat. All right, that's great, concise statements. General Blumenthal, General Coakley, thank you so much for your leadership and for being here today.