 Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another amazing episode of Security Matters Hawaii. My guest today is a sought-after speaker nationally, internationally. She's an expert in child exploitation, and I'm happy to have Perry after I've joined this day. Perry, thank you very much. Well, I appreciate it, Andrew. It was a very kind intro. The Internet has caused a lot of people a lot of problems. We hear it constantly about business compromise. We hear the cybersecurity breaches. Adults have their own set of responsibilities, but children are often just not aware of everything that's thrown their way as far as compromising them, compromising who they are, exploiting what they do. So, we're going to get into this, and I know this is for, I think, for everyone. It's sort of a difficult topic, and I think that that's perhaps why it doesn't get the discussion that it deserves. So thank you again for joining us today. What's your take on the conversation? Is it gaining traction? Is it getting broader? Well, there are two parts of the conversation. One is what you talk to kids about, about how to be safer, privacy settings, protecting their own reputation, respect for themselves and others. And the second more serious issue is what happens behind the scenes. The creeps that are out there, cyber-bullying, death threats, putting somebody's head on someone else's naked body, those are a lot more serious, and we talk about that less on television and the media than we should, because that's a very difficult conversation to have. Yeah, and do you think that it, is it because it strikes home? I think that most people don't do this, and so they're shocked that someone would, so they'd rather sort of hide from it maybe perhaps rather than address it head on, take those conversations home with their own children or make sure that these conversations are being had in their schools. What's your feeling about that? I agree. They're very hard conversations. A lot of teachers and others who do programs in schools and even parents who want to talk to their kids don't know how to do it, and they also feel intimidated thinking the kids know more about technology. They may, but we know more about life. So we need to recognize the risks. At the same time, you have the industry that's trying to play down the risks. You'll talk to a lot of cyber safety experts who've been in it almost as long as I have 25 years, and they'll tell you that it's not really happening because they get a lot of funding from the Googles and from the Facebook to say it's not happening. So the conversation needs to be had in the same way that good touch, bad touch, needs to be had, and what you do online stays online. And at the same time, we need to have these conversations with professionals who may be able to stop the real cyber crimes from occurring. In your experience with these platform owners, I'm sure they're not trying to promote this behavior, but what's your sense that they feel responsible for their tool being leveraged? And do they say, well, that's just the way it is? Or do you think that there's an active effort to find and take down people that are being predatorial or posting inappropriate, targeting children with inappropriate material? Well, Vince Cerf, the man who invented TCPIP, the internet, has put together a group called the People-Centered Internet. And there are a few of us he asked and involved. I tend to be the cyber safety not smartest person in the room. Everybody else is a scientist and brilliant world leader. But he is trying to make sure that the digital technology that he helped construct can be used in positive ways and not used in dangerous ways. And Tim Berners-Lee, the person who invented the web, it has the same thing. He has an NGO that does that. Now, the industry, our parents, their people too, and they care about these issues, but they care a lot more about being free of liability. And there's a law in the United States called the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, that gives absolute immunity to any of the providers for whatever they do to keep things or take things down in their own judgment. They don't have to do a thing and you can't sue them about it. Now, child pornography, images of child sexual exploitation are exceptions to that. But there are a lot of things, cyber bullying, videos of deaths and self-harm that are not covered by those exceptions. And as long as they don't have liability for them, they're only going to do what's good for business. Wow. Is there an appetite for a change to that law? I know that's the perspective that you bring to this issue. And I know there's an appetite probably from the public, but what about the business community and the shareholders? Well, you know what's interesting. The digital providers are lining up. So the IBMs and Cisco's of the world really are unhappy about the tech clash that we're seeing against the reputation of all tech providers. And they do something about 230. So they're really doing the right thing and they're on the hill talking and they're talking to me and others. But the Facebooks and the YouTubes really need that in place because they don't want liability and they're already spending as much as they're willing to spend on taking down radicalization, massacre videos, putting a kid's head on somebody else's naked body, whatever. And so we're getting them to line up and do something and Congress is starting to listen. But the problem is people don't know about it. Yeah. And as long as they don't know about it, they're not going to complain and make a lot of noise. So we're going to start that education today. Yeah. I do wonder if the, you know, our congressional leaders tend to be older and I don't know if they're as up to date with what you can actually do with these platforms and how powerful they are. And many times the kids are as good at evading detection for the things they're doing or better than maybe their parents are trying to find out what their children are doing online. Is there a, when I asked about an appetite, do you think we'll see a push back into the corporate America? You think that they can be regulated or you think it just has to be done like sort of under the FCC constraints or something like that? Well, the Federal Trade Commission has something called COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy. And they've now asked for comments from us as to whether it's good enough and it regulates kids under the age of 13 preteens. So the question is, should it be for older kids as old as 15, 16? What do parents need notifications on? When do they have to give absolute consent? And how much of that's privacy versus how much is safety? So we're now looking, there's going to be a hearing in October and a lot of us are putting in comments and C and in other countries around the world, they're putting a lot, a lot stricter rules now because everyone's concerned about what's happening to kids and the trust to the industry seems to have been misplaced. Yeah, I was having a discussion that we haven't, we in the security sector, we sort of let cybersecurity get ahead of this by not paying attention to it for decades. And now the privacy discussion has also gotten in front of the security industry and we didn't address it first. So it's going to be taught to us. And it seems that that idea could also be expanded into technology itself where the, because these things weren't taken care of and because criminals learned how to leverage them against children and against all of us for that matter, you know, we've got to come backwards in it. It seems to take so much longer to fix something from the backside. And I don't know if in your estimation or maybe changes to these laws to expand protection or expand the age groups they protect. Is this a decades long sort of battle? We have to fight with the technology companies or is it something that you think can move a little quicker? Well, I think it's an ongoing battle. And we do it up top down and from the middle in both directions. So we're looking at the government putting in new rules that looks like there's some appetite for using digital best practices, cyber safety standards as a basis for what these the industry players have to do. And it just so happens, the new charity we're forming is putting those standards together. And I hope, Andrew, you're going to help us with that and in regard and everybody out in Hawaii that cares can weigh in as to what they need. We also need people to start talking about what's going on, what they like, what they don't like, what they want the schools to do, how better secure they need to be in the middle in both directions. We need to start coming up with standards, training and certifications in cyber safety and the same way we do in cyber security and privacy. So it's time not to think that that's just kids putting a computer in a central location. There's a lot more to it. We're talking about lives and the future reputations of our kids. Yeah, I think I do want to talk about them probably a little more in the second part of our of our broadcast today. But the idea that parents or teachers or administrators, for that matter, think that we are supervising these kids very well. I think that the kids are fairly adept at disguising things that they know are on the on the edge of what they should or shouldn't be doing. Perhaps normal human mode is just like desire or curiosity to explore things. It takes takes these kids to places that are waiting for them. And the kids just don't know that that's the intent of what's the of the material that's there. You know, this is a magazine. We used to hide under the mattress. We're talking about the bad guys who to our kids bedrooms and their backpacks and our purses through these hand devices where kids are taking pictures and sharing them and taking their clothes off at the age of 10, because somebody asked them to. We need to recognize that people are getting in our homes and our lives and into our children's hearts through this technology. And we need to train our kids directly. We need to train their friends how to keep them safe. And we need to know enough and be comfortable enough sitting rules and saying, I'm the parent. I'm not your best friend. Yeah, it's interesting to me how many I see fairly young children with with mobile phones. And, you know, I think they're definitely under 10. And it kind of amazes me that the parents allow them to sort of I see them just sitting around the mall or even sitting like after school around the school. And I'm stunned that I think that there's a lack of knowledge out there. So we do have to work on it from all levels, for sure. What's been the sort of the biggest trend you know, I know that more and more young adults are being targeted more and more often. So it seemed like cyber bullying was sort of on the radar for a while. What what other trend do you feel is sort of risen up or is increasing that people aren't aware of? Well, sexting, sex distortion and sexed bullying. So sexting when kids are taking naked or sometimes sexually explicit and sometimes just suggestive images of themselves. You might find a group of 12 year old girls who want the attention of the seniors on the football team or a boy or a girl who are taking it because they're in love or they have a relationship. Boys do it to show everybody what they're missing. If they don't go out with them, girls do it often to get attention or because they're asked or being coerced. Those images get out unintentionally most of the time. But once they're out, they get into the hands of traditional sexual predators who are now blackmailing our kids for more images or to meet them in real life to engage in sex. And these predators, high school students or their peers who are blackmailing them as well. And then we have sex bullying often by girls of other girls. They get a hold of these images or they'll manufacture them by taking a girl's head and putting it on somebody else's naked body. And they'll do it to their reputation. Hmm. This is something else. So we're talking with Perry Aftab here. We're talking about child exploitation and specifically the Internet and child exploitation. We're covering some great ground. We're going to take a break, pay some bills. We'll be back in one minute. Sit tight. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours, the Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of ThinkTech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, the Cook Foundation, Dwayne Kurisu, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Volo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. We're back with Security Matters Hawaii and today we're talking with expert Perry Aftab about Internet and Child Exploitation. Perry, you've worked hard on the laws in this country. You've seen it evolve. You've taken your focus from Internet protection down to, I think, really protecting children on the Internet. And I know we want to talk a little bit about the foundation that you're setting up. But I think you mentioned something right before we went to break about the age ranges of some of these children that are maybe bullying each other and then these images that they're taking or sharing are getting picked up by true predators who then start to blackmail them. Is this expanding? Are we getting kids younger and younger and younger? I mean, I said I've seen them, you know, very young children with these mobile phones and I'm surprised that they have them. Should we just expect these trends to follow the, you know, the younger you give them, they're going to figure out how to do these things? Yes, unfortunately, it's not just a mobile phone. It's a lot of the tablets that parents think are harmless with Wi-Fi phones. And so I had lunch the other day with the head of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force here in New Jersey. And John was explaining to me that he's seeing sexting as young as eight and nine. Wow. Now, the youngest is a 10-year-old. And, you know, when they take off their clothes, frankly, they all look exactly alike at those ages. Posing without bras when they don't need them, but they're doing it because they're being sexualized. The Internet's forcing a lot of different looks and poses and the rest on them. And the demands are being paid by boys and girls of each other. And the Internet's an easy way to do it, somehow thinking that what you do in the privacy of your bathroom or your bedroom, and when no one else is looking, doesn't count, but those images are real. Yeah. And they never go away. I saw Europol took down a pretty large European group recently. What's the feeling from the Task Force director you spoke with? Is there a lot of this that's housed in the U.S., or is a lot of it going overseas, or is it some of both? Well, sex trafficking tends to be housed around the world less in the United States than it is in other places. There was years ago when UNESCO put me in charge of sexual crimes against children for the United States. A lot of it was being housed in Japan because they had faster and more secure networks. However, sexting issue that's now turning into a lot of images, Interpol had five million images, and they couldn't tell if they were sex-trafficked images or kids who took them voluntarily because they had too much to drink at a party. So when law enforcement doesn't know to investigate and what to do about it, we're in serious trouble. Especially if the volume is that high. Are the platform providers, are they actively helping with these investigations when it comes their way? I know we talked a little bit about how they don't want to be regulated, but are they willing to help in these investigations in your experience when it comes their way? Or does it have to be taken and drugged from court? Well, most of them require a subpoena unless it's an exigent circumstance, a child who's missing, a child who's seriously at risk and you have enough. What we're doing as part of this new charity we're setting up is we're creating standards and I have some of the leading experts in the world working with me on creating what the standards need to be for the industry to work with law enforcement on investigation. So I have John Ryan, who headed the National Center for Missing and Supported Children. Bob Schilling, who Bob was succumbed to, Interpol for the Crimes Against Children we have. Ron Laney and Ron had run DOJ on these issues forever. And so many of the other experts, John Rouse out of Australia, RCMP, Home Office, we're all getting together. We're going to come up with what we think the rules should be and I think enough of us make noise. They will become the rules. Good. And is the international community willing to play out? I see more activity, truthfully, from Interpol and Europol about these sort of takedowns or these investigations and even publishing, hey, we're looking for people. I see Europol all the time posting, like, have you seen this vest or have you seen this, you know, if you can identify this garment, let us know where you saw it or a picture of a barn somewhere, things like that. So it seems like there's a great appetite internationally. Is a lot of the traffic and activity running internationally? Is that why we need that support? Or is it just more visible because they're crossing so many, I guess, legal, you know, I guess technology boundaries, right? You're crossing different providers and things like that as you move material, you know, outside the U.S. into Europe, for example. Well, a lot of it has always come from outside of the U.S. Kips, the very first program to use things around you and environments to find sexual, sexually trafficked kids, came out of Canada with a plea to Bill Gates. But dealing with smaller countries, it's more obvious. The United States is very fractured. We tend to be less supportive of law enforcement in this country than we should be. And I think we need to put up walls to law enforcement, being able to get the information they want. Those walls don't exist as much outside of the United States. They tend to allow government, including law enforcement, to have more information than we're comfortable doing in the United States. That has to change. Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, kids are our top priority. Saving a life, saving a future for a child comes before politics. Yeah, and saving just one. You know, we've got a few thousand that live on the streets here in Hawaii in Honolulu. And it's sad. You know, there's a lot of outreach that goes out to them, but they're, you know, they're safer on the street than they feel like they are at home. And so they just won't go home. And that's always a hard-working story. They may be safer on the streets or at least a different kind of risk. When you trust somebody and hope that they're going to love you and take care of you and they don't, that betrayal is very different. But even street children in Delhi and in Mumbai and India have access to cell phones that somebody's discarded. And although they don't have providers, they have SIM cards. And the SIM cards are stored with grooming images of videos of children being raped that will help less perhaps their resistance to being the next victim. Wow. That's so sad. What levels of outreach are happening for the kids? I know at some of the schools, and I don't know if it's private schools, public schools, what's your feeling about the outreach and the education? You know, are we just hitting them once a year at the beginning of the school year? Is there ongoing programs you're aware of that we could emulate and maybe talk about to educators here in Hawaii? I hate to keep saying our new charity. However, whatever we've been doing for 25 years hasn't been working. We have programs where kids teach each other. We teach 14 to 16 year olds to go down to the grammar schools and teach the other kids to be safer. My grandson's just started the cyber safety agents program this weekend where my grandson said he's the CEO. He's turning eight this week. And he wants their kids to keep their homes more secure and keep an eye on the cyber bullies. We even have a therapy dog program. That's the cyber safety service dog program where people who have therapy dogs can go into schools, hospitals, community groups. We'll teach them about the cyber safety messaging and they bring a dog to help the kids heal for all of the bad stuff that they may encounter. So we're going to throw everything we can at the wall and whatever works we're going to keep. And our model of we're all unpaid volunteers works pretty well. But Hawaii's been ignored far too often. You have a multicultural space. It's really you've got aboriginal values. You have really some amazing things as people come in from all over the world and build a community that protects their land, their ocean and their children. So it's time we create something special. So you invite me out. We'll do some snorkeling create some programs at the same time. Yeah, we'll have some an aloha chapter for sure of your organization. I think the idea of kids teaching kids is so important because there's a there's a natural wall that drops. I think when you are not an adult talking down to a child and not many of us are schooled and how to teach children. And we probably lapse into the, you know, talking down voice maybe too quickly. How's the success been? I did see that you're I saw you're actually that your grandson posted that he was the CEO is on LinkedIn. I was amazed by that. How's. So is this something that he's he's gotten some experience with already is he been out talking to other folks. He has a lot more. Our Teen Angels program are 13 to 18 year old kids and they testified before Congress. They speak at the United Nations. They speak at Parliament and House of Lords. They create programs. They sit on boards. They have been the voice of this so for so long. But now the younger kids are saying, wait a minute, you know, we want to make sure our house is safer. We want to make sure our friends are safer. We have a voice here. So we're using animations of the cyber safety service dog teaching those kids about cyber safety so they can teach it others. They'll get badges. I created many years ago the program for the Girl Scouts of the USA and it's old and it's now down. I think it's time to do another one. We need to reach out to all of the groups, the faith based groups, youth pastors, the Scouts on both sides, any of the service organizations for H anything that has kids together and let's arm them with the information they need to keep their own kids safe. Happy to share. I think it's a great idea. Perry, I look forward to helping out with this. We'll get the Hawaii chapter started for you. I truly appreciate you taking time to chat with us today. We've got about 30 seconds left if you want to make one last plug for the charity. Okay, brand new. It's sites not even up other than watch this space. It's called cyber safety.org. We're all unpaid volunteers. We're going to be training and certifying and getting out there together. We're going to own this issue and we're going to keep our kids safe. And Andrew, I couldn't do it without you. We all need to work on this one together, folks. They said it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village to keep them safe as well. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week. We'll be a GSX. Perry, I know you'll be up there speaking as well. So we'll be in Chicago, but we'll be back in a few weeks. Thanks for joining us today. Aloha, everybody. Take care.