Category: Internet Crime

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Correcting Bad Information on Social Media-Craig Silvermen

June 7, 2016 by CSOSA

DC Public Safety Radio

See the main site at http://media.csosa.gov

Listen to the radio show at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2015/07/social-media-during-emergencies-craig-silverman-buzzfeed/

Leonard: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s topic: social media during emergencies. Does government have the ability to correct bad information?

I am honored today to have Craig Silverman. He is the founding editor of Buzzfeed Canada. He is at Twitter, @Craigsilverman. To say that this is an extraordinarily important topic is an understatement. Craig wrote a document; Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content. It was funded by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Knight Foundation. Throughout this radio show of great importance, and immense complexity, I want us to focus on 3 things: A. How do we address misinformation? B. What can we do about misinformation, and C. If we had a dirty bomb that went off in your area, we practiced this all the time when I was with the Maryland emergency management, what are the implications for public safety and the surrounding area? Craig, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Craig: Thank you so much for having me.

Leonard: I am honored to have you. With the world economic forum in 2014 according to your report, top trends, viral misinformation. The world economic forum is saying viral misinformation is one of the top trends in the world, correct?

Craig: Yes, that’s right. It made their list of the people that they had asked to fill out a survey. People from around the world put that in the top 10.

Leonard: That’s amazing. Misinformation regardless as to it’s an emergency or not, is standard practice in today’s media world. Is that correct?

Craig: Absolutely. When you have a world of decentralized media, where people can easily publish instantly from a smart phone, can easily start to make something gather attention and vitality through social networks, we end up getting a lot of stuff that circulates that simply isn’t true. There have always been rumors. People have always traded information that had a questionable level of voracity, or was in that early emerging stage where you don’t know if it’s true or not. What happens today is these natural human tendencies that we have to pass along information, to share information, it can really go like wildfire because we live in a network society. There’s a huge amount of misinformation that gets out there. It can very easily be seen as true by a lot of people, and once it starts fooling influential folks, such as people in the press, or people in influential positions and government or other places, then it really starts to be seen as true. It’s a big priority, I think, in newsrooms to do a better job of understanding the dynamics of rumor and misinformation, and I think for the folks that you talk to, and in the roles that you’re in, it’s also critically important.

Leonard: It’s compounded during an emergency if we have a hard time correcting bad information on Facebook and Twitter, and the other social media platforms. If it gets into newsrooms, newsrooms end up repeating it. On a day to day basis, that’s a tough nut to crack. When there’s an emergency, if I’m driving in my car, when I was with Maryland Emergency Management, equipped lights and sirens. They say there’s a problem, I have to drive to the problem where we’re setting up a media briefing center, and while driving, and it’s going to take me an hour and a half to get there under the best of circumstances, the rumor goes off that there’s a dirty bomb. I don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of putting out that rumor. I mean, I’m driving to the scene. During an emergency, this stuff flows fast and furious.

Craig: Absolutely, it does. Obviously my area of expertise is not in emergency management, but the first thing that comes to mind to me as you’re describing that scenario is there are certainly some physical responsibilities, in person communication, going to scenes, evaluating what’s going on. There’s that piece of it, and I would hope that people involved in this world also think about setting up social media command centers to a certain point, to monitor the information that’s coming out of that specific area where a disaster might have happened, or there are reports of a disaster. Also looking at the larger networks and monitoring key words and other things to see what people are talking about. There’s a two-fold purpose in it. This has some overlap with newsrooms. On the one hand, there were people who are just simply closer to the problem, closer to what’s going on than you are, if you’re in your car driving over, what have you. They may have access to a smart phone, they may be on Twitter, they may be on Instagram. There’s a hug amount of information that could be coming out in real time, from the critical area, or from people who have a certain level of expertise and knowledge. They may be going to social networks to put that out there.

The other side of it, aside from gathering information, you want to use these channels to push out quality information. I think that through both of those things, the monitoring of information, you should be looking at rumors and claims that are out there, and trying to triangulate the information, and compare it to the information that you have coming in from your other sources. On the other side in terms of communicating information, you want to think about, we know this rumor is circulating. We know that it’s true, we know that it’s false, or maybe we don’t know whether it’s true, what can we put out to give some context and to help in the process of people understanding and making sense of the situation. I think in the scenario you described, you’re in the car driving as fast as you can to get there, I would hope that there are colleagues who are really monitoring social media. Not only to gather additional information to provide to you as you give you’re briefings, or what have you, but also to really see if there are things that are starting to take flight that may not be true, or that you really need to look more into to see whether they’re true or not.

Leonard: Even when it’s not during an emergency, I would contend that most of us in emergency management throughout the United States, most of us within the criminal justice system throughout the United States, we do not have these special I-teams to do that analysis. The question becomes whether or not we are all sophisticated enough and do we have our own personal social media accounts, and do we have enough of them? It may be Twitter, it may be Facebook, but it could be an endless number of others that are putting out this misinformation. It would take somebody savvy, it would take somebody who already has social media accounts, and it would take an almost instantaneous network to begin to compare notes, before we could put out these fires.

Craig: Yeah. This is one of the things that it goes to a point that’s really, really important. I worked on a project with the European Journalism Center, something called the verification handbook, where it was a document oriented towards newsrooms, but also humanitarian workers, helping them verify information in real time in emergency scenarios. One of the things that became very clear is as we talked to journalists with the Australian broadcasting Corporation, she talked about their experience with wildfires in Australia. I’m sure that this probably isn’t news to you, but one of the things that became very clear from talking to her is what you do before the emergency happens dictates how well you’re going to handle it and cover it in the moment.

In these scenarios, rather than trying to figure out who on the team has got social media accounts or what have you, obviously it has to become part of the planning process. What are the channels we’re going to use? What are the ones that are most important to use in terms of getting news out in real time? I would say that Twitter is a very important one, because that’s where people tend to look for real time information.

Leonard: Yeah.

Craig: Facebook is obviously where the most amount of people are. Facebook is doing a lot of work to be seen as more real time, and more hospitable to real time, so a Facebook page is also really important. I think setting this stuff up ahead of time of, where are we going to communicate this information, who is going to own these channels, and what are we going to use these channels for? Those are really, really important things to think about much sooner than before you get the reports that a dirty bomb has gone off. Figuring out who on the team has expertise in this area, figuring out what accounts exist or need to be set up, and then how you’re going to use those. Those are just as important as all the other pieces of preparation that are going to be done, because not only is it important for, again, getting the information out, but if people know this is a trusted source, and a place where good information is coming from, then they may actually bring intelligence and information to you, and it becomes a place where people can start to contribute. It again gets that kind of two-way thing going, which is really, really important and useful.

Leonard: I think you would agree that there’s no piece of technology out there that that’s going to solve this. I’ve been also looking at magazines and different companies are offering emergency social media analysis hardware/software. I don’t think this is a matter of hardware/software. I think this is a matter of, as you said before, preparation, having trained people in place, and the ability to instantaneously sit at a computer and analyze social media and instantaneously contact each other. This is something that’s not going to involve one or two or three people, this is something that’s going to involve in some cases, up to 20 or 30 people who can instantaneously drop what they’re doing, go to the computer, start searching hash tags, start sharing information with each other. That involves a pretty high degree of sophistication and preparation and technology that they have to have with them practically at all times.

Craig: Yeah. You need an internet connection, and things like say Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite, or things like that in terms of the tools, but there is a lot of it that goes down to training and expertise. Just a lot of it that is the human factor. You need to have access and basic knowledge of the tools, but you also need to have people who are well trained. I think actually a small group of people can achieve a lot. The larger you get, once you get beyond say five people, it becomes very hard to coordinate those folks. You might have people duplicating effort in the scenario of monitoring social media and analyzing it. Ideally, you have some specialists in this area who can get on that wan watch for it. I think there’s the technology piece, but what you bring up is kind of the human piece of it, and that’s really, really important when we’re talking about rumors and misinformation.

There are some really basic human needs that are filled by rumors. That’s why we have so many of them, particularly in emergency and disaster scenarios. When humans lack a certain amount of information, when it’s a very confusing scenario, and there’s lots of conflicting information, what we try to do, is we try to make sense of the world. It makes us very uncomfortable to not have information, especially in a critical scenario. It’s very tough for our brains to process conflicting information. What we naturally try to do is to make sense of this scenario, and that often causes us as we talk with other people to come up with, “well, maybe it’s because of this, or maybe it’s because of that.” We all put our pieces of information together, and that’s where we start to create and propagate rumors. It’s important for everyone to understand that there is this human need that rumors can often fill, especially in emergency scenarios, where there’s a real, imminent threat there. Understand that rumors aren’t necessarily people who are trying to put out false information, it’s people who mean well who are engaging in this process of sense-making, trying to figure it out.

Especially when it’s hurricanes or things like that, and there’s high anxiety. It actually is a coping mechanism in a lot of ways for us to fill in the gaps, the things that we don’t have, the information we don’t have, to put that out there. You’ll see this happening on Twitter and on social media, is people asking questions, interacting with each other, latching on to little scraps of information that come out that seem to make sense to them that they then propagate. I think that everyone should have a basic understanding of why rumor is such a basic human element, particularly in these scenarios. Whenever you have things like bombings, or hurricanes, natural disasters, they’re going to be there. It’s the human engine, emotions and brains and those kinds of things that are driving these rumors. Tools and technologies are important, but understanding human behavior is always really, really big in this kind of scenario.

Leonard: There’s also sources of purposeful misinformation. One of the things when I was learning how to do green screen television, is that I realized that I could buy readily available footage from elsewhere, I can do a green screen television shoot, and it will look exactly like any other news program. It will look and feel and smell and taste like a real news program, and I can purposely put out misinformation, and sites purposefully putting out misinformation. I refer to the photos of sharks swimming in the streets of Sandy Hook after Hurricane Sandy. We have that level of a complexity to deal with as well.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. One of the things in the research that I focused on were what I called fake news websites. These are websites where somebody’s taken a basic WordPress template or web template and it looks like a real news website. The articles are written with a newsy voice and tone to them, but everything on the website is fake. What I saw in my research was that they could have articles that could get hundreds of thousands of shares, driving a significant amount of traffic. What their strategy basically is, they’re trying to monetize on gullibility. They come up with fake articles about celebrities, or about what I saw when Ebola was a real threat in the United States, they did a lot of fake articles. One of them reported that an entire Texas town had been quarrantined because a family had contracted Ebola. Completely fake, of course. It got a huge amount of shares. Of course, that sends people to their website, they have ads on their pages, and they earn money that way.

There are certainly people who are conscientiously trying to spread misinformation, whether it’s fake news websites doing it to earn money, or perhaps there are people who have a malicious intent and other ways. That’s certainly something that’s going to emerge and come out there. Sometimes though, people are spreading fake information, but it’s not necessarily with malicious intent. This is a really hard thing particularly for journalists to understand, because why would somebody put out something that was fake? The answer that a lot of these hoaxers give, is that again, it’s a stress relief for them to just put a joking image. Unintentionally they put it out thinking everyone will know it’s a joke and have a laugh, but people start to take it and treat it as real.

Again, there’s this release valve that people need in these very anxiety inducing scenarios where they’ll often put something out like that. It is something to be aware of. It’s important to be aware that rumors are absolutely going to emerge in these scenarios. A hundred percent guaranteed, in an emergency response scenario, natural disaster scenario, what have you, rumors will abound. No question about it. There will also be people who intentionally or otherwise put out misinformation.

One is the monitoring aspect of this. The second piece where journalists also really need to raise their skill level, is the verification piece of it. You see a tweet, and somebody’s made a claim, how do you figure out if that’s true or not? This is a skill area where the more people who can know how to use some tools and some basic approaches to figure out whether it’s true or false, the better off we’re all going to be as a society.

Leonard: There’s a fascinating part of your report where basically you’re saying that there’s an economic model for anything that delivers clicks to a website and that the incentives are all wrong, which is one of the reasons why we’re having this problem to begin with.

We’re more than halfway through an extraordinarily entertaining and informative program. Ladies and gentlemen, Craig Silverman is by our microphones. Founding editor of Buzzffed Canada. You can reach him a Twitter @craigsilverman. The report itself, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, again funded by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Knight Foundation. Extraordinarily fascinating read. Find it on the internet if you are interested in rumor control, if you’re interested in emergency management, you must go to the website and get Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, and read it.

Craig, we have a 30% reduction in reporters over the last 10 years. Where we’ve relied upon media in the past to assess rumors and correct information internally, their ranks have been depleted tremendously. The reporters who I work with are doing more than ever before with less than ever before. The media that we counted on in the past to verify and to figure out what is correct information and what is incorrect information with our help from people who are directly at the scene. Because of their fewer numbers, it’s very hard for them to complete this task. It’s very hard for them to be the gatekeeper.

Craig: It is. The reason I do things like the verification handbook and the Lies, Damn Lies report, is because I see that there’s a lack of these skills in the newsroom. Of the journalists that are left, they absolutely are overloaded with different things, and they haven’t been given training in verification of social media content and things like that. I think you do have to in these scenarios, look at newsrooms as an important channel and partner in these things. I also do think that you have to look at the reality that you just articulated, and say we are going to be a source as well. We’re not just going to feed things through the media. We have to be able to be a credible, reliable, consistent source ourselves. I think that’s a really important thing to realize and to think about what that’s going to take in terms of resources and training on your own.

All that being said, a piece of advice we give to newsrooms in terms of preparing for disaster coverage is you need to think about all of the critically important government agencies, first responders, experts in your area and you need to create a line of communication with them ahead of time. I think it goes both ways in that, absolutely you should be thinking about who are the newsrooms, AP being one that’s all over the country, so how do we get a direct line into AP to make sure we’re communicating with them well. Thinking about locally, who are the critical local sources as well, and setting up those lines of communication to say when we have something important, we’re going to get it to you in this form. For the journalists, to tell them and say when you have an important question, when you know something, here is how you get that to us. I think when we’re talking about these kinds of scenarios of emergency situations, some of the mutual suspicion or distrust that tends to be there, it recedes a little bit because everybody’s in it together just trying to get the best possible information out to the public as possible. To tell the people who need to evacuate that they need to evacuate, and to make sure that it’s not a false order. And so on.

I think that you’ll find in these scenarios, newsrooms do want to be a very good partner. Figuring out the method of communication, helping them understand what kind of information they can rely on from your particular office, and which other places they might need to go for other information is very important. Then of course thinking about how you are going to get your information, not just out through the media, but through like we talked about; a Twitter account, a Facebook page, other means to make sure that it’s getting out there as much as possible.

Leonard: Bottom line is that we have to have a core of digital specialists who are extremely sophisticated about social media. Extremely sophisticated in terms of following the media, who already have these accounts set up, who are ready to go at a moment’s notice. What you’re saying is, is that we can do it with a small number. Let’s just say 1-10, we have to be digital specialists. We have to really know social media. We have to know its implications, we have to know who’s out there, and we have to be on the various platforms. I agree with you with Facebook and Twitter, but Instagram is rising in popularity more than anybody ever anticipated, and others. Periscope. There’s all sorts of things out there that are just exploding and we have to be knowledgeable of them all. We in the media, and we within government, and we within emergency management must become digital media experts.

Craig: Absolutely. You have to think like a newsroom in some ways, particularly when there’s an active scenario going on. You have to think about how you’re communicating the information. One of the other pieces that’s really important and this is talked about in the report, is deciding at what point you’re ready to communicate a piece of information.

Newsrooms, what I was talking about in the sense of there’s so much information that’s circulating online and circulating on social networks, and it may have news value and it may be of interest, and it may get them clicks, but what newsrooms have to figure out is, what’s your bar for when you’ll actually cover something? Do you need to have it 100% nailed down? Or will you just take anything that’s circulating and put some [hedging 00:21:58] language in, and saying, “Well, this is popular on Reddit, we don’t know if it’s true, but have a look at this photo.” I think it’s important for government agencies and communicators as well to think about that. Okay, so if we’re going to be a source of information in this scenario, what level of voracity, what level of conformation do we need to put something out? Are we only going to put out stuff that is 100% nailed down, or are we actually going to engage and say, “There’s a rumor circulating that this is happening in this area of the city, as of right now we have no information to confirm that.”

Thinking about how you’re going to engage on that level is I think a really important thing. Overall, yeah. I think that there’s no way to do this kind of work today without having people on your team who are social media savvy, who are good at monitoring, who are good at assessing, who are good at verifying, and who are good at communicating. These are absolutely core skills. There are definitely tools and things that can help you, but a lot of it comes down to human decision making and figuring out what you’re processes are and what you’re standards are, just like newsrooms have to do.

Leonard: Even in your report, when you mentioned Larry King, he criticized CNN his own network in terms of Flight 370, the Indonesian airliner that went down. He criticized their coverage of that as absurd. We say in the report that there is an economic model, that anything that drives clicks to a website, the incentives, fiscal incentives, financial incentives are all wrong. This is a challenge. This is a challenge for media, it’s a challenge for us to put it together, and guess what you’re saying is, is that not only must we train amongst ourselves, we’ve got to get together with media and figure all this out ahead of time, and have a protocols in place so bad information doesn’t get out information that’s going to harm literally thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people.

Craig: Absolutely. Yeah. That preparation piece. We keep coming back to it because it’s so essential. For the folks that this particular conversation is targeted at, I don’t know that their incentives are as misaligned as they are in a lot of newsrooms in the sense that a lot of digital newsrooms value the number of views and clicks you get, and if you take the extra time to nail something down and find out that it’s not real, then you get no clicks for that, because you haven’t gotten the story. Other people may get it first. In newsrooms, what they have to re-calibrate is what do we value? Do we value getting the most clicks on a story, or do we value being the ones who’ve said, “No, no, no. This story is fake,” and putting that out there and showing that we’re trusted and building that up over time.

I work at BuzzFeed now. I Joined BuzzFeed after I did the fellowship that led to the report we’re talking about. For me. BuzzFeed obviously is a huge organization, drives a huge amount of traffic, covers a huge amount of stuff that’s viral. What I saw before I joined, is a shift that had been happening culturally internally at BuzzFeed over the last couple of years, whereby rather than just finding anything and being first to it and getting it up first, the culture had shifted towards asking questions, reaching out, doing verification, and not having fake stuff on the site. A more journalistic culture has taken hold, and BuzzFeed as they’ve been hiring people and news.

I don’t know exactly what the incentives are in the world of the folks who are here, but I assume that there’s probably not as much pressure around clicks, and far more to be lost in terms of reputation if a government agency or a specialized company doing emergency response is putting out fake information. That is a game changer for them, whereas a single journalist, if they make 1 mistake they can move on. For a government agency putting out false information in an emergency, that’s almost game over, because of the amount of credibility it has.

Leonard: In the final minutes of the program, and there’s so much I wanted to get to but I’m not going to be able to get to it today. The more we care about a rumor, the more we have a stake, the more we participate in that rumor, the more we care about a topic, the more like we are to spread rumors, and the more likely we are to believe it’s true. We cherry pick information that we hear, that we come into contact with, and if it fits our preconceived notion of the world, there’s a good possibility that we will spread that rumor. We will believe it and spread it. Part of this is the psychology of the people who are reading and assessing this for themselves, and what you’re warning is that you’ve got to be very careful in debunking the rumor. You cant go after the person, you have to to go after the facts. There is a strong set of psychological principles that apply.

Craig: Yes. There’s a lot going on here in terms of why somebody would choose to propagate a rumor. If it aligns with existing knowledge and existing beliefs that they have, they are more likely to believe it and to propagate it. If it fits with suspicions they have, if it fits with their worldview, again they’re more likely to put it out there. They’re more likely to believe it. Another thing that people should note also about rumors, there is often a connection between repetition and believability. The more that someone is exposed to rumor, the more that any skepticism they might have about it starts to erode.

There have been studies about the number of times somebody was exposed to a rumor they start to believe it even more.

Leonard: That’s amazing.

Craig: It is. It just shows how important it is that so many of us news organizations, government communicators and other communicators, how we understand that we have to get out there early. When we see things, we have to talk about it and engage and warn people off of this stuff.

Then that gets us into the realm of debunking that you brought up. Which is, how do you do this effectively without in effect, repeating the rumor so much that people still ignore your debunking. One, as you mentioned, is people who pushed out a false rumor, you don’t want to attack them, you don’t want to personalize it. You want to debunk the idea and not the person is what people often say. That’s very important. Don’t go around shaming people. Make it easy for them to let go of this thing that they put out there and that they believed. It’s also really important to try to minimize the amount of times you’re repeating the false information. You want to express the truth in a more positive way.

A small example of this, rather than saying Barack Obama is not a Muslim, you would want to say Barack Obama is a Christian. That’s the more positive reinforcement of the correct information. It’s also important of course to get out there early. It’s important to do it in a positive way, to not attack people. It’s important to think about how you can connect with other trusted sources to get this information out there. What I mean by that is, if somebody is propagating a rumor because it aligns with say a political belief, a personal belief, some kind of orientation. If you can get other organizations that person might be perceived to be as aligned with their beliefs, and have that organization help you with pushing out the debunking, then you’ve got a much better chance of getting it out there. If they have suspicion about the government, then you should talk to other local organizations that aren’t seen as government organizations to get them to push it out there as well, whether that’s a red cross, or a local chamber of commerce. Think about all these different channels, how people who might be skeptical of government, might actually listen to one of these other channels.

Leonard: All right. Craig, you’ve got the final word. There’s so much here to discuss. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re interested in emergency management, if you’re interested in relations with the media, if you’re interested in rumor control, please go to Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content, easily found on the internet. It is one of the most fascinating reads that I’ve had within my 40 years within the criminal justice system. We’ve talked to Craig Silverman today. Twitter @craigsilverman, founding editor at BuzzFeed Canada. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments. We even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a very pleasant day.

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Internet Crime, Social Media Tagged With: Correcting Bad Information, Craig Silvermen, emergencies, social media

Victim Assistance and Cyber Crime in America-NOVA

March 3, 2014 by CSOSA

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

The portal site for “DC Public Safety” is http://media.csosa.gov.

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2014/02/victim-assistance-america/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host Leonard Sipes. Ladies and gentlemen, back at our microphones, Will Marling. He is the Executive Director for the National Director for Victim Assistance, www.trinova.org, www.trinova.org. We’re going to be talking about a variety of topics in terms of victim assistance in America. Will, welcome back to DC Public Safety.

Will Marling: Len, thanks so much. You know this is one of my favorite things to do. I just really enjoy our time.

Len Sipes: Well, the remarks that I get from Linked In and the other social media sites plus our own website seems to indicate that you’re very popular. Every time I bring you on we get nice comments, so we want to start off with a constitutional amendment for victims. One of the things that always boggles the minds of everybody is that the overwhelming majority of the criminal justice system is there to protect the rights of defendants, but very few rights are there to protect the rights of the victim and we have a variety of states, somewhere about 30 that do have state constitutional rights to protect victim rights, but what we’re talking about a federal law to establish a strong victims’ presence in the courtroom and then law enforcement and the rest of the criminal justice system protecting victims’ rights when a federal law is violated. Correct?

Will Marling: Well, that’s right. I mean we’re talking about the highest law of the land, which is the United States constitution, our founding document. So this represents an amendment to that founding document to affirm rights for victims of crime specifically.

Len Sipes: And how is that coming?

Will Marling: Well, it’s moving. We’re moving forward, you know, a lot of folks that listen to your program; things like this aren’t clearly visible because there’s a lot of activity. There can be between 10 and 12,000 bills introduced into Congress during the course of a two-year session and so you know, there’s a lot of noise, as I might say it, in the bills but we are continually educating house representatives specifically. It’s House Joint Resolution 40, and the main thing that we’re doing apart from just educating them is asking them for their co-sponsorship. They can literally put their name on an official support list and said yes, I will co-sponsor House Joint Resolution 40 and so it’s a continual effort to build momentum, to educate, and to move it forward.

Len Sipes: How could you not support victims’ rights? I mean, I would think the entire Congress would get behind this.

Will Marling: Well, we agree. The reality is that when people are asked on the street, should victims have rights? It’s an overwhelming response in the affirmative. And most people, even those who might resist this would affirm victims’ rights. There are some folks who are purists and we shouldn’t amend the constitution and you know, I agree, maybe not very frequently, but the reason it’s to be amended, is because it needs to grow and change. There are some that are concerned that it would impact the rights of the accused or defendants, and we simply respond that is not true either. We affirm that those rights need to be there and the Bill of Rights, the amendment is designed to protect those accused of a crime need to be vigorously upheld. We’re only saying that victims of the crime of which that person is accused, they need to be able to have standing under the law to affirm dignity, affirm the right to information, the right to restitution if this follows through, and the right to be part of the process officially. That’s really what this means.

Len Sipes: Well you have a lot of federal crimes that are in the news lately in terms of the military. So what you have is a situation where a lot of women in the military are basically that they were sexually assaulted, and advocates have stated that they have been ignored, that their rights have been ignored, this would provide them with the rights they seek, correct?

Will Marling: Yeah, it would, because an American under the constitution can affirm rights that are inculcated in the constitution. We say inalienable rights and what we mean by that is there are some things we just know are true. The average person knows they’re true. But we still have to state them in the constitution, they have to become part of a written document, so that someone can say hey, right here, we’ve said this. And in the military context, that’s especially true under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, historically, there really are no rights as such for victims of crime. Now, I will say, that in the latest National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA coming out, there have been some very positive progress with the affirmation of protections for victims. But nonetheless, this is, as I like to say, an amendment would cover a multitude of sins. It would address this issue of victims’ rights, crime victims’ rights, but also it would affirm at large, even those people who don’t engage in the criminal justice process as victims, it would create a national discussion about what rights are, what rights should be and hopefully raise the level of prominence, the needs that people have when they are harmed by others.

Len Sipes: And about 30 states or so have these rights, and the process in those states that do have a constitutional right, a state constitutional right, guarding the rights of victims of crimes, it’s worked in those states, it’s been a sea change. My experience has been that everybody is now very much attuned to the rights of victims because it’s the law. And in some cases you’ve got to spell it out and in some cases you’ve got to make it crystal clear. That’s what others have said to me. Is that correct?

Will Marling: That’s exactly right. Now I will affirm that of the 33 states that we know have crime victims’ rights in the state constitutions, the affirmations in the state constitutions vary from place to place. In other words, what they affirm as a right can be different in another state. But let me give you the example of Arizona, that has had victims’ rights for 20 years and they’ve been able to demonstrate that the process can be safely adjudicated so that the rights of the accused are not impinged upon, and the rights of the victims can be affirmed so that a process can pursue justice. And equitable justice. We know that there are inequities in the system, in many ways, and I recognize that even in my victim advocacy role that the accused many times, can be shortchanged from anything the defense attorney that they’ve been assigned or whatever. But we want to and vigorously want to affirm that the rights that everybody should have and we also say, victims want a good and healthy process for everybody. They don’t want a process where the accused is getting shortchanged, because commonly that just means an appeal, another trial, more and more pain and suffering for them. So you know, that’s really why a fair and balanced system can serve everyone.

Len Sipes: But speaking of pain and speaking of a sense of injustice, the average person going through the criminal justice system before a state constitutional amendment would often times say that it’s the criminal justice system itself that acts as an inhibitor to the healing process. If the state criminal justice system or the federal criminal justice system is going to be so difficult to deal with and where rights are not respected, can you imagine a person going through a violent crime and a family member is a victim or a violent crime and then now, they find that it’s just an impossible process in terms of getting the information that they need, getting the information that they seek, getting the respect that they deserve, and having their day in court, if that was not recognized, if that was not embraced. Then that victim is almost re-victimized, and I’ve heard that from crime victims before the constitutional amendments over and over and over again. The criminal justice system re-victimizes me by not respecting my rights.

Will Marling: You’re exactly right, and it’s one of the many reasons I like you, because you’re in tune with many different facets of the criminal justice system. What we hear as well is re-victimization, re-traumatization, common themes. Why? Because the system itself is a system. It’s a machine. It’s designed with sometimes harsh mechanisms that are without respect for humanity, that’s the system. But the people in the system are the ones that affirm the dignity and compassion that need to be affirmed for people who have suffered so egregious losses. And so, that’s all we’re doing, we’re wanting to affirm those things and we’d love for people just to do that automatically. We’d love for people in the system to affirm inalienable rights of crime victims, that actually many people believe are already there. They have no idea that they’re not there. But we know that those need to be affirmed. So that a victim can say I have the right to this, and I want to assert that right and I want that right protected.

Len Sipes: If you’re interested in additional information or if you would like to support the National Organization for Victim Assistance in terms of this endeavor, www.trinova.org, www.trinova.org. Will, we’re going to move on to the next topic, distance learning with the victim assistance academy. You guys are doing an awful lot of training. You were doing training for the Defense Department in terms of training the trainers, if I remember a previous conversation. All throughout the history of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, you all have been involved in training victims’ advocates throughout the country, throughout the world. Then the next big step, a little while ago, last year was your work with the Defense Department and now you’re talking about a distance learning victim assistance academy. Talk to me about that please.

Will Marling: Yeah, thanks. Just stepping back a little bit just to you know quantify what we’re doing. You’re exactly right, we do a lot of training and it’s in particular in this area of victim advocacy and our side of house with crisis response. Lot of these things revolve around the skills necessary to advocate for people but also trauma mitigation, trauma education in working with those harmed by crime and crisis. With the Department of Defense, we are actually the secretariat for the SAC-P. The Department of Defense Sexual Assault Advocate Certification Program. So we’ve actually collected subject matter experts and they are part of a committee built upon the national advocate-credentialing program that certifies victim advocates specifically in the United States military, all branches. And that’s been a wonderful experience for us of course and we’ve been grateful for the privilege of serving in that way, but also encouraged by steps, small and large, that are being taken in dealing with sexual assaults specifically in the military. And out of that kind of context of seeing needs and the like, we hit on this issue of a distance learning victim assistance academy. Now let me explain that one. Since the mid 80s, when we actually have the vocation of victim advocate emerge, there are a number of states who have developed their own victim assistance academies. And it’s kind of a standard approach, standardized approach, with a 40-hour basic training that touches very skill-based aspects of advocacy. And it’s a very important training, in fact, it’s foundational if you’re going to be a national advocate, nationally advocated credentialed person, you’re going to have at least a 40-hour basic, and what we discovered in our work was that not only are there a number of states that don’t have academies, but are a number of people who are far-flung who don’t have access to that kind of training very readily. And so we have recently launched NOVA’s national victim assistance academy, and it’s a distance-learning concept. In other words, it’s real time, with an instructor, using technology, so that there’s a classroom and people are logging in, in their remote sectors and they’re seeing the instructor as well as seeing a presentation and they can talk to the professor. In fact, we encourage that; we encourage live audio Q&A interaction. And the powerful thing about this is that distance learning dimension means that distance is removed. People are actually taking this training in all parts of the world. All across our country, they’re in Asia; they’re in Europe, and other parts. So we are not only pleased and honored by this, we find that people are extremely receptive to this, plus the instructors we’ve lined up are heroes in this field. Incredible subject matter experts, and many people simply wouldn’t get access to them otherwise, you know, we just can’t ship them around. So it’s a great step for us.

Len Sipes: So the bottom line is that anybody, anywhere in the world can receive this training and you have been on a previous program, we talked about the fact that you’ve been interacting with other countries throughout the world in terms of you know, this whole concept of a constitutional amendment. This whole concept advocating for victims, it’s not just an issue within the United States. You’ve been interacting with people all throughout the world.

Will Marling: Indeed. In fact, we’re starting really a consortium non-profit international and enterprise called Victims of Crime International and I know that isn’t especially creative, but what it does represent this true focus of many people in other parts of the world understanding that victims, victims of crime specifically need support, they need resources, and their voices need to be amplified to their national, their local and national leaders. And that’s what this enterprise is about, specifically Victims of Crime International. And I think the training is going to contribute to that, hopefully as we give people, basically anybody that can get access online can be part of this.

Len Sipes: We’re halfway through the program. I want to re-introduce Will. Will Marling is the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trinova.org, www.trinova.org. Will, I do want to ask you in terms of your interactions with people in other countries; I would imagine everybody has the same issue. I would imagine there’s not a lot of difference between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Katmandu. I would imagine when you’re victimized; I would imagine the criminal justice system is often times not the most receptive place to, not the most supportive place in terms of dealing with victims, dealing with their trauma, dealing with the emotional aspects of being victimized, dealing with their informational needs. I would imagine those problems exist wherever you are in the world.

Will Marling: I would agree. There can be varying reactions to, and you can understand that from the standpoint of even countries that maybe aren’t strong on human rights, we’re experiencing that. I think it’s kind of funny, you name two places, I actually have talked to people about this very issue. Katmandu and New Mexico, of course all across the country there are incredibly gifted and committed people, and even in Katmandu, it’s fascinating the young lawyer that I talk to there, who is really trying to propel the notion of victims’ rights in the context of humans’ rights and he’s just an amazing fellow. The challenge that we do face in varying ways, and I say we, because the human collective represents a commitment to justice anywhere and everywhere. And what we see is sometimes there’s a difference in resourcing, that can be an issue. And that can be here, you can find remote locations in the country where there aren’t as many resources to assist victims of crimes, or you can find locations here where people aren’t maybe well oriented as professional to the needs that victims face, but certainly that is in other parts of the world. That’s why we’re really trying to propel a global voice and a global concept for folks, so that we can shout on behalf of other people in other places that their voice should be heard, we believe that can be beneficial for them. As well as for victims here.

Len Sipes: But it does get back once again to whether you call it a US constitutional amendment, or embodied within the law in different countries, if it’s not embodied in code, if it’s not part of law, if it’s not part of the training of the judiciary, the law enforcement, individuals within the court system, individuals within corrections, if it’s not embodied within law, it tends to be ignored. Or not taken as seriously as it should be taken.

Will Marling: Indeed. And in fact the European Union passed incredibly powerful legislation to affirm victims’ rights and services, and this is, it’s called an EU Directive in that context because the European nations don’t have a constitution as such, they’re a union. Essentially it’s a confederation of states. So they have to have treaties between all of the member states, the 28. And yet their highest level at this point is an EU Directive and the most, this victims’ rights EU Directive that’s being implemented over the next year specifically. There has to be a plan put in place by every member state, but then of course promoting and implementing that goes well beyond. And so that’s what we’re seeing, you know, Europe is seeing the need for this.

Len Sipes: The steam is picking up; the momentum continues to move forward. Just in the United States and throughout the world.

Will Marling: That’s exactly right. The word momentum is a great word, Len, because it represents what we’re trying to see happen and what we are see happen.

Len Sipes: Alright, we’ve talked about the philosophical underpinnings of victims’ rights in the United States; let’s get down to something very practical and very real. Target credit cards, now the National Organization for Victim Assistance has been involved in cybercrime for the last two or three years. You told me on a previous program that you’ve got so many calls from so many people regarding cybercrime that the National Organization for Victim Assistance was willing to move beyond its traditional role in terms of what I refer to as garden variety street crimes and domestic violence and sexual assaults and robberies and burglaries and those sorts of things into cybercrime because simply there was a demand for it, correct?

Will Marling: That’s right. What we were seeing was cyber of course is an extremely popular type of crime, and naturally, the cyber permeates everything we do. We’re all inter-connected. And so we’re getting victim assistance calls, we take thousands of victim assistance calls on our toll free victim assistance line and every year, and when we began to see this uptick, definitely in request for help and assistance, we said ok, we need to pay attention to this. Quite honestly, it just meant, definitely boning up on a lot of the dimensions that are impacted here. So we began to train ourselves internally. We did a lot of training with staff, so we do victim assistance that way. And the Target breach represents, quite candidly, one of many different types. It was a high profile event, and we had calls on behalf of folks who had experienced compromise there. Ironically, Target itself is considered one of the stronger security committed companies, and they have a lot of appropriate and meaningful policies in place, but when you’re talking about a breach that as I see it or understand it occurred, you’re talking about mechanisms that were able to break into basically vaults of information. So it’s very profound and it scared people.

Len Sipes: The Washington Post the other day editorialized that it’s time to embrace the European model, and from what I understand in terms of the European model is that it’s a chip and code based system. So if you don’t have the chip and if you don’t have the code, you don’t have access to the information in the card, but the really interesting factor is, is right now, if you’re victimized through your credit card, you’re not liable. You don’t have to pay those credit card bills. In the European model evidently, once they market the move over to the chip and the pin system, then suddenly you’re stuck with paying those bills if a bad guy gets a hold of your credit card information. Is that correct?

Will Marling: That’s right. Well, the chip and pin is a significant mechanism to protect information. In our country, of course, a credit card compromise like that is considered technically a crime against the bank. That’s why it gets a little complicated because people’s lives are impacted by it. When my credit card number was breached, I didn’t lose track of my card, they got the number from somewhere, the bank was the one that took on the liability. Now under federal law if you report your loss, you can be liable. It’s three days, you can be liable for $50 up to three days, between that and 60 days, your liability can be $500. I’ve never heard of any bank charging that you know to that consumer. So they consider it, I think, a cost of doing business. But what the chip and pin can do, and I used to live in Europe where the chip and pin was important, that chip and that pin have to be, you know, they have to work together. And that significantly limits the risk associated with breach. And it also means there’s, for the bank’s sake, it’s an opportunity to detect when the consumers are actually committing the fraud because you know, in some ways, they have to say, I’m taking you at your work. I had to sign affidavits, I basically swear that I didn’t cause this, I’m not making a false claim, you know, to affirm that I didn’t make those charges, that somebody else had. I actually think that it could be helpful for everybody. But you know, in our society, it’s an issue of convenience and that’s what we’re trying to encourage people to think about. Ok, so it takes a little bit more time to make a transaction. That’s ok. So it’s takes you another 15 seconds. That’s ok.

Len Sipes: Give everybody and those of us in the criminal justice system the three quickest tips to keep ourselves safe from this sort of crime.

Will Marling: Well, yeah we kind of work from a principle, we try to use principles that kind of can be a little pithy that can help people remember. We tell people you are your data. Think about it in that way, when you get a call and it’s a voice, you don’t actually know who that person is. You think you do, because you want to believe what they’re saying to you. But you have to think, they want your data and they’re going to try to get that out of you. Another principle is very simple. If it has a lock, use it. If your phone has a lock, use it. If anything electronic has a lock, your computer, use your lock. Very few people, even if they would say they live in a safe neighborhood, they lock their car when they get out of it. They use their remote, lock it up. We also, this is a really important one in my view, if somebody asks you for information; it’s perfectly acceptable to say, what for. And when they tell you what for, you can decide, mmm, I don’t know if that’s important enough.

Len Sipes: So the bottom line is being unbelievably judicious in terms of providing that information to anybody and if you have questions as to whether or not you’re talking to the real deal, if you’re interacting with the real deal in terms of an internet message, is to call the bank, call the store, not through the telephone number that they provide, but you look it up, you go on the internet, you look up the number, and you call them and you call the billing department and say ok I’ve got this email message from supposedly you guys, is this legit?

Will Marling: That’s right. There are all kind of scams. I’ll give you one that just came to me yesterday. I got an email, allegedly, from the Arizona court of appeals.

Len Sipes: Really?

Will Marling: Yeah. So the idea was that’s terrifying, what’s going on? Well, I knew it was bogus, but you know, we’re busy, you’re not paying attention and so, even there, you say, when asked for, they asked me to click this link and follow up. Well, I’m saying to myself, well what they want that for? Why would they be emailing me? Of course they wouldn’t be. So once we even stop, most of the time, if we just stop and ask a couple of basic questions, wait a minute, then it all rings false, and then we can just stop, but it’s easy to get paranoid these days. Especially if people telling you stuff like this.

Len Sipes: All of us in the criminal justice system, even those who are suspicious of everybody because we’ve been in the criminal justice system for so long, we still get fooled.

Will Marling: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s a common, primarily because we’re busy people and there’s a lot of data passing. And so if an email gets your network and somebody doesn’t reject it and they forward it on to you, that could be, right there, the lynch pin pulled to access your network. How does that happen? It’s not hard. I mean, again, we’re busy people. So it’s diligence.

Len Sipes: Just a couple minutes left Will. You know, when I did auto theft campaigns years ago, we recognized that if the auto industry just implemented certain security procedures in cars it would drive down auto theft considerably and auto theft over the past five, six years has plummeted because of that. There are many people who are basically saying, look, they’re out there stealing iPhones, they’re out there stealing iPads, they’re stealing my electronic devices, why aren’t the companies making these devices to the point where they can be completely worthless, the companies can shut them down. People are saying why can’t the credit card companies make a credit card in such a way that it’s useless if somebody steals it or steals the information. Do you guys get involved in those sort of endeavors working with the automobile manufacturers, working with the credit card companies, working with Apple and other smart phone manufacturers to improve the security of devices?

Will Marling: Well, we sure would. We’re willing and committed to speaking into these issues, not just from a victim’s standpoint but from a potential victim or consumer standpoint, but you find a lot of forces at work. We know right now that within any given cell phone, you can have basically a kill switch. And there are pros and cons at different levels on that. Some people would be concerned that my phone could be killed if somebody decided to do that outside of me. But we know that technology is available. One of the areas where we kind of stumbled into this is an area where cell phone contraband is making it into prisons. And that is making inmates accessible, it’s giving them access to the outside world, we know that they have committed significant crimes, they’ve called contract hits on perspective witnesses, they’ve harassed, they’ve stalked, and that’s the kind of thing, it’s actually a big problem. And one sweep in a California prison, it was 6,000 phones that were found. So it’s things like that that have ancillary effects as well, not just some of the things that even you named, I lose my phone and all my information is on there, man I’d love for that thing to be destroyed, you know, remotely. Because I don’t want anyone to have access to it. And I don’t want them to have access to your phone, Len, because you might have, we might have been talking about sensitive things, you might have an email from me, my contact information, that’s private. So it behooves us all to pay attention to that very thing.

Len Sipes: Well, I’m going to let you have the final word on that topic. I really do wish that the National Organization for Victim Assistance and everybody who supports victims’ rights throughout the United States to be supportive of a United States constitutional amendment for victims of crimes currently working its way through the House of Representatives and also we are all supportive needless to say of additional, every state in the United States should have a constitutional amendment protecting victims’ rights and I think Will would completely agree on that. Ladies and gentlemen, our guess today has been Will Marling, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trinova.org, www.trinova.org. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We appreciate your comments, we even appreciate your criticisms, and we want everybody to have themselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Internet Crime, Victim's Services Tagged With: constitutional amendment, crime victims, cyber crime, NOVA, Victim

Internet Safety-Internet Keep Safe Coalition-DC Public Safety Radio

March 7, 2013 by CSOSA

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

The portal site for “DC Public Safety” is http://media.csosa.gov.

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/11/jobs-in-corrections-discover-corrections-website-dc-public-safety-radio/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes, for the first show of 2013, and we have at our microphones, back at our microphones, she was once with us a long time ago, Marsali Hancock. She is the CEO and President of the Internet Keep Safe Coalition, the website ikeepsafe.org – ikeepsafe.org. I invited Marsali back to our microphones to discuss internet safety, and it’s an issue of extreme importance to just about everybody within the criminal justice system and everybody out there listening to my voice. Marsali, welcome back to DC Public Safety.

Marsali Hancock: Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.

Len Sipes: You know, I can’t imagine a topic with more universal connection to those of us within the criminal justice system and everybody else who happens to be listening to this program. You and I, before we hit the record button, we were talking about a good friend of mine and she was cyber-bullied. She received threatening messages via Facebook, and this was not an easy event for her. This was not something that she sloughed off. I won’t tell you all the different things that she did and the reactions but she took this very personally, very emotionally, I mean to the point, well, you know, somebody knocking on the door and I’m not there, I mean, it was a very frightening event. So cyber crime, cyber bullying, cyber safety just has an impact, an emotional impact, a strong emotional impact, and it’s probably affecting millions of Americans.

Marsali Hancock: Well, you pull up a very interesting point that there are strong emotions with technical devices, and it’s because people emotionally connect with them. So when you look at the types of communications people send, either through Facebook or text messaging or the photos they sent back and forth or the videos, this is how people emotionally connect and when something goes wrong, that sense of unrest and insecurity is really heightened. So lots of people in the world are trying to navigate, how do I have a good, healthy relationship with my technology, and when something goes wrong, it’s very hard to know how do I navigate it, where do I go, how do I prevent it, and what’s my plan when something does happen.

Len Sipes: Let’s talk about this for a second because I’m not quite sure if people have an understanding of this. They use their smartphones, they Facebook, they Twitter all with their smartphones, they go home to their computer, they do LinkedIn, they do a variety of social media sites, but they see it as having this huge impact on their world. The digital space means something profound to the people involved in it, correct? There’s more to this than meets the eye. It’s just not use of Facebook. It is now pretty much a lifestyle. It is now pretty much something that permeates our day-to-day existence.

Marsali Hancock: Well it absolutely does, and when you look at how often people check their phones, when you look at a mobile device, people feel it’s an extension of themselves so emotionally they’re problem-solving often through that medium, so when things go wrong, it feels very – that you’re space is invaded. It’s a very unnerving experience. Often people forget that the digital world is always public, it can never be private, so what we do online absolutely impacts our future academic and employment opportunities. It impacts our relationships, our future relationships, and you can never fully pull off what has been sent digitally, and anything that can be sent can be tracked and stored and resent by anyone.

Len Sipes: Is there any such thing as Internet privacy?

Marsali Hancock: No. No. You can try to reduce the amount of exposure, you can be very careful by what you post, but you can never plan on anything being fully private, ever. It’s just not to be expected. Sometimes in this space when you work with parents, they’ll feel like, “I want my child to know I trust them, and I want to give my child privacy. I don’t want to look into their private communications,” and that parent is completely mistaken about the reality of technology. The reality is if it’s done through digital technology, it is not private, there is no assumption of privacy, and anything sent can be capture and resent by anyone else.

Len Sipes: But you go on the Facebook and the settings are immensely confusing, and the pundits have complained about the fact that they’re immensely confusing. I’m not quite sure that there’s anybody out there, whether it’s a parent or a child or a professional, that has a full understanding of the fact that what you post on Facebook, you may have it geared for friends only but it’s still searchable and it still is pulled up into feeds of other people within your timeline. There’s nothing private about your use of Facebook.

Marsali Hancock: You can reduce what others see but you cannot ensure that anyone who can see it does not also publish it. You can go to ikeepsafe.org and we do have a guide for parents on Facebook so there are some ways that you can minimize your risks by being able to identify those 9% of fake sites, you know, sites that are just set up by someone to be impersonating or to inflict harm, that’s out there which ends up being 80 million some odds sites that are fake, but learning how to navigate privacy setting is a convenience, it’s not a guarantee. It’s not encrypted. Sometimes people will feel like, “Well, the same type of protection I have from my bank is what I have with privacy settings,” and that is not the case. Encryption is a totally different procedure, technical feature, than privacy settings which are just literally a convenience.

Len Sipes: You put on a variety of training programs for the Department of Justice, and I met you through U.S. Department of Justice contacts. Why you? Why did Justice put their faith and trust in I Keep Safe?

Marsali Hancock: Well first, I Keep Safe is a nonprofit. We’re a 500c3 but we align ourselves easily with industry to help industry make better choices but then also for industry to be able to communicate how can you best use that site. So we’ve done many projects with law enforcement agencies across the country and even outside of the country, so in Pennsylvania the Attorney General, in Michigan the Attorney General, in multiple states. We’ll help to customize and localize what are the key topics that are important to that law enforcement organization, and then what’s the capacity within that state to deliver, and how can we help reach consumers with the things they need to know about how to stay safe online.

Len Sipes: How the criminal justice system can do a better job of Internet safety, again, I have been involved in the digital world from the very beginning of the digital world. I mean, I put up my radio shows on the Internet decades ago. I put my radios up and responded to different people via email, and yet as we proved this morning, I have this first radio show of the year, and I struggled to put all this equipment together. I think I’m intimidated by the digital world. I think all of us are intimidated by the digital world. We within the criminal justice system, I’m not quite sure we fully get it. I’m not quite sure we fully know what to do in terms of advising parents and advising children, in terms of keeping themselves safe. So what do we need to do within the criminal justice system to do a better job?

Marsali Hancock: Well first of all, you’re right, everyone’s dealing with this through their own lens and there’s big challenges, and some of the biggest challenges are the technology changes and the application changes on how we gather information, how we handle an investigation, what’s the communication channels and those lines. So for the criminal justice system, there’s a continual learning curve, and the capacity for professional development needs to be increased. What helps us when we get down to the victim side, all right, what’s hard sometimes for particularly law officers who have not had training in actual digital devices and how they navigate that investigation, there’s an enormous amount of support law enforcement can offer that no one else can. If you’re in a school or a family setting and you’ve got something on Facebook or YouTube or on SnapChat that’s making you really nervous, law enforcement has the capacity to connect with industry much faster than anyone else. There are ways to report abuse and there are things that consumers can do but it’s really law enforcement that has the shortest path to getting to someone on that platform who can be helpful with content.

Len Sipes: On this program however we’ve discussed either from the law enforcement or the correctional side the shortcomings, the budget cuts, the fact that there are a lot of agencies out there that are doing much more with much less over the course of the last five years or so with the budget cuts. Do we really have that capacity at local law enforcement? If you go to them and say, “I’m being cyber bullied,” they really do know what to do?

Marsali Hancock: You know, to be honest, not very many do. I recommend that when a family’s in that situation, if they talk to the Internet Crimes Against Children’s Taskforce, they’re going to find someone that’s at the A-game around digital evidence.

Len Sipes: Right, and how do they contact the Internet Crimes Taskforce?

Marsali Hancock: You can just do a search online to find out your exact state, so every state – its –.

Len Sipes: Every state in the United States has an Internet Crimes Taskforce, and you need to go and use the search engine of preference – see, I didn’t say Google – use the search engine of preference and find the Internet Crimes Against Children’s Taskforce. What about if you’re being bullied as an adult?

Marsali Hancock: Same thing, so they’ll be able to point you, and when you look at the landscape of law enforcement officers, everybody has their niche and their specialty, and some people are really up-to-speed on gang recruitment or some on child victimization, but you need to have someone who can help you know what’s the landscape of opportunities I have to find out who’s behind the types of communication and what do I do to support them. Can I just connect them with the victim’s rights? Has anything actually criminally happened, or, you know, where do I cross that threshold? And from that piece, it takes somebody who knows the ropes about digital evidence, and unfortunately there’s not that many yet but because the digital road grows so fast – every day, 900,000 new Android phones are activated.

Len Sipes: Every day?

Marsali Hancock: Every day.

Len Sipes: Isn’t that amazing? – 900,000 Android phones throughout the world, and they’re all little computers.

Marsali Hancock: Right, and with full-functioning computers with various levels of apps that have the capacity to take a wide range of personal data and spread it to a wide range of countries and developers.

Len Sipes: Yep. They’re more powerful than my desktop five years ago.

Marsali Hancock: Ah, yes.

Len Sipes: Some are more powerful than my desktop three years ago.

Marsali Hancock: Well, and it’s not just the capacity of the device, it’s the types of behavior you use with that device.

Len Sipes: Right.

Marsali Hancock: So what you used to do on your laptop was pretty limited but when you talk about mobile applications, and the global positioning, and your online banking, and your social networking with your closest friends, and your work friends through LinkedIn, I mean, there’s an enormous amount of activity that we never did on a desktop that we do every day with our mobile devices.

Len Sipes: Now I hear from the pundits that all the emphasis within the last ten years has been in terms of cyber attacks – cyber attacks on your own computers, cyber attacks on corporate computers. It is not shifting over to cyber attacks on cell phones.

Marsali Hancock: Mobile devices, so not just cell phones, that’s also your tablets.

Len Sipes: Mobile devices, I’m sorry, mobile devices, your tablets, yes.

Marsali Hancock: It’s anything that connects to something of value, so when you’re looking at the potential for victimization, your value can be your unused credit. So for children, their unused credit is used by criminals and it’s not until you apply for a student loan that parents really recognize so learning what is it of value on my device that helps me to better prepare. So unused credit is a value, so everything around identify theft and protection, you need to have some confidence and competence.

Len Sipes: And all of this you can find on ikeepsafe.org, correct?

Marsali Hancock: Yes, absolutely.

Len Sipes: Okay, and guidance for parents, guidance for children, guidance for law enforcement – its all there. You can start off with that.

Marsali Hancock: Yes, so prevention and then post-incidence response, how do I better manage?

Len Sipes: Okay. Now also the FBI has a huge cyber-crime unit. I’ve advised people in the past to simply Google – oh, I’m sorry – use the search engine of your choice and to look for FBI/cyber crime or FBI/computer crime, and you will come up with the proper unit within the FBI who will provide guidance in terms of cyber crime as well.

Marsali Hancock: Yes, it’s a great resource and like every government agency, everyone’s pressed for resources and time. If you’re the victim, you want to find someone who can help you with your next step and find out what are your rights as a victim and what’s something that’s rational that you can do to prevent it next time.

Len Sipes: What do we say to parents and law enforcement? There has got to be some balance here because their children are going to be on the internet, they are going to be on the internet, and we hear these endless horror stories, and it’s sort of remote and sort of academic until it happens to you as it happened to be me in terms of a woman who’s very close to me, the fact that she was cyber-bullied, and it becomes personal at a certain point. It’s not academic. It’s not remote. What do we say to people in terms of putting all of this in balance and keeping it in perspective because our kids, our 9-year-olds are going to be using the internet, our 14-year-olds are going to be using the internet. Yes, there are literally billions of people throughout the world trolling for them, either to defraud them or to engage them in nefarious acts or even sexual acts. They are out there but we’ve got to put into perspective, do we not?

Marsali Hancock: Oh, absolutely, and when you look at most communication by youth, it’s not problematic, but there is always going to be that’s a challenge, and Danah Boyd in her research calls it “digital drama” because it doesn’t necessarily fit into a criminal act or into necessarily bullying or cyber-bullying where some details about it’s repeated, it’s from a position of power. Digital drama is when somebody’s really upset because of something that s happened online.

Len Sipes: Right.

Marsali Hancock: So you absolutely have to address it. If we pull kids off – so let’s take the Draconian approach. I’m going to keep my child safe by not letting them have a Facebook page or a mobile device, then the expectation is at 18 when they go off to college, they’re going to have to figure it out on their own plus, how about this one? – Often websites are set up or social networking sites are set up for someone who doesn’t have one so let’s look at a couple of different areas, so let’s just take reputation and maybe cyber-bullying. If I don’t allow my child to have a Facebook page, then someone else could create one for them and post all sorts of horrendous things on it, and it takes quite a while – you can get it down but it takes some time. Also about the online reputation, so if I have nothing on the web, then if we’re done with this show, you write, “Oh, that Marsali Hancock, she was just such a bore,” then that’s the 100% of what’s on the web if you’re the only one who’s posted. So really when you look at the web as a potential positive and reducing negative, it means you actually get involved, you get engaged, you create your own online reputation that’s an asset rather than a liability proactively, and we have to look at the digital world as a place where we want our children to succeed. They can’t succeed if they are not prepared and practiced.

Len Sipes: Okay, well let’s go back to the criminal justice system and let’s align some things up. Well, we’re already halfway through the program. Let me reintroduce you. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today is Marsali Hancock. She is with the Internet Keep Safe Coalition. She is CEO and President – ikeepsafe.org – ikeepsafe.org. Marsali, for the criminal justice system, they need training, they need background, but there is in every state in the United States an Internet Safety Taskforce. So if you searched Maryland or Iowa or Montana Internet —

Marsali Hancock: It’s actually Internet Crimes Against Children.

Len Sipes: Internet Crimes Against Children, but they will also help you with other internet-related areas, correct?

Marsali Hancock: Yes. They can help point you in the right direction so it’s a real voice, they have a real number, and they will be somebody who can point you in the right direction.

Len Sipes: Okay, so there’s a local contact for people and there’s a national contact for people through the FBI, their Internet Crimes Taskforce; but local law enforcement needs training, do they not?

Marsali Hancock: They do need training, and it’s very helpful when they recognize they can literally be the golden ticket for their schools. So when you are looking at a principal who’s dealing with let’s take a situation of sexting. It’s very helpful for that principal to have a network of law enforcement, attorneys/psychologists, people who are up-to-speed in how to manage a digital experience like this where you minimize the risk to the victims and you minimize the risk to the perpetrator and you reduce the risk to the bystanders too who are just caught up in the experience.

Len Sipes: Okay. So the bottom line is that there are places for local law enforcement to go, and they can go to your website, ikeepsafe.org, and begin the process of finding out what resources are available to them.

Marsali Hancock: Yes. And for children, you can also report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They are the center, if you are seeing online exploitation; they are set up and ready to gather up that information. If you are a victim or you are a parent at home and you’ve got something that’s concerning you, you’re not sure it crosses that threshold; it’s very nice to call an Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce officer.

Len Sipes: Okay. For parents, it is a matter of what? It is a matter of, again, going to your website and websites like yours to learn how to deal with their children and what access to give, what age to give it, and how to guide your children in terms of keeping them safe?

Marsali Hancock: Well, ikeepsafe.org will help parents get the picture, so what are the big key issues? What are the areas where, if I don’t help prepare my child, there could be a very big pitfall?

Len Sipes: Right.

Marsali Hancock: So where’s the big gaps, and then how do I talk to my child in a way that I’m just not talking about all the pitfalls because kids glaze over, just like when you talk about awesome cars, the car-owner doesn’t want to hear about how they can be killed in their car. They want to talk about their awesome car. Kids want to talk about their awesome technology.

Len Sipes: That’s a good analogy. That’s a good analogy.

Marsali Hancock: So looking at how can we help them better balance the ethical, be careful with their privacy, manage their online reputation, have healthy relationships, and understand the importance of online security. You cannot miss one of those topics.

Len Sipes: Young people do not separate themselves from their digital identity so they see Facebook, they see Twitter, they see the other social sites as being integral to who they are. They don’t see themselves as being different from their digital presence, correct? – And that applies to not just kids, that applies to just about everybody today, correct?

Marsali Hancock: Well, it does, but to youth, because they have grown up with this ubiquitous access often, they connect emotionally with and through their digital device, and they define their relationships on web platforms, and that’s different than those of us who have a few grey hairs.

Len Sipes: So if they’re bullied or if they’re attacked via the Internet, they take it as seriously as if it happened on the street.

Marsali Hancock: It’s actually in many ways, emotionally, it can be more serious because if I viewed bullying in the old days on my bus, I’m going to get off that bus and I’m going to go home, and I’m not continually seeing that bullying on the bus. If it’s online it goes on and on, and what to use to just involve maybe 5 students or 100 students or 200 students now can be 100,000 or 2 million or 5 million students, and in that process as people are viewing digitally the bullying experience, they are either becoming desensitized or they have a sense of ethics that help them to know, “I need to flag and tag this. Whatever platform this is on, I can send an anonymous tag so that this type of behavior is better monitored by the platform.”

Len Sipes: Bullying, cyber-bullying, the topic, the individual topic that we’ve touched upon throughout the program, again, law enforcement, if I’m John Doe police officer and I get a call to go to a house and to deal with an issue of cyber-bullying, I’m going to be stumped.

Marsali Hancock: Well, you don’t have to be stumped, first of all. First know that at search.org, which is set up for law enforcement, there is a research and it’ll be on our website. We have a blog that when we post about this show, we’ll link to it. It gives you the law enforcement entry point, so it’ll give you either a phone number or it’ll give you an email that’s fast-tracked through the company. So here’s an example: in Maryland we were at a school and they were having an issue with cyber-bullying. Some of it was anonymous, some of it involved a few students at the school, but they were assuming it involved quite a few more because of the anonymous posts. So the school resource officer was able to connect with the law enforcement community, get a warrant. They were able to identify the IP addresses of all of the individuals involved so they could go back to the principal and say, “Well, okay, here’s what we have. Here’s the evidence. These are the students’ homes that we know the digital communication was sent from these households.” Now you can’t ensure, we never know for sure who’s actually on the other end of the digital communication. It could be a mother, it could be a friend at that home, but it narrows this huge, giant universe of the web down to, okay, here’s these 12 homes that were involved in actually sending content.

Len Sipes: You really don’t live anonymously. Now there are all sorts of fraudulent sites out there and we haven’t even discussed cyber fraud. My heavens.

Marsali Hancock: Another day.

Len Sipes: Another day, another time, because they originate in Russia and send their messages through —

Marsali Hancock: China.

Len Sipes: — China, and they end up through Burma, and then they end up on your computer, so it’s very hard to track them down but the local cyber-bullying is something that can be traced back to various IP addressed, various computers and various addresses.

Marsali Hancock: It’s difficult to be totally anonymous. To be completely honest, it can happen, but it takes someone very skilled.

Len Sipes: And I think that’s pretty reassuring for a lot of people listening to the program, and I think it’s hopeful to the criminal justice personnel that they can do something about it. So again, they have to work through their task forces, and again, if they have any questions, they can go through the website ikeepsafe.org. Suicide – one of the things I do want to get into is the emotional trauma – it’s just not emotional trauma for a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old to be bullied in a massive setting and that spreads through the school and literally hundreds, if not more, students have access to these messages. So that’s got to be profoundly difficult to deal with, and that’s one of the things we have to – parents need to sit down with their kids, and we in government need to be prepared for the emotionally trauma of what happens when you are bullied and the possibility that suicide could be a result.

Marsali Hancock: Well, Len, you bring up the point about suicide, and what kids are posting online can be incredibly traumatic. I think one of the areas – there are not that many cases that show bullying and online bullying lead to suicide but there are many cases of students who are considering suicide who post about it online, so for the criminal justice community to recognize that we’ve never had the capacity that we have now for intervention and early intervention, so here’s a couple of examples. This one doesn’t involve suicide but my second one will. We were at a school in North Carolina. One of the teachers had picked up a cell phone because they were texting in class. When she picked it up, it was actually an image of his private parts, so now that image is a sexting image of a child so it is child pornography. She wasn’t sure where she takes that and how she manages that. At the same school, another phone she picks it up, and it’s a gang paraphernalia on a 12-year-old with handguns, so she’s going, “Oh, no. Now what do I do? What do I have to do? What’s legal? What’s ethical?” She took it to the law enforcement officer there connected with the school, they pulled the child out. They found a stash of weapons near the school, but the best thing – and here’s my point – is now this 12-year-old is in a gang intervention program before he’s in the criminal justice post-crime.

Len Sipes: Why is it that so many people create that presence on the digital world? The mass shootings – not to deviate into that – but they oftentimes leave digital trails. They oftentimes basically tell people in subtle ways that this is what they’re going to do. I’m not quite sure if everybody recognizes that. How do you recognize a child in trouble? How do you recognize an individual in trouble through their digital presence?

Marsali Hancock: Well in the UK, there was a young woman who had posted she was going to commit suicide. She had over a thousand friends on her Facebook where she had posted it – no one did a thing. So they found her the next day, passed away.

Len Sipes: What are you supposed to do?

Marsali Hancock: You’re supposed to notify, so if you know that person for real, then you call the police. My nephew had a very painful situation where he was instant messaging on the platform MySpace, and as he was instant-messaging with her, he realized she was creating her goodbye communication. There were three people that she was instant-messaging with, saying her goodbyes, it was her birthday, she was in high school. He only knew her from high school so he only knew her as a school friend. He did not know her parents’ name or landline, and in today’s world, you don’t call landlines. So if I ground my child from their cell phone, nobody calls a landline and goes through mom. They don’t have that communication. So he didn’t know how to find that information, he wanted to call 911, so he starts doing reverse searches, he’s working, working. By the time he figures it out, law enforcement goes, she’s in a coma, and it’s a week before she passes away. But in his mind he will always wonder, “How do I report potential suicide when I don’t know what we used to know which was people’s parents’ names and their home address?” – Because digital friends don’t always know where you live. So part of the criminal justice charge in this generation is to help people learn how to report and respond when they see something. Now not ever case is tragic. There was another one last year where there was someone, a teen, a youth in the UK who had reported that she was going to commit suicide, and her friends did report to law enforcement, they reported to the State Department that sent a message to the UK that found the child and there was intervention just in time.

Len Sipes: Parents need to have age-appropriate conversations with their kids about digital safety and about the digital world because it’s obvious that kids do not separate the real world from the digital world, and I’m beginning to believe that’s applying to more and more adults.

Marsali Hancock: Well, see, we call it the real world and the online world but youth, there is no difference because which they do online is just like hanging out at their friend’s house. What they used to do at the corner store now is done in a group digital experience, either creating or they’re sharing instant messages or it’s on the texting, so there is no on-and-off line for kids. There’s just life.

Len Sipes: But you agree with me that the first line of defense is that parent having that age-appropriate with their child throughout the process and recognizing this, that maybe the digital world did not exist for them just a couple of years ago but it does exist for their 9-year-old, it does exist for their 12-year-old, it does exist for their 17-year-old, and regardless as to how much they protest it, they have to be involved in the child’s digital world.

Marsali Hancock: It starts when they’re 2 and they’re on an iPad. It starts when they’re 3 and they’re 4. Some interesting statistics from Rochester Institute of Technology – by second grade, kids start to harass each other online so that cyber-bullying message needs to happen before second grade. By fourth grade, they’re downloading illegal music and game files. By seventh grade, they are hacking into and out of servers where they don’t belong. So the time to prepare a child to be responsible and ethical and resilient online is as they experience technology. It will never happen by accident that we will have ethical and responsible children in the digital space. Adults must help them through how they navigate it. They don’t have a frontal lobe. They need us.

Len Sipes: Prevention is key from the standpoint of parents’ involvement with children and getting criminal justice personnel trained so they know what to do in terms of providing preventive messages and knowing what to do in terms of an adequate response.

Marsali Hancock: Well, and one thing that everyone can take from the show today, one of the most hurtful thing is when someone says to a parent, “Well, kids will be kids.” What they need from the criminal justice system and from other adults is, “We are here for you. We recognize it was traumatic. We’re going to help you navigate this” rather than “Oh, it didn’t cross criminal barriers. You’re out on your own.”

Len Sipes: You know, that’s just it. I think people need to understand that it is a complex world and they need to know they’re not on their own. There are places that they can go, like your organization, ikeepsafe.org, the FBI, the local taskforces. That’s the bottom line in terms of the messages for today.

Marsali Hancock: And the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Len Sipes: And we’ll put those in the share notes. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. We really appreciate your listening to today’s program on internet safety. Marsali Hancock, she is the CEO and president of the I Keep Safe organization, ikeepsafe.org. We really appreciate the calls, the letters, the emails, and we hope that you will have a wonderful listening experience in 2013. Please keep the comments coming in, and have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Identity Theft, Internet Crime Tagged With: cyber bullies, cyber crime, internet safety

Identity Theft-NOVA-DC Public Safety

June 13, 2012 by CSOSA

Welcome to “DC Public Safety” – Radio and television shows, blog and transcripts on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system. We currently average 90,000 page views a month.

The portal site for “DC Public Safety” is http://media.csosa.gov.

Radio Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/audio/2012/03/identity-theft-nova-dc-public-safety/

[Audio Begins]

Len Sipes: From the nation’s capital, this is DC Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s program is about identity theft, and back at our microphones, Will Marling, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trynova.org. Will’s been at our microphones before, and it’s always a pleasure to have him back. With Will today is Denise Richardson. She is a consumer advocate, ID theft and education specialist, and, again, that’s going to be the meaning of the show. To Will and to Denise, welcome to DC Public Safety.

Will Marling: Hey, thanks, Len.

Denise Richardson: Yes, thank you for having us.

Len Sipes: Now, Denise bear with me for a second. Will and I were talking before the show about a couple things. Number one, Victim’s Rights Week is coming up in April, and I certainly do want to mention that. Also, Will, the National Organization for Victim’s Assistant that has been around since 1975. You now have been given the task of certifying all victims’ advocates within the Department of Defense, correct?

Will Marling: That’s right. Yeah, just a recent decision by the Department of Defense is for us to become the secretariat to certify their victim advocate. So we’re extremely honored, I have to say.

Len Sipes: That is wonderful. That is wonderful and that’s a huge undertaking.

Will Marling: Well, it is. It’s an important one. It’s a demonstration of the military’s commitment to victim assistance, and it’s also their recognition of I think the important work that this organization has done historically as well as today.

Len Sipes: Now you guys have been certifying victim’s rights specialist for quite some time.

Will Marling: We have. The National Organization for Victim Assistance is the secretariat for the National Advocate Credentialing Program. It started in 2003. So that’s a – it’s similar – it’s credentialing certification. It’s all kind of — they look very similar but we provide a credential. We’re the secretariat for that National Allied Professional Credential, and of course we’re honored to be part of that as well.

Len Sipes: Oh, I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s an immense undertaking. But I can’t say that this is immense and it’s not that I’m not excited about that but the Federal Constitutional Victim’s Rights Amendment is back on the radar screen, and I find that to be wonderful. I mean one of the things that the public needs to know is that there are a lot of State Constitutional Amendments for victim’s rights. 36? Correct?

Will Marling: 33 I think technically.

Len Sipes: 33.

Will Marling: Three fifths of our nation’s states, that’s right, have it in their constitution.

Len Sipes: Now, but we tried a federal constitutional amendment, victims’ rights amendment before but it lost just by a couple votes, right?

Will Marling: Well, yeah, the attempt was to start with the Senate, and it was just two votes shy of cloister in the Senate, and of course that stopped it. But we think the momentum, the timing, there’s so many things that have come together today, right now, for a victims’ rights amendment, you know, a 28th amendment to the United States Constitution to affirm victim’s rights. And we’re — to be honest, we think it serves the nation to do this.

Len Sipes: Well, it’s something certainly the hope for it is certainly something to pray for because you know the fact of victims within the criminal justice system – you know, I’ve been around in the system for 42 years. We haven’t done the best of jobs in terms of taking care of victims.

Will Marling: Well, yeah, that’s right. I mean, I many times say the system is designed to get the results that it gets. People just don’t realize that many times it works the way it’s actually designed. So when you think about redesigning it, that’s one dimension. Sometimes it truly doesn’t function meaningfully. And at the end of the day, who’s the biggest stakeholder in this? It really is the victims. There are others impacted including communities. But certainly the victims need to have that voice, and we believe a constitutional amendment in the United States Constitution would provide that social grounding as well as the legal framework for affirming socially the needs of crime victims and the consistent service that they deserve at every level.

Len Sipes: You know I’ve talked to a variety of people who have been in the criminal justice system who victim’s advocacy was something that they were partial to. They certainly were not against it. But it was not first on their radar screen until they or a family member became a victim of crime. When they walked through the experience directly as a victim or being very close to somebody who was a victim of crime, their attitudes changed remarkably.

Will Marling: Absolutely. I mean, it’s the doctor becoming the patient.

Len Sipes: Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. All right, but the program today is about undoubtedly theft. It’s one of the things that always is on my mind. It is always on the mind of people throughout the country. And I do want to reintroduce Denise Richardson. She’s a long time consumer advocate and author of “Give Me Back My Credit!” The victim of identity theft herself, Richardson set out to research the effects of this kind of theft and became a certified identity theft management specialist and trained and certified by the National Institute of Fraud and Risk Management. Denise, this concept of identity theft, who within this country does identity theft not touch? You can talk about burglary. You can talk about sexual assault. You can talk about violence. You can talk about theft. And that affects individual pieces of the population. Identity theft, that issue belongs to everybody in the country.

Denise Richardson: It belongs to everyone in our country, and it effects everyone in the world, because, unfortunately, as victims of this crime in this country, a lot of it can come from outside the country, and it makes it really tough on law enforcement to be able to even have the resources or ability to hold them accountable, to stop it. So it allows the crime to just explode and grow in all sorts of ways. From across the country, in the country and it hits everyone. And one thing I’d like to say is congrats, Will, on all of your efforts because NOVA is one of the organizations that stepped out to realize that identity theft is a traumatic event. And it can leave scars, whether they’re visible scars or not, and those scars can serve as a reminder of the pain that can last a lifetime. If somebody has your social security number and is able to commit crimes and do other things in your name, it can literally take a lifetime to get through. So for NOVA to come out and say, yes, this is a traumatic – can be a traumatic crime and there are victims, I just applaud your efforts in doing this.

Len Sipes: www.givemebackmycredit.com is the Website for Denise Richardson. Denise, now, the people listening to this, they are members of the criminal justice system, members of the public. What’s the one thing that we need to know straight from the very beginning of the program? What do we need to understand about identity theft that we don’t understand about it now?

Denise Richardson: One of the frustrating points that I see over and over when I hear from other victims of this crime is that they didn’t know. They didn’t know it could be this bad. They didn’t know this could happen to them. They didn’t know – they had credit monitoring. So they thought just by monitoring their credit reports they would have known. But you wouldn’t know if someone’s hijacked your tax return, if somebody is committing violent crimes in your name. You wouldn’t know this. So, to me, the number one thing is more education on today’s identity theft trends and the types of risks and impact it can have, because often I see it downplayed in the media that, oh, if a stats gone down, if there’s a statistic that’s gone down in one area, you would never – if you look at it this way, you would never say to yourself, “Crime’s gone down in our neighborhood, so I think I’ll leave my doors unlocked now.” And that’s the type of message I think continues to come across because that’s what I hear from the consumers who turn victims and say, “Why didn’t I know about this? I always heard it wasn’t a big thing and the credit card companies would just take care of it for you.” But there’s the problem. Not all the crimes that are committed today are credit related. Yet people are still equating the crime with just America’s credit card and the banks will take care of it for you, so I would say education.

Len Sipes: When we’re talking about identity theft across the board, we’re not just talking about our credit cards. We’re not just talking about our social security number. We’re talking about every little piece of paper that is attached to us. And I had somebody the other day, a pretty prominent person, came to me and said, “Oh, my God, my name and my – where I live and everything else is available on a Website. How could that possibly be?” And I said, “Well, they pull from public records. Have you bought a house?” He says yes. Well, all that information in terms of who you are and where you live is a matter of public information. That’s startling to a lot of people. But so there’s – number one there’s a lot of publicly available information on you out there. We participate in Facebook. We participate in Google Plus. We set up a Google profile. There are public records that apply to us. So from the very beginning people need to understand that a lot of information is publicly available about you off the internet, and thieves can go from there and get the rest of it, correct?

Denise Richardson: Absolutely. And these identity thieves have gotten sophisticated, and if you remember, that’s their job, to sit on Facebook or Twitter or wherever they can get a wide range of information, hack into large databases, whatever it is. And they can take small bits of information that you have on your profile and put it together with other information that’s public, say, your property records or whatever. So they use that information. They sell it to other scammers who use it and then pretend to strike up a conversation with you or know you or connect with you, whatever it may be. A small little bit of information can turn into the key that unlocks the door to every other bit of information, and you wouldn’t even know it.

Len Sipes: Okay, now that we sufficiently scared the dickens out of everybody listening to the program, because I think identity theft is huge. I think it is beyond measurement. Will, do we have a sense as to how many Americans are impacted by identity theft on a yearly basis?

Will Marling: Well, we do. I mean the Consumer Sentinel Network, which is the Federal Trade Commission’s report; they indicate that for 2011 there were 1.8 million complaints. Now what’s important to recognize—

Len Sipes: But not everybody complains.

Will Marling: Well that’s what’s important to recognize. I mean in terms of uniform crime reporting, identity theft is one of those crimes that doesn’t actually get reported. You can sort of speculate and extrapolate. We know it’s a lot worse than that. I mean, come on, partly because you are obligated as a victim to report. Secondly, sometimes law enforcement actually won’t take a report, and even if they do, they might not know what to do with it. But the challenge becomes just even collecting that information. So we always encourage people, tell the FTC, file a police report if you can because at the very least we need to know what’s going on. What’s important to know is that, with the latest report, credit card fraud is only 14 percent of what’s going on here. Government documents benefits fraud is 27 percent. So when people say, “Oh, identity theft is just about credit card, and I had that happen, and the bank said they’d take care of it.” Well that’s another issue. The banks not necessarily going to report for you that there was another identity theft even though that’s what occurred.

Len Sipes: What do you mean by government documents?

Will Marling: Government documents, anything pertaining to a government document, for instance, getting a driver’s license in the name of somebody or getting government services in the name of somebody, filing a tax return in the name of somebody to get a $2,000 refund.

Len Sipes: Do they really do that? They’ll file tax returns?

Will Marling: Oh, absolutely. I mean it’s a great business. It’s a massive business. You know we don’t know exactly. It could be $20 billion worth of business but it’s hard to quantify completely, but absolutely. If they get your name, social security number — you can go online right now and find people’s PDF’s of their tax returns. And so commonly in training I ask people you know, “Raise you hands, how many of you have a PDF of your tax return that says “Tax Return 2010″?” And people raise their hand. Well if you have access to somebody’s computer and you just do a basic search and say “tax return”, and it comes back, I have your tax return plus all your kids, their social security numbers, your spouse. See, I have all of that right there. And what’s a simple way to default that? Well rename that PDF file. It could be one, call it “Grape Juice Recipe” or actually take it off your computer. Put it on a jump drive separate but file it up somewhere. That’s the easiest way to thwart that potential compromise.

Len Sipes: You now I keep – the amazing thing about when we have these conversations about identity theft I say to myself, I’ve been in this system for 42 years. I have four college degrees, university degrees, and you constantly come up with stuff that I never would have thought of in terms of discussing this topic, because our taxes are filed on our computer, and we’ve done exactly what you’ve said. Never crossed my mind to do this. Never crossed my mind to name it grape juice recipe.

Will Marling: Well you’re a smart guy, right? It’s just an awareness issue.

Len Sipes: It is.

Will Marling: I mean that’s what this will confirm.

Len Sipes: That’s what Denise just said. So, Denise, what are the prevention tips we need to get out? Is it okay to go to them that quickly?

Denise Richardson: Well I would just to expand on what Will was saying, to give you an example of how you say you hadn’t heard of this or changing your name. People do not know that their kids who are on Facebook and Twitter and they have their own iPhones and everything, these iPhones are nothing more than a little computer.

Len Sipes: Oh, absolutely.

Denise Richardson: They need to be protected as well. And if your kids are using your home computer and they’re sharing music, your files could be open for sharing everything. And that is a lot of how – you know you could be on a network in your neighborhood coffee shop and if your files are set to open and to share, anyone can get your information. And as far as the income tax fraud, filing fraudulent tax returns, I live in South Florida, and the FDC report that just came out named South Florida as the number one metro area for this type of crime and Florid itself as the number one, again, several years. And it stills strikes me that we – and the FDC came out and said two weeks after tax season opened identity theft crimes jumped 50 percent. And the next day – I mean this was on our front page of the paper every day for a week. In between that time I would read an article online by somebody out there saying, “Do we really have to worry about identity theft? Is it just fear mongering?” And in the meantime I’ve got all these emails from consumers saying, “What do I do? I can’t get my tax return. I plan to pay my property taxes with it.” And so I’m seeing one thing that’s reality in my life every day but then when I read this kind of information I think it is harmful. So I just think we need to send a better message that I think people can learn how to protect themselves better. There’s no way to prevent it, but you can do things and talk to your kids or your neighbors, seniors—

Len Sipes: Okay, I have to break because we’re way past the half way mark and I have to reintroduce both of you, and then we’ll get back to the conversation. Our guests today, ladies and gentlemen, Will Marling, the Executive Director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, been around since 1975, www.trynova.org. Our other guest is Denise Richardson. She is a consumer advocate and a ID theft and education specialist. Her Website is www.givemebackmycredit.com. Okay, so we’re way into the second half. Either one of you. So again, what we’ve done is scared me, scared all of our listeners. I need to focus on what we can do. Is there one place that we can go to get information about this? Is there a one-stop service? Where do people go to get the information they need?

Will Marling: Well, yeah, let me jump in here. There isn’t one place to go. Of course, the internet offers us access to a lot of different resources quickly, but we try to principalize this so that people build an awareness, because however you instruct people about vulnerabilities, there will always be another tool that’s used by perpetrators, a new technology or whatever. So we talk about raise the fruit. Have you ever heard the phrase “go for the low hanging fruit.”?

Len Sipes: Sure.

Will Marling: We always talk about raise your fruit because make it even that much more difficult. Can that stop it all? No. But why hand them your tax return on a PDF? Why keep all your sensitive documents on your computer when you don’t access them regularly and you can put them on a jump drive and lock them up in a box?

Len Sipes: Well, but there has to be a mantra in terms of all of us simply need to be aware that if our kids are file sharing on computers and the bad guys have access to our computers, there’s got to be a sense that every person that is not known to you, every email, every phone call, every snail mail communication where that person is not known to you, you immediately be suspicious of it. I mean there’s got to be a grounding that we can start people off with.

Denise Richardson: I agree. And I think it is being informed and being alert, being aware that you shouldn’t’ ever give your information to anyone who is soliciting it. And you shouldn’t blindly trust anyone who calls your house. You shouldn’t trust your caller id anymore. You know and I say these things and people will say it’s fear mongering, but there’s where the issue lies. IT’s just simple education and trying to learn what you can do. I don’t expect a consumer out there to know fishing, smishing, vishing, skimming, spoofing, cook jacking, tab napping, all the names that people who work in it every day understand, but I’m all for – what my passion is about is just raising awareness to what you can do, what should you do. You should know about the latest scams. You should know that you shouldn’t put too much information on your profile. You should stop and think before you publish anything. Ask yourself, “If I hit this publish button and it was going to be on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow, would I do the same thing?” And you might stop and think about it. You know we tend to hide behind the screen of the computer thinking everything is, oh, just our friends see it. But that’s not the case.

Len Sipes: You mean, just my friends read my Google Plus profile?

Denise Richardson: Well, some people feel that just your friends are getting into your space, into your – you got your settings set one way. But the settings can be changed. They can be hacked. People can use the information you put in your profile. For example, you love lacrosse. You do this. You do that. And they can pretend to have those same exact interests and send you a note and say, “Hey, what school did you go to? This is what I did.” And your guard is down. We tend to trust, and criminals know that, so they take advantage of that trust.

Len Sipes: Hey, you and I are both friends with Will Marling, so obviously I’ve got to be legitimate if you and I share a friendship with Will Marling.

Denise Richardson: I would say so, exactly.

Will Marling: Sure.

Denise Richardson: And that’s what they think because, oh, she was sent – I can not tell you how many times I get a call from even a friend who knows that I work in this industry. Just a couple weeks ago somebody called and said, “I think I got myself in a world of trouble.” I said, “What did you do?” And he said, “I went to Yahoo! And it said that they were protecting me because I didn’t have – I had to re-put in my information, so I did, and then it asked for my social and I—” And I said, “Please tell me that you didn’t give them all that.” He did. So he spent hours changing his PayPal account, this account, that account because then I found out in asking him a few questions, he has the same password. So if a criminal gets a hold of – hacks into one of your passwords, and they’re easy to guess because we have – we use combinations that they figured out through our public information. Just imagine if they hack that one password how much havoc they can create in five minutes time. Check to see if you have a PayPal account, if you have an Amazon account, anything.

Len Sipes: You’ve just made thousands of people very uncomfortable because the research says that’s exactly what we do.

Denise Richardson: And I hope I made them uncomfortable. That’s the point. I want them to go out and say, “Oh, my gosh, I need to change my passwords. I need to strengthen them.” I did a speaking engagement at one point and I asked the people in the audience how many people use the name of their car or where they graduated or what year they graduated in their pass code. And over 75 percent of the people raised their hand. And I then explained why that wasn’t a good idea, and someone said to me, “Oh, my gosh, I do that with all of my passwords. I’ll use my spouses name, my spouse’s birthday, my child’s name, my dogs name because it’s so easy to remember.” Criminals are smart, and they know that. So never – unfortunately you’ve got to come up with ways to have stronger, longer, unpenetratable passwords.

Len Sipes: All right, but the one thing – to me this is the best suggestion of them all and that is is that anytime you get a communication from anybody that is part of your financial world, so you get an email from your bank saying your account’s been compromised. You get a call, an email from your credit card company saying that your account has been compromised. Immediately contact them independently on your own through a number and through a source that you know to be legitimate and then ask that person a question. So never proceed with that initial contact. Always go to the source. I’ve always found that to be the most powerful of them all. Am I right or wrong?

Denise Richardson: You’re absolutely right. You have to do that because a lot of these scams now will appear to come from Go Daddy or Amazon or your bank or even the U.S. Government. And they’ll provide you with here’s the fraud department number to call. We suspect something and people will panic and call that number. What they don’t realize is they’re calling right into the thief. So always – so never use a phone number, and your bank is not going to email you about something like that.

Len Sipes: Yeah, but people don’t know. I mean—

Denise Richardson: Right.

Len Sipes: –we got a phone call the other day about our credit card being misused. And the point is that my wife had a conversation with the credit card company regarding that, and it was very legit and very straightforward, but my wife shouldn’t have done that. My wife should have hung up and called the credit card company back.

Denise Richardson: Well because sometimes what happens when they call you, they have quite a bit of information on you already, and that tends to make consumers think, oh, yes, that’s my bank because how would they know that? But if it really is, your bank is going to understand if you say, “You know what, I’m concerned about identity theft. So let me hang up and call you through the number that I have for you. Do you have a particular extension?” Something like that. Or if it’s legit your bank should be able to tell you your password on that account, tell you everything you want to know, not the other way around where you have to confirm it with them. I recently had the same thing happen to me with my bank calling about another credit card fraud. But today the criminals are getting even more savvy with telephone calls, using the phone to hook you into falling for anyone of their many scams. So if someone calls you, never give out information.

Len Sipes: If you post on Facebook that you’re going to Florida and then the scammer calls you up and say you know there’s –evidently you’re in Florida and you have problems with your credit card, you immediately assume that this is legitimate.

Denise Richardson: Exactly and I always tell people, oh my gosh, stop telling people where you are every minute of the day because people have been being robbed because they watch this. If they have enough information and they know where you live and here’s a picture of me, I’m sitting a thousand miles away on a sunny beach. We’re all here on vacation. There was just a story in the news not too long ago where the teenage daughter didn’t know that she was giving out any information like that that she shouldn’t and said “Oh, we’re at the airport. She text right at the airport, “We’re getting on the plane.” Well her friend posted it and a friend of that friend, they tracked it back to because they did catch the people, robbed their house while they were gone.

Len Sipes: Denise we have one minute left. What point do we need to make that we haven’t made in one minute?

Denise Richardson: That there are available – there’s information out there, and the best way that you can avoid becoming a crime victim is to be informed, look out for the risks and know the impact and have a plan of action.

Len Sipes: Yeah, but there’s so much to know.

Denise Richardson: There is. I mean you can’t possibly learn it in one moment. You can go to the FTC.gov site. They have a lot of information. Will’s site, I’m sure, does. My site at – on my site I have areas, categories for the current scams. I try to keep that up-to-date, the types of risk, what to do if you’re a victim. So there’s definitely information out there. And here’s something. If you’re ever in doubt, you get an email that you think might be a scam, type it in your browser. Chances are people have already written about it and learned about it.

Len Sipes: Well that’s a wonderful idea. All right. Our guests today and in terms of summarizing and it’s a lot to summarize, Will Marling, Executive Director, National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trynova.org. Also with our theft identity – identity theft expert, Denise Richardson. She’s a consumer advocate and an ID theft and education specialist. Her Website is www.givemebackmycredit.com. It seems as if the Federal Trade Commission just Google or your favorite search engine, Federal Trade Commission and look for consumer fraud or identity theft, and there’s information there. What I heard today was about file sharing in terms of especially in terms of your kids and downloading music or file sharing, relabeling your computer files to be sure that if you’re hacked that the person won’t go and find your important documents. Be careful with social media in terms of what public information you make public, change your passwords, go to the source if you get a call from somebody or contact from somebody. Don’t continue with that. Just hang up and go to that source independently so you know that it is legitimate. Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety. Have yourselves a very pleasant day.

[Audio Ends]

Filed Under: Audio Podcast, Fraud, Identity Theft, Internet Crime Tagged With: Denise Richardson, identity theft, National Organization for Victim Assistance, NOVA

Sexual Exploitation of Children-DC Public Safety-US Department of Justice

October 19, 2011 by CSOSA

Sexual Exploitation of Children – “DC Public Safety”

Welcome to DC Public Safety – radio and television shows on crime, criminal offenders and the criminal justice system.

See http://media.csosa.gov for our radio shows, blog and transcripts.

Television Program available at http://media.csosa.gov/podcast/video/2011/07/sexual-exploitation-of-children-dc-public-safety/

We welcome your comments or suggestions at leonard.sipes@csosa.gov or at Twitter at http://twitter.com/lensipes.

[Video Begins]

Len Sipes: Hi, everybody. Welcome to D.C. Public Safety. I’m your host, Leonard Sipes. Today’s show is about sexual exploitation of children, and you know what? It’s really about a rescue mission. The FBI estimates that on any given day there’s a million pedophiles online looking for your children. The attorney general, Eric Holder, what he did was to frame a national effort to look at what we can do, what we in the criminal justice system can do, and to look at what you as parents can do. To discuss this on the first half of the program, we have Francey Hakes. She is the national coordinator for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction from the U.S. Department of Justice, and we have Dr. Michael Bourke, chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office, and to Francey, and to Michael, welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Francey Hakes: Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes: All right, did I frame all this issue? I mean, we have a lot of people, a lot of concern, a lot of individuals involved in exploiting our children. So can you frame it for me a little bit, Francey? And can you give me a sense as to the national effort as announced by the attorney general, Eric Holder?

Francey Hakes: Of course. Some people have described the sexual exploitation of our children as an epidemic. I would certainly describe the explosion of child pornography that way. So last August, the attorney general, Eric Holder, announced our national strategy for child exploitation, prevention, and interdiction. It’s the first ever national strategy by any government in the world, and it’s certainly our first. It’s supposed to have three prongs: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction. What we decided to do is bring together all of the federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, all our prevention partners, all our sex offender management partners, our court partners, and most importantly, our parents and community groups together to bring this effort under one umbrella so that we can fight child sexual exploitation on all fronts.

Len Sipes: The numbers that I’m talking about, they’re going up dramatically. The numbers are astounding. We’re talking about a huge number of individuals trying to violate our kids on a day to day basis, and when I say violate, we’re talking about psychological and physical bondage, are we not?

Francey Hakes: Unfortunately, the children that are being sexually abused, especially the ones whose images are being traded like baseball cards across the internet, across the world, are being violated in increasingly violent ways, and we’re seeing increasingly younger and younger children being violated that way, and that is the reason that the attorney general and all of our partners decided to get together and start this effort, so that we could do something about it, and our ultimate goal is to eradicate child exploitation ultimately.

Len Sipes: Michael, you’re the chief psychologist for the United States Marshal’s office. You are an expert. You understand these individuals; child sexual predators probably better than anybody else. Who are they?

Michael Bourke: Well, for eight years, prior to coming to the Marshal Service, I treated these men in federal prison, and the truth is there isn’t really one mind of a predator, you know, so to speak. These men come in from all walks of life, they’re from all socioeconomic groups, they’re both genders, frankly, and these men tend not to burn out like other types of offenders do. So really, when we talk about what is the sex offender, they, they’re folks that are our neighbors; they’re folks that are our coaches and civic leaders in our communities in some cases. So they, most individuals that offend against children are actually known to those children and some have a very positive relationship in other ways with those children.

Len Sipes: Well, help me frame it Michael, because on one hand, we have, according to the FBI, a million pedophiles online, and they’re trying to entice these kids into meetings, and they’re trying to entice them to exchange images. These images are going to haunt them for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, most sexual exploitations involved people who were known to the victim. They’re the neighbor. They’re the uncle. They’re the coach. I mean, what do you say to parents? I mean, the numbers seem to be overwhelming. What are the chief lessons to be learned here, and what prevention lessons can we put on the table?

Michael Bourke: Yeah, I think, and Francey may have something to add to this, but from my experience, parents need to be aware of what their children are doing online. They need to be aware of who their friends are online, with whom they’re chatting at night, they should be paying as close attention to those friends as they do if their child’s going to go spend the night at someone’s home, and frankly, a lot of parents are a little intimidated by some of this advanced technology on the internet, children have a lot of access and avenues by which to access the internet, including mobile devices, and parents need to just get a little, get some additional education, and they need to pay attention to what these kids are doing online. It’s a very dangerous place.

Len Sipes: They’ve got to be aggressive. We run, by the way, in this program, we run a commercial about parents intervening with their kids and their online experiences, but the parents need to be aggressive. Is that the bottom line? I mean that’s the principal prevention method, if parents are aggressive in terms of what their kids are doing, and keeping an open line of communication, so if that child is approached, he can go to the parent and tell the parent about this experience. Am I right or wrong?

Michael Bourke: Yes, I think that’s accurate. And also that relationship is very important between the parent and child as well. For the parent to have a relationship with the child where the child feels comfortable coming to the parent and saying, someone attempted to solicit, or asked me to send them a dirty picture.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: or something like that, so that the parent can take action because so much can occur despite parents best efforts…

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: these children can access the internet in a number of locations in a number of ways.

Len Sipes: Right.

Michael Bourke: so building that relationship and that type of rapport with the child is very important.

Len Sipes: Francey, you mentioned at the beginning of the program that The Department of Justice, for the first time, is bringing a coordination of effort in terms of parents, in terms of community organizations, in terms of law enforcement, in terms of everybody within the criminal justice system. What is the bottom line behind that coordination, is it to be a more effective tool for prevention, a more effective tool for apprehension and prosecution? What is it?

Francey Hakes: Well, like I said, in the beginning, it’s really three prongs. There are three main focuses of the national strategy: prevention, deterrence, and interdiction. Interdiction is traditional law enforcement investigation and prosecution. I’m a federal prosecutor, and I’ve been prosecuting these cases for 15 years. That’s obviously very important and will continue to be very important. But we’re never going to investigate and prosecute our way out of the problem. The numbers are simply too large. So deterrence is very important, and that’s where the United States Marshal Service and others, our state and local partners, through their sex offender management and monitoring, they are so key, and one of our best tools is going to be prevention. We’d rather not have the victims to have to rescue in the first place. We’d rather the children be empowered to protect themselves. We’d rather the parents have the tools that they need to know how to protect their children, and so that’s why organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Netsmarts, these organizations give out free materials, they have websites, they give out free materials for parents, teachers, students, and groups to obtain the information that they need to protect themselves online. It’s not just the parents, it’s not just the students, it’s not just the teachers. It’s all of those groups, plus our community groups, that need to have the materials necessary to protect themselves, not just online, but in their day to day activities, I think sometimes in this internet world, we’ve become, and Dr. Burke is correct, that children have access to the internet through so many devices now that it’s, sometimes, I think, a little terrifying. But we also have to remember that the majority of children who are being sexually abused are being abused by those that they know, and so arming them with the knowledge, the empowerment, the understanding of what is right and what’s wrong and what’s okay to tell, who to go to, a trusted adult, those things are very important.

Len Sipes: Having those age appropriate conversations with the kids, informing them, but not scaring them.

Francey Hakes: Exactly right.

Len Sipes: Now, so all these statistics that I mentioned at the beginning of the program, one million pedophiles, and a 914% increase in the number of child prostitution cases, do we have the capacity to deal with this? Is the criminal justice system at the federal, state, and local level overwhelmed by this process? Do we have the wherewithal to deal with this effectively, or are we fighting an uphill battle?

Francey Hakes: Well I think, sometimes in prosecution, we always used to call it shoveling smoke because it seems like the more you shovel, the more that there is. And I think with respect to child sexual abuse it’s been around for a long time, we hope that we can eradicate it, and where I think, we’ve started well, we’re on a good path. Are we somewhat overwhelmed? I think it’s overwhelming. I don’t think we’re overwhelmed. There are huge amounts of effort going on at the federal, state, and local level, but the key here is what the national strategy was designed to produce, and that is partnerships, collaboration, and cooperation at all levels of government, including globally. This has become, of course, an international problem with the advent of the internet.

Len Sipes: A global issue, right.

Francey Hakes: It is an absolutely global issue. And so we’re working with industry on ways to solve the problem. You probably heard the announcement last week from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Facebook and Microsoft. Microsoft has invented a new technology called Photo DNA. They donated it to the National Center. The National Center, in turn, gave it to Facebook, and Facebook is going to employ this technology throughout their systems which will search for and find known images of child pornography so that they can be eradicated from their systems.

Len Sipes: Wonderful. Michael –

Francey Hakes: So these are things that we have to do to work together and really think creatively between law enforcement, community, and industry.

Len Sipes: Michael, can we persuade people who are child sex offenders, who are pedophiles, not to get involved in this, or is that drive, that’s going to be with them for the rest of their lives–can the system have an impact on their behavior? Can we persuade them not to do this–that we’re taking sufficient actions that’s likely for them to get caught, can we persuade them not to do this?

Michael Bourke: Yeah, it’s a great question, Leonard. I think the answer is, it’s fairly multifaceted, but the short answer is that there is no cure for pedophilia. There’s no cure for these fantasies and these drives, per se. There is, however, for any of these individuals, a possibility of managing that behavior. This is not something inevitable, this is a choice, these men are responsible for those choices, and women, and we can assist them in doing that with creative external management. By that, I mean things like the registrations and outpatient treatment programs and things like that. With proper external management and proper internal management, these men are capable of living a life in which they never harm a child.

Len Sipes: Right, so treatment does work. That’s one of the things I did want to get across. Treatment does work, and we within the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, our sex offender agency, we’re going to talk about that with two people involved in that unit on the second half, but treatment does work, we can really persuade individuals who are on the edge. The commercial that will run between the first and second half, we’ll talk about ìwhen did you become a child sex predator?î Obviously, we’re under the opinion that we can persuade people who are on the edge not to do this. This is wrong; you’re going to get locked up. We can meaningfully intervene.

Michael Bourke: Right, well there are individuals that, with those proper things in place, have a choice not to re-offend.

Len Sipes: Okay.

Michael Bourke: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: The final part of it is aggressive prosecution. We need to go after them in every way shape and form and that’s what we’re trying to do with the federal, state, and local level, is to set up these dummy operations to pretend that you’re the 14 year old, the 13 year old, to monitor whatever it is that we can monitor, and to go after these people and arrest them and prosecute them. Is that correct?

Francey Hakes: Well that’s right, and that’s one of the reasons why we place such a high emphasis on technology and training for our law enforcement and for our prosecutors, because this is often a very high-tech crime, and we need a high tech solution, and that’s why we’re working with industry on things like I talked about, the Photo DNA initiative, but there are lots of other tools that law enforcement uses to keep up with the bad guys who are trying to assault our children. There are very sophisticated groups out there that have banded together to discuss their deviant fantasies and to plan ways to sexually assault children, and we have to find ways to be just as sophisticated to break their encryption, to get into their passwords, to find a way to infiltrate these groups, and we are doing that at the national level in order to make clear to these would-be predators that they have nowhere to hide, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have very strong, firm sentences as well, because that is part of our deterrent prong.

Len Sipes: Okay, we have one minute. So through the national effort, for what attorney general Eric Holder announced, the Office of Justice Programs, US Marshals Office, Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, we can look them in the eye and say that we’re gaining ground, that we have the wherewithal to come after you guys. Stop it.

Francey Hakes: I think the message is, to the would-be pedophile out there is you’re probably talking to a law enforcement officer, and watch out for the knock at your door.

Len Sipes: Cool. Michael?

Michael Bourke: I agree. United States Marshal Service has also set up what we call the National Sex Offender Targeting Center. It’s a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary intel and operational hub. We’re looking in all corners for these men. We are going after them when they fail to register, and we’re putting all of our efforts toward this problem.

Len Sipes: We have to close now. I really appreciate this stimulating conversation. Ladies and gentlemen, Francey Hakes, National Coordinator for the Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction from the US Department of Justice, Dr. Michael Bourke, Chief Psychologist for the United States Marshals Office. Stay with us on the second half of the program as we talk to individual parole and probation agents, what we call community supervision officers, who supervise sex offenders on a day to day basis. Please stay with us.

[Music Playing]

Len Sipes: Welcome back to D.C. Public Safety. I continue to be your host, Leonard Sipes, and we continue to explore this topic of sexual exploitation of children. The first half, we talked to two individuals from the Department of Justice, and we framed the numbers, and the numbers are truly staggering, but what does that mean in terms of the local level? We talked about the importance of partnerships, and we talked about the importance of people at the local level enforcing laws and providing treatment services. To talk about what it is that we do here within the District of Columbia; we have two principals with us today. We have Ashley Natoli, a community supervision officer for the sex offender unit of my agency, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, and Kevin Jones, another community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, and to Ashley and Kevin welcome to D.C. Public Safety.

Ashley Natoli: Thank you.

Kevin Jones: Thank you for having us.

Len Sipes: All right, Ashley, give me a sense as to this issue of the sex offender unit. What is it that we do? What is it that we do in the District of Columbia that’s unique?

Ashley Natoli: Well, we supervise offenders who have either been convicted of a sex offense, had an arrest for a sex offense, or an offense that is sexual in nature. They come to our unit and are supervised in our unit. There is roughly about 450 active cases in our unit right now, about 670 total of all sex offenders right now.

Len Sipes: Now, the interesting thing is what we at CSOSA do, and this is different from a lot of parole and probation agencies throughout the country, is that if you’ve had a sexual conviction in the past, not your current charge, but 15 years ago, if you had a sexual conviction, or if you had an arrest, you come to the sex offender unit, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: All right. Kevin, I want to talk to you. This is something that’s intrigued me from the very beginning of my time in corrections, that is, is that so many of the offenders on the sex offender unit are so compliant. They dress well, they work, they show up on time, they dot their I’s, they cross their T’s, and they give every appearance of people who are compliant vs. other offenders, sometimes it’s pretty obvious that they have issues. With the sex offender unit, the sex offenders, they can give the impression that nothing’s wrong with me, just spend your time with more troublesome people. You don’t have to really spend that much amount of time with me, look at me, I do everything right. Am I in the ballpark?

Kevin Jones: You’re in the ballpark exactly, Leonard. These guys are the most compliant guys on our caseloads. They actually drug test as scheduled, always on appointments, on time. They’re in the office, they appear to be, have all their ducks in a row. I think our main focus is, what are you after you leave our office? So that’s why we use a lot of our safety tactics, are that, we have a lot of collateral contacts with the offenders and the offenders’ families, and we really get to see what kind of guys they are once they leave our office.

Len Sipes: Now, I guess I shouldn’t brag, but then again, I am the host of the program, and this is our agency, so I am going to brag. We have one of the best sex offender units in the country, in my opinion, and what I’ve heard that from a lot of people, one of the best sex offender units. We have very high levels of contact. We drug test the dickens out of them, we submit them, they have to submit to lie detector tests, polygraphs. We put them in treatment, sometimes through the treatment process we find out about other things, we search their computers. We put them under surveillance, if necessary; we work with local law enforcement in terms of joint supervisions. We go to their home unannounced. You guys do it, and sometimes with our partners in the Metropolitan Police Department, they’re under a lot of supervision, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: Okay, and what does that do for that person, either one of you?

Kevin Jones: That person, as we do unscheduled contacts, it kind of keeps them off balance. Again, he has to be held accountable for, if he has no contact with minors, we assure that by doing home visits, and when we’re in home visits, we’re actually looking for things that might kind of be off the beat, maybe a possible toy, things of that nature in someone’s home, and at that point, they’re questioned.

Len Sipes: Now it’s also extraordinarily difficult, at the same time, with handheld computers, commonly known as smartphones. I mean, the smartphone that I carry every day is as powerful as a desktop computer five years ago. You can do anything you want with a smartphone. So yeah, we have the right to search their computers, but they may not be operating off their computers. They may be operating off of a portable device, correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: How do you deal with that?

Ashley Natoli: We look at the smartphones and the handheld devices similar to a computer. We have the ability to search those just as we would a computer, and in most instances, the offenders will be having these handheld devices as opposed to having a computer,

Len Sipes: Right. And the other thing that we are aware of too is a lot of the gaming consoles, such as Play Station 3’s, can be manipulated into being a computer as well, so we have to be looking out for a lot more than just a laptop in the home. We have to be looking into what they’re using as a phone, what they have, and then we’re asking the questions and following up with the searches. And that becomes the intriguing part of this, because it truly is a cat and mouse game. Now I don’t want to overplay my hand here. These individuals, in many cases, are compliant. You’re supervising them, they are in treatment, treatment does work, you can take individuals, and they can control their impulses. They don’t necessarily have to be out there offending. But this is truly the, Dr. Bourke mentioned it in the first half, this is the master psychological game. It is a psychological game, is it not, of cat and mouse, of looking for nuances of listening to individual little things that may not mean that much to another community supervision officer, but to you, means a lot. Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Kevin Jones: Yeah, that’s correct.

Ashley Natoli: A lot of these offenders, they are masters of manipulation and deception, and that’s, in most instances, in a lot of instances, how they ended up offending in the first place, because they have an incredible ability to groom these victims, and they’ve mastered the art of manipulation, and so we have to be aware of that so we aren’t taken advantage of.

Len Sipes: Well, tell me a little bit about the grooming of the victims, because we didn’t get involved in that in the first half. They will go online with them, and they will have, not just hours of conversations, but days or weeks or months of conversation before they ask for a photograph, or then that photograph moves on to a more sexually suggestive photograph. This is a process. They’re very patient individuals. Correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct. A lot of the guys that are in the grooming process while on sex offender treatment, a lot of that comes out in the treatment process, and once you find out that a guy might be on supervision, an offender might be on supervision for one offense, during that sex offender treatment process, you will find out that this offender has had multiple victims that he has proposed and that he has groomed, and this makes this offender a little more dangerous than what, from the outside, what it looks like to just this one victim.

Len Sipes: And again, I mean, the idea of going in unannounced, putting on a GPS tracking device, but all of that, we talk about the technology, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself with the technology, it strikes me, the most important ingredient we have here in terms of protecting the public is the savviness of the people who are supervising these sex offenders. Do I have it right? It really doesn’t matter about the computer part, the GPS, and the tracking devices, and the lie detector tests, what really matters is your ability to read the tea leaves as to whether or not this person is truly compliant or not. Am I right or wrong?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct. You have to be very patient and very thorough and leave no detail unturned. Like with the GPS, we’re not just looking at, are they complying with their curfew, are they charging their device, we’re looking at, where are they going during the daytime. So you actually look at all their tracks so you can know, did this offender go to the park, or was this offender near a school, so we’re aware of that, and we can put alerts on there so it helps us to identify that, but we have all this information, and if we’re not doing the right thing with it, then

Len Sipes: And the neat thing about it is we can overlay Google Earth, so we’re taking a look at that intersection, and we’re not quite sure he’s hanging out at the intersection, but when we overlay Google Earth, a-ha, there’s a playground that didn’t show up on a regular map. So we do have the technology tools to try and keep up with the individuals, but it’s really is more understanding who that person is. How long does it take until you get a sense as to that sex offender? How long does it take before you feel that you’re inside that person’s head, that person’s mind, that person’s modus operandi?

Kevin Jones: Well, again, with the treatment modal-, coupled with the GPS, you can probably feel your offender out, I guess, in about two months, maybe, to that nature, and a lot of it is, you’re questioning his every move, which makes him uncomfortable, which is, at the same time, holds him accountable for where he’s going, so as long as he’s knows that he’s being tracked, and that we have exclusion zones from the zoo, from parks, and things of that nature, then that kind of keeps him in compliance.

Len Sipes: And we’ll get word from the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement partners that we saw the guy spending way too much time outside of the St. Francis School. It was a block away, and maybe he has a legitimate reason for being there, maybe he doesn’t, but that’s also the law enforcement partnership feeding us information, right?

Kevin Jones: Yes.

Ashley Natoli: Yeah, definitely.

Kevin Jones: And apart with the law enforcement contact, we do unscheduled accountability tours, and that’s with our partnership with Metropolitan Police Department, and at that time, we also have what we call GPS clean sweep tours, where we will come do unscheduled accountability tours on an offender who has a GPS curfew of 7:00, just to make sure that they’re in place, that there’s no type of shielding, anything of that nature, and we also are really big on the Halloween project, where, that we will come to the offender’s home between the hours of 3 and 11, and he is to be in that home at that particular time.

Len Sipes: Right, and we have found violations on the Halloween tour. We have found kids inside the home, and we have found them, they’re not supposed to be giving out candy, they’re not supposed to be decorating homes.

Kevin Jones: Lights supposed to be off.

Len Sipes: We roll up to the house, and there’s decorations, and there’s candy, so we’re trying to protect the public in that way. The other major thing that we’re trying to do is look at social media, look at Facebook, but there are literally hundreds of sites that kids go onto. I was reading this morning about going onto gaming sites. You know, it’s not a chat room, it’s not Facebook, it’s now gaming sites. So we’re now in the process of taking a look at social media and tracking that person through the social media process, correct?

Ashley Natoli: Yes.

Kevin Jones: That is correct.

Len Sipes: Okay, and there’s a certain point where we are going to be expanding this to other offenders beyond sex offenders, but that’s part of their world, and that’s part of the experience of kids, and if they’re going to be there, we need to be there, right?

Ashley Natoli: That’s correct.

Kevin Jones: Yeah, and we actually have a mechanism where we are monitoring Facebook, and we’ve had situations where we’ve seen our offenders who may have no contact with minors, and in his profile sheet, he’ll be holding

Len Sipes: Right!

Kevin Jones: a child.

Len Sipes: Right.

Ashley Natoli: And it’s not as simple as just searching them by their name. You’re searching their aliases; you’re looking, searching by email addresses and different things, because a lot of it is not going to just be given to us. We have to find the information. It’s there if we search for it, deep enough.

Len Sipes: Right. We’re not going to give away our secrets in terms of how we’ve figured this out, but Cool Breeze was his moniker, nickname seven years ago, and son of a gun if he’s not using Cool Breeze in terms of his Facebook interactions, so there are all sorts of ways of getting at this issue. So the bottom line is this. What do we tell parents? I mean, you guys are there protecting their kids, you’re protecting all of society, just not the kids, but you’re protecting society, protecting kids from further activities on the part of these individuals. You know them better than just about anybody else in the criminal justice system. What do we tell parents? One of my chief messages is having an open conversation, so if somebody approaches that child, that child talks to the parents.

Ashley Natoli: I agree, and I also think parents need to be aware that this is something real and that happens every day, and that a lot of people think, oh, it won’t happen to me, or it won’t happen to my children, but you need to be aware that it is a problem and it will happen, and you need to know what’s going on so that you can educate your children appropriately and know that this is real.

Len Sipes: Well, the FBI is saying one million predators. That’s just an unbelievable number of people. I mean, they’re attacking your kids, correct, Kevin?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct. And a lot of it is, just like we were stating, collateral contacts. You have to build a collateral contact with the offenders’ family members.

Len Sipes: Right, and employers and friends.

Kevin Jones: Employers, friends, significant others.

Len Sipes: The bottom line is that you’ve got to get, and we’re going to close with this question, you’ve got to get a complete psychological profile of who that person is. You’ve got to know that person better than their own mother knows that person, correct?

Kevin Jones: That’s correct.

Len Sipes: All right, we’re going to close on that. Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Jones, community supervision officer for the sex offender unit, my agency, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Ashley Natoli, the community supervision officer, again, with the sex offender unit. Thank you very much for watching, and please, protect your children. Please have an open and honest conversation and age appropriate conversation with your children. Watch for us next time when we explore another very important topic in our criminal justice system. Please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.

[Video Ends]

Filed Under: Criminal Justice, Internet Crime, Interviews with Policy Makers, Interviews with Staff, Parole and Probation, Probation, Sex Offender, Sex Offender Registry, Video Podcast

Victim Assistance and Cyber Crime in America-NOVA

Internet Safety-Internet Keep Safe Coalition-DC Public Safety Radio

Identity Theft-NOVA-DC Public Safety

Sexual Exploitation of Children-DC Public Safety-US Department of Justice

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