topic of internet crimes against children i wanted to open the program by letting you know that this is a disturbing topic the program is about the types of crimes which include child pornography and creating child pornography and they're the type of thing that we are concerned about in vermont and that you may have concerns about your children watching so although we're not showing any child pornography and we're we will be discussing the creation of child pornography and the sharing of that and most importantly what vermont is doing towards combating this problem the topic was one that i knew very little about until attorney general came to the house appropriations committee and testified last session asking for an appropriation for more investigators and more prosecutors to combat this problem so one one thing that happened for me was that once i realized what the problem and clued it on the extent of it and that it was in fact a compelling problem in vermont that i also realize that each of us has a responsibility to take some action to help work through this problem and to solve it so my action was to invite these two experts to this program to talk about the problem to shine some light on it and to begin to help you understand what's happening in vermont and the good work that's happening in terms of children and internet crimes that two guests today are cindy mcguire who is the chief of the criminal division at the attorney general's office and she of focus has been the area of child sexual abuse miss mcguire is a graduate of the remount law school and st john's university and in addition to her work as a prosecutor she has been teaching college criminal justice courses for over fifteen school and since the program is called meet the experts i am spending a little time giving the credentials of the experts at the beginning because i want to really be communicating with you all how much expertise there isn't ramond and what good work there is happening around the state on some of these tough issues attorney general sorrell as many of you know served to in counties as a state's attorney has been the vermont secretary of the administration and was appointed attorney general by then governor howard dean in one thousand nine hundred seven and has been reelected to the state's attorney general position seven times in two thousand and three he was chosen by his fellow attorneys general to receive the presti ous national recognition the kelly wyman award which is given annually to the outstanding attorney general who has done the most to further the goals of the nation's attorneys general he has also receive recognition from the american legacy foundation who endowed in his name an annual lecture on tobacco issues and the vermont medical society recognizing him as citizen of the year in two thousand and nine so i want to welcome you both and to start off we enforce the laws that the legislature passes environmental protection consumer protection i have statewide or we have statewide criminal jurisdiction the same as an individual state's attorney has in his or her county we have statewide and then pretty much any time the state is sued for months laws are attacked in court and we defend those laws so where do internet crimes more and more sharing in training of child pornography in vermont and around the world to be honest so we began to work very closely with on ways how can we address this problem in vermont so we've been working with the fourteen counties we've been working with i cack other police departments in trying to show some leadership on how to deal with these types of cases so how much of this is actually going on and there's a huge amount going on and how do we now well we there are various mechanisms by which those who want to share you share a child pornography can do it on the web you can do it on facebook pages you can certainly do it by emailing videos and pictures and such but one method that's become very prevalent now is through what are called these peer to peer file sharing networks and these are  arrangements on the computer that high school and college students frequently use to share videos movies song popular songs but there is a percentage of people who join these peer to peer networks and what they're interested in is downloading and making available for sharing identified child pornography and since when you join these p peer file sharing networks you agree that your computer will be like a bulletin board so that others who are in that peer to peer network can look and see what you have on your computer and electronically grab that and so you can grab it from south burlington or you can grab it from southeast asia and there is while there is software available for law enforcement now it is being used in in vermont as well as in other states permissible that can monitor and see how many separate computers in vermont have identified child pornography  available for sharing and you know as of march of this year through that software how many was so two hundred fifty identified ip addresses in the state of vermont  so and it's important to note that that is only the folks that are keeping their files open so that doesn't capture everybody that's capturing some percentage but two hundred fifty the state of vermont is a huge huge number  one of the concerns we have of course is that there are studies on the correlation between those who download and make a bailable child pornography for sharing and the risk of hands on sexual abuse of children and the studies have ranged from roughly thirty percent to as much as over eighty percent of these individuals who traffic in child pornography with a history of hands on abuse of kids and so what you said at the opening of the show is that we all have a responsibility to respond here and that this is really about protecting me from my own kids and the disturbing one of the just disturbing things is that as of the march with those two hundred fifty separate computer addresses in virtually every corner of this state and virtually every community that law enforcement given limited resources was actively investigating less than ten of those computer addresses so i'm very happy that  your committee and others in the legislature responded positively and appropriated two hundred thousand dollars of new money for an investigator in our office to investigators at the state police laboratory so that we can start to identify more of these priority cases for investigation and ultimately successful prosecution so i have various conversations with people about this topic and one of the questions that often comes up is why are people protected by law software program that law enforcement utilizes they're just another one of the people that are publicly in the arena if you will so we're not going into people's homes with this software these are people that have opened up their computer and said hey i've got these images of these movies do you want to trade so anyone can go and do it so law enforcement does it and after that after we've identified an ip address then we have some steps to take before we get to that house and those steps are governed by law and are governed by a court order or search warrant so the short answer is for minors are protected from police just coming into their home they do need to get a warrant but in this first initial phase this is what people are doing publicly and it's hard to imagine that could be doing it from your computer but you're doing it out on the web and public if you're interested and the latest lady gaga music video or whatever you will join one of these peer to peer file sharing networks but in order to join these networks you have to agree that your computer is open for other two other members of the file sharing network so if you're a member of the file sharing network and you have lady gaga newest video on it and i join i type in lady gaga it will pop out that i can go and get it from your computer i don't have to call you up i don't have to send you an email and get your permission or whatever you have it posted there just like on a billboard for those that want that and i can go grab well the same thing applies for child pornography and so law enforcement through this th software is just another member of these peer to peer file file sharing networks and can see what other people have on their computers and because of of studies of what  identified child pornography files that are been discovered by law enforcement over the years and they each one has a so called digital footprint this software can tell that computer in for the individuals to join the peer to peer networks they have to agree that their computer is an open book and so long for strangers takes advantage of that and it looks in the book now for us to then actually go into the home see that kind of puter analyze the you know the hard drive and whatever of the computer we absolutely need to have a search warrant for that court approval yet so for those another question that's come up quite frequently is you know perhaps i have a teenager who's gone to an x rated website and you know what does that mean right you know is that showing up in a database you know you know if there's identified child pornography on there maybe but one of the things the software does which is so advanced and so helpful is it helps of prioritize offenders the offender profile so sad to say but there's a range of child pornography and the most  egregious involves infants torture i mean really really horrible stuff and this software can not only identify the ip addresses but can categorize what types of the offender profile so if we have offenders that have incest ality torture there they're high on the list if if it's a teenager that's looking at age appropriate or food or exploring you know otherwise legal per se no they're not going to wind up in this you have to type in you know search terms just like you type in if you're looking to to just something on google you going to type in a search term craigslist same thing with clicked on the wrong button and all of a sudden whoops i have this here what you hear is a defense but that's not how it works yeah but if you type in p g h c for example as a search term that stands for preteen hard core and just like a google search you're being search the computer will say oh well here are x files that fit that search term and he here are the ip addresses where you can go where those are available and you can go grab these files off these computers and download them and then you post them on the billboard that is your computer and that's the way these peer to peer file sharing networks work so one of the things for me personally in hearing your testimony and thinking about you know what's from on doing and how are we actually you know do we have enough investigators to be now suing these problems and are we in for me a sort of bottom line thing came to protecting children because it really is child abuse that we're talking about and how are we protecting children if they're not protected perhaps sometimes even in their own home where the children are obviously victimized when the original remark or for you it's made but then there refit demised as it's played numerous  times around the world and then again that correlation between those who enjoy watching these kinds of disgusting things and the risks to other family members neighbors kids  kids that come in contact with these folks there's the risk of victimization of an additional children so it's it's why it should be a priority for us we should take responsibility for us and for it and law enforcement has certainly has a role to play but part of the reason why we put together a video and went into the legislature and actually highlighted publicly the existence of this law enforcement software so that those who download and share this know that we have the capacity to look at them is to highlight how prevalent the issue is and how much people should be on the lookout for signs of these kinds of activities we talk about prioritizing the cases when we begin to develop a target one of the things we look at in developing that target is are there children the home is the person likely going to have contact with children that is that a teacher is a you know that it is their daycare and then they go up higher in our list in terms of prioritizing because with two hundred fifty as we talked about you you need to make some choices and any time we go into a home if there is a child in the home the child going to be interviewed by police and the c f and and we're also going to look at that offenders background to see you know what what are his connection to the children because you know i'm convinced as a prosecutor for as long as i've been doing this work that there is a correlation you couldn't you couldn't be obsessed in watching this you know again violent disgusting images photos movies whatever one college and not have some high risk of either having offended on  offend and i think a lot of people think that child pornography is seventeen year old males having sexual relations with fifteen year old females and trust me that is not what it is we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the child or children in the pornographic video that they're not age sixteen so the truth of the matter is we don't want to get into a trial where there's a question is is is is this person sixteen years and two days old or fifteen years and ten months or so the reality is there's so much of it out there that it would be a very unusual case that we would bring where we thought the child or children in the in the in the video was older than twelve you know because there's so much of it from age twelve or just about twelve down that a thirteen fourteen or fifteen year old we're just not going to bother with that and you know that and i mean people could hear the statistics of two hundred fifty i addresses and law enforcement only taking a look at less than less than ten but you have to understand that knowing that a given ip address has x hundred files and that type of files that they are that these would be a priority for us that's just the beginning of the investigation and then we have to find out from the innocent internet service provider where in vermont is this particular ip address located then with so we now have a street address but then we start it's really not a traditional law enforcement yeah you know lives there who has access to the computer does twelve nor st in milton not to pick on  more richman do they have a why fight there so it might be the neighbors who are actually using the web through through that so the real on the ground heavy investigation it's labor intensive starts there and we're going to be able to do more of that with the new resources that we have but you know we're not it'll be a long time before all two hundred and fifty are in our si so what can vermonters do when people watching you know what can we do to helps with this whole how how can we protect our children i think the first step is aware enough and just having this conversation the conversation we of the legislature the video that we created with the help of i can being open about it it is a problem it is a huge problem and it does put children in vermont at risk i think one of the the greatest things about the software we've been talking about is that we can now proactively look for if and as opposed to waiting for it to happen i think parents need to be extremely gauge with their kid ten years ago it was keep the computer in the family room so you can monitor your kids access well today  the computers on the phone so that's more difficult but it doesn't mean that parents should still be fully engaged you need to keep that conversation the communication open and you need to step out of denial and recognize that this is a real problem it's not just in vermont it's across this nation it's across the world and you know schools do a good job i kept does an excellent job there are presentations available to schools many many schools do them i cackled the schools that they contract out with other providers to go out you can just type on line internet safety and get some tips but really it comes down to you know monitoring your kids online check and making sure you have  passwords and being aware and listening to that voice inside of that got and you know just keeping the communication open and you know if you want to get out of the pornography the rain is for second for other crimes against children that are perpetrated over the internet i mean child luring cases and your kids could be thinking they're communicating with somebody who's the same age maybe the same gender maybe not you know in chat rooms on the internet and such and you just have to know that some of these predators are experts at knowing kids lingo and what are important to kids what's what music they're listening to what movies they want when they become best friends on what they become best friends online and then how about we meet at the mall or whatever and and your kids have to predator and you would never want to get into a situation as a child where you're going alone to a nonpublic place to meet someone who  who you met online and don't really know and and you have to have this trust relationship between parent and child that your child will tell you these kinds of things other crimes that we see on line cyber bullying it's it's really expanding we've had some very unfortunate cases here in the lot that he's of communication through this social media right now of saying terrible things to kids and  leading to self destructive behavior such you got to be aware of that the web is a wonderful tool it's a wonderful tool and social media is wonderful and responsible use of social media protect but protecting your privacy at the same time is is is really important so there really should be more dialogue between parent and child and and because it's all about protecting kids  i saw that you did a program with facebook on line safety and i want i wondered if you might just comment on that there are some highlights from that program that you know we brought facebook in to talk about responsible use of not only face book but other forms of social media and it was for educators and parents and students we did it or as excited school but we filmed it and it's available on our web site now many of the local access channels channel seventeen  ten and it's available but just the first step again about being aware of some of the privacy settings on facebook and so you're not sharing more intimate information than you intend to be instruction and get it around more of the state during the next year i mean the conversation just has to keep going our kids are growing up on line and there are so many wonderful things but also so many dangers and you know it's critical for parents that didn't grow up on line to get connected with technology is changing so rapidly that you know we're now saying that you know you have the tablets and such but that so much of the online world is now smartphones i mean just think of five years ago today what that's all about where's the technology going to be five yeah it's the fastest growing crime in this state in this country right now both through use of the web and otherwise huge amounts of money being taken by people stealing your identity draining your bank accounts or using your identity to take out credit cards and such and just run up huge bills it's a multimillion billion dollar a year industry goal with this program mr tried to shine a light on the internet crimes against children because you know as it were monterrey having grown up here and lived here and you know you know in our community we kind of think well that's what's happening in new york city or it's  was about whether or not it was safe to post photos of my child on facebook like is there some risk to having a facebook account and posting children's photos there you  know i think it's hard to measure the risk i mean i think facebook is overall a pretty safe form of social media can someone go in and photoshop a kid and do something like that i suppose but i don't think it's enough of a risk to tell people not to post pictures like i i have two kids and i'm very aware of what they're posting and their photographs and you'd be surprised what some kids post so you know i think it is safe as safe as you can be on the internet we there are so much to cover on this topic and we've just had this little short conversation but i hope that it will encourage people to get involved if they think children are being abused and need some help because there there are resources available for if you're concerned that someone that you know or you see in the library or workplace or whatever maybe is looking at child pornography or something else inappropriate please please be proactive be proactive on that terrible thing is to say i'm going to respect privacy and and then something terrible happens that could have been avoided please help your neighbors yes thanks and i probably would have never imagined myself doing a program on this but i feel like it's a proactive move just to say have a look at this important work that's being done from the attorney general's office look at it is a problem in vermont and we can all pitch in and help out so thanks so much thank you having us tonight