Derek Banner

Hi, Ben.

It's great to be with you and great to meet your audience.

Thank you.

Yeah, so technology is a double-edged sword.

It's definitely an aspect that law enforcement uses and leverages in these investigations and to keep children safe and to prevent traffickers from...

from operating in our neighborhoods and our towns.

But the predators and the sex traffickers are leveraging technology at an equal, if not a greater level than law enforcement.

The short answer, Ben, is all of them.

So they are leveraging technology at scale.

So they're leveraging the internet, they're leveraging social media platforms, even seemingly innocent gaming platforms, online gaming platforms.

Any and all of those are opportunities for offenders and predators to attempt to try to engage with children at a scale that we've never seen before.

So law enforcement is the men and women that investigate crimes against children are, I think, some of the greatest heroes in our country in law enforcement.

It's one of the hardest jobs in law enforcement.

The content and the material itself is something that you just can't unsee and unhear.

And of course, the sense of urgency around the backlog and the issue itself creates another level of complexity.

I can set the stage for you a little bit in terms of what the law enforcement faces in terms of just pure numbers.

In 2024, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 20.5 million suspected reports of child exploitation.

Within that 20.5 million, Ben, is another 63 million files, videos, images of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM as it's referred to.

So predators are, as we said earlier, they are engaged in actively trying to entice minor children into providing explicit material over the internet or through encrypted chats or through grooming techniques on these platforms.

uh once that happens um these explicit images are then uh shared within the predator community um it's essentially their uh their goal is to uh is to create these uh these images and then they're they're traded um over the internet on the dark web and around the world