Competence and Confidence Partners in Policymaking (C2P2): Family Leadership for Inclusive Education in Non-Traditional Settings
March 2015: CYBER SAFETY: Keeping Kids Safe in the Digital World with PRESENTER Brian Regli, Ph.D., Drakontas LLC
TRANSCRIPT
> Good evening. Welcome to our webinar series. My name is Kathy Miller, and I am the director of community services here at the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University. And I'm so pleased you can join us this evening. I wanted to let you know that funding for this project comes from Pennsylvania's Developmental Disabilities Council. Tonight I am so pleased that we are going to have a session on Cybersafe Safety, and Dr. Brian Regli is one of the principles of Drakontas Limited, where he has been working with the U.S. Department of Justice for a number of years in the are cybersafety. So we're so pleased that he is going to be able to share his expertise with us. And he'll tell you a little more about himself, but I would first like to tell you about the project that is bringing this webinar to us this evening. Competence and Confidence Partners in Policymaking family leadership, an inclusive education for nontraditional schools, which we fondly refer to as C2P2, is designed for families with students with disabilities who are educated in home schools, cyber charter schools, charter schools, private schools, as well as parochial schools. The goal of the program is to create a network of family leaders who will work together with the educators and administers to champion inclusive practices for children with disabilities in the nontraditional school community. Project activities include online leadership development training, such as this evening's program. We also provide free oneonone parent consultation supports from trained parent consultants. We have online resources on our website. And I'm encouraging you all to register for our live session, which will be happening on Saturday, May 9th, at Vision for Equality here in Philadelphia. So any of, those of you who are local who would like to attend, the session is going to be on transitions from secondary schools. And it's going to be a really wonderful lineup. We have this is our seventh webinar, so we have six of our webinars that are archived on our website. So you can see on the screen, the last webinar that we had was done by Annemarie Clarke, Dr. Clarke from SPIN, who did "Understanding Evaluations: What Do the Results Mean for Your Child?" Before that, Dr. Regli's wife Tanya and Cathy RocciaMeier, our project coordinator, talked about "Community Connection." Before that, we had the "Teamwork for Success." How do you work as a parent, as a family member with, with the professionals in the school setting? How do you work with those administrators to really have a great relationship with your, with your teachers and administrators in your child's school? One of our most popular sessions was by Maura McInerney, who is a staff attorney at the Education Law Center, where she talks about "Your Child's Rights! Learning the Laws and Rules to Support Your Child's Education." Before that, we had a number of families who, whose children experienced disabilities talking about what is inclusion, how do you support all abilities of students learning together? And our first session, which is an integral piece in really creating a vision for your child's future, really, what is that vision that you have for your child. So all of these are available on our website. And as I mentioned, our transition form is happening at Vision for Equality on May 9th. So you'll see that the web link is below. And I'm going to read it to you. It's programs/ leadership/c2p2family.shtml. And if you go to that you can register for that very informative session that we will be having shortly, in the next few months. I wanted to elaborate a bit on our oneonone parent consultation that is available to folks. It is entirely free, and any families participating in this training may call us and request guidance and technical assistance. We will match you with a parent consultant from one of our primary partners, Pennsylvania's Education for All Coalition, commonly referred to as PEACH. PEACH consultants can assist you with locating resources and support, helping you understand what your child's rights are, reviewing your child's individual education plan, helping you develop strategies to support your child's inclusive education, suggestions and ideas for accommodations, and supports for your child's specific needs. They may attend, and you may request them to attend an IEP meeting with you during the transition or secondary transition. Again, these are all trained consultants who happen to be family members of children who also experience disabilities. So it's a wonderful resource, and we encourage you to contact us if you're interested in such a service. Support, as I mentioned, can be offered in person, over the phone, or even email. So it all depends on your need. So if you need to request a parent consultant, you can go to our project website. It's right there. I'm not going to read it again. But please complete the form if you would like that service, because we'd be happy to provide support to you. Another component of this protect is that we have online resources. One of the ways that you can connect with us online is by joining our Facebook page. And it's a closed group, which means that it's not, there is a membership requirement. All you need to do is click "join group" and your request would be accepted within a few days. The reason we have a closed group is so that there is a modicum of confidentiality there so you can really discuss whatever issues with one another. And our project coordinator and other experts are available to provide you with some discussion and some good answers to some of your questions. If you need some more information about C2P2/FL, as again, Competence and Confidence Partners in Policymaking family leadership, Kathy RocciaMeier is our very competent family education coordinator here at the Institute on Disabilities, and this program is in her portfolio. You see all of Cathy's numbers there. We have a TTY number, a fax number and Cathy's personal email address. In fact, I want to note for those of you who may be joining us this evening via a cell phone and you have some questions that you might want to pose and you aren't able to get online, you can either call Cathy or you can send her an email on this very email that's posted here. Cathy with a CRM at Temple dot edu. A couple of housekeeping items. You'll see on your screen, on your upper right corner, if you have some questions about tonight's topic, type in the Q and A box, click the question mark symbol at the top right of your screen to open the box, and then you simply type your question right there. Down at the bottom here you can see the illustration on the screen. So we do encourage questions. And we will have a question and answer period. And for participants with confidential questions, we will also have a tenminute question and answer period at the end of the session that will not be recorded. In fact, I did this session is being recorded, and it will be archived and put up on our website in about two weeks. So as I said, there is a period of time, if you have a confidential question that we will not be recording those questions. So, I just want to mention before with I introduced Dr. Regli to you, that we do ask for your feedback on this session and all of our sessions. We have a Survey Monkey link that is going to pop up after this, Brian's presentation. So we do encourage you to please give us your feedback, because this program is all about you, the families who are working in the private schools and the nontraditional school settings, and we really want to be as responsive as possible to you and your issues. So again, without further redo, adieu, excuse me, I want to introduce Brian Regli. He's going to take it away.
> Good afternoon and evening. My name is Brian Regli. I'm here today to talk to you about cyber safety, cyber security, but I want to put that within the context of a digital playground. The companies that have built interactive games, social media platforms, communication devices, all of these companies are building digital playgrounds. And the children and the young adults that are in our care play in those digital playgrounds. And sometimes bad things happen in those playgrounds because these are beautiful places. Places of great fascination, and great opportunity and great diversion. And ultimately, there are vulnerabilities in that playground. In the same way that you build a wonderful playground in the real world, any town manager will tell you that crime happens in those spaces.
^M00:10:10
So my goal tonight is to share with you research that was conducted by my company, Drakontas, through grants from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance. From 2009 through 2013 I have the honor of working with literary dozens of law enforcement jurisdictions throughout the United States, training them on the vulnerabilities in these gaming platforms and how crimes can be committed and how people can be exploited in those platforms. So what I'm going to present to you tonight is essentially an extracted version of the materials that we would use to train law enforcement officers to identify crimes and to essentially investigate crimes on these digital playgrounds. By the same token, I'm also approaching this as a parent of two children, one of whom has autism, and who has experienced in my home challenges associated with cybercrime. So we're not going to get into the highend issues of, you know, whose hacking who or the most recent set of headlines that you're going to find about cybercrime. We're going to get into some practical issues around how individuals interact with this technology, how the interactions of this technology can lead to potential vulnerabilities for those individuals, and how you as a parent or a caregiver, working with an individual with disabilities, may be able to help guide them to better outcomes and to safer outcomes. Now, as a researcher, my background is in technology. As a parent, I understand something about having a child with disabilities, but I am not an expert on disabilities themselves. So what I'm sharing with you tonight is fundamentally research about law enforcement, and it's about crime, and it's about challenges in cyber security and cyber safety. It's not necessarily about some of the deeper psychological elements or, or social elements that may come with that. But obviously I will touch on that. To the framework by which I'll communicate these pieces, I wanted to start by giving you a sense of the landscape. What are the components in these digital playgrounds? And before I dig too far into it, if at any time you have questions, and you can pose them through the QA window that's available to you that Kathy's already described, I'll try to incorporate answers to questions along the way. So feel free to begin to populate questions as we go. And then we'll have that tenminute period at the end for any questions that you'd like to have outside of the scope of the presentation. So this framework, what is the technical landscape, the social media element that your children and adults and everyone are working within the digital playground? There's four elements that I want to talk about. And this is a framework that was developed by Dr. Robert D'Ovidio at Drexel University's Criminal Justice department. So I have to give, my colleague Rob credit for this. Collaboration, communication, entertainment, multimedia. All of these are experiences that a user will have in a digital playground. And they all depend upon each other. Because companies who build these digital playgrounds, they're creating opportunities for individuals to interact with each other. They're trying to create stickiness. They're trying to help those individuals build relationships. The more relationships they have, the more likely they are to stay there. So if you're a Facebook aficionado like I am, it feels great to have all of these friends. If you're an Instagram person like my daughter is, it's great to have hundreds, thousands of followers. And they rely upon each other. You collaborate. You communicate. And there are entertainment components that you share and video that you share so that all of it coheres together. But what you'll see is that different companies focus on different parts of that environment. You're all probably familiar with Wikipedia. You may be less familiar with Reddit and Digg and some of these other social bookmarking platforms that are out there. But people share information. They build Wikipediatype environments. So if your child is a big fan of Pokemon, my son is a huge fan of Pokemon. You will find thousands of wikis out there that are all built around the history of Pokemon characters. Or if you're a big fan of, you know, Harry Potter, same sort of thing. These are people collaborating. They're sharing experiences. They're building, essentially, a context for the communication that they're going to have. Communication that is layered on top of that collaboration, and in some cases you're using components like WordPress or blogs like Blogger or Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, and you're communicating. You're taking your experience, and you're posting it online, publicly, in some cases to hundreds of thousands of people. And part of this, as well, is making yourself socially available to others and building relationships. What the companies are doing, obviously enough, is monetizing the use of those platforms. They're making money on advertising. They're making money on the user data, and so the more data they have, the more money they make. And you can imagine, again, why it's so important to have all of these relationships built within the platform. The multimedia sphere. Most of your children, or you're probably aware of YouTube and if your children are not yet aware of YouTube, God bless them, because they seem to be living in the alternative universe that I wish my children would live in sometimes. This is where my children will spend lots of time. And there are hysterical things on YouTube. And that's a great, great entertainment platform. Think of YouTube as being a broadcast medium where I can go up and post something online. Anybody can post something online. But platforms like LimeWire and FrostWire and others, those are peertopeer video and music sharing platforms. Now, for those of you who are concerned about child pornography, concerned about the availability of contraband material online, these types of software that allow individuals to set up their own servers and share multimedia and video and the like, many of these servers are very dangerous because they will contain material that is illegal. And I will talk a little bit about how these platforms are discovered by law enforcement and how they are accidently discovered by individuals who may just be casting around on the internet and may not actually understand what they're looking at until it's too late and they've actually committed a crime because they've downloaded information or access to sites that they didn't realize contain contraband material. So multimedia, in its most benign form, is the entertainment that you're going to see on YouTube, which is very highly regulated, and the folks at Google that own YouTube spend a lot of time trying to police that site. And it's a very difficult thing to do. But when you encounter shared pictures and images and music, there are all sorts of environments that individuals can create, and those individuals can draw others to those sites using the communication and blogging capabilities that we've just talked about. Because that's where you find and you create relationships with people online. And then finally there's the entertainment sphere. And this is the sphere that I'm going to talk the most about in great part because this is where people spend a tremendous amount of time. For anyone of one who has a child that plays World of Warcraft or plays Call of Duty or plays all the games that Disney can provide, these are games that are built on social networks, that are built on attracting as many people as possible to the game, and then having people establish those relationships. And you can get that on your PC computer or you can get it on a gaming console. Your Xbox, your PlayStation, your Wii console made by Nintendo, these have the identical capabilities as the computer does. So if you think that your child may not be able to access all the things on the Xbox that they can access on the computer and therefore the Xbox is somehow inherently more safe, that's not true. Because of all of these are essentially computing devices that can be accessed and can access every network resource that they're connected to. And the same, you have a cell phone. If you have a tablet, most of these games, these entertainment sphere platforms are being expanded to include all of these environments, as we'll talk about. So the context for these digital playgrounds are a whole, wide range of capabilities that you may not be aware of. And I emphasize this every time I have this talk with folks. It is not that the companies who have built these digital playgrounds have intended to create vulnerabilities. In the same way that your town manager, when they create a beautiful, beautiful, you know, beautiful playground in your community, if a sex offender shows up there, the town manager didn't intent for that. But sex offenders do show up in these environments, and we'll talk about how that happens and why that happens. Because ultimately it's an open platform. And it is very, very difficult, if not impossible, to police the broad scope of access that all of these entertainment, blogging, communication, multimedia sites can provide. To give you a sense of how pervasive these platforms are, how important, how central they are to our culture today, I'm going to give you some basic statistics. And these are from the Entertainment Software Agency, which is basically a working group that's been established by the gaming companies. 59 percent of Americans play video games. And by that, that's everything from, like, Angry Birds that you're going to have on your cell phone. You're sitting in line at the grocery store, you're playing Angry Birds. All the way over to these superinvolved games like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft that can be wholly immersive. 160 million games, 21 billion of revenue. So you're talking about a substantial amount. And if you're thinking about it in terms of movies, perhaps you're a movie aficionado, you know nothing about video games, well Call of Duty, which is probably the most popular game created by Blizzard Activision, which is one of the big gaming companies, from 2003 to 2014, that game made $10 billion. Not million, billion. Call of Duty 3, which came out in 2011, that's one of the franchises they're up to Call of Duty 4 and now some variations, they're up that franchise alone made more money in the first ten days after its release than the movie Avatar made in its entire international run. And Avatar is the top grossing movie in the history of movies. So it shouldn't surprise you when you start looking at how big and how culturally pervasive these entertainment environments are, how much money they make. The average gamer is 31 years old. You're not talking about 14 and 15yearolds only.