Safeguarding podcast – The Tangled Web with PA Consulting

By SafeToNet Foundation

Nick Newman, Defence, Security and Public Safety expert within PA Consulting’s Vulnerabilities team guides us through their report The Tangled Web, in response to the UK Government’s Online Harms White paper.

We define Child Sexual Exploitation Abuse (CSEA) and discuss the “tradecraft” of predatory pedophiles, we explore the dark web, outline the structure of the “safeguarding ecosystem” and how this tangled web can be streamlined, and what we can learn from the military in the war against child abusers.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/safetonetfoundation/SafeToNet_Foundation_Podcast_-_The_Tangled_Web_with_PA_Consulting.mp3

You can play the podcast here, or in iTunes, Spotify or Podcast Republic. Alternatively if you simply want to read it, you can find a transcript below.

PA Consulting’s paper “The Tangled Web” can. be downloaded from here: https://www.paconsulting.com/insights/2019/protecting-our-children/

Neil Fairbrother

Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast where we discuss all things to do with safeguarding children in the digital context. I’m going to begin this show by sharing with you some statistics which were recently published in report, which we’re going to be talking about shortly.

UK police forces have seen a 700% increase in referrals of child abuse imagery since 2013, rising to an astonishing 82,109 in 2017 which equates to nearly 7,000 per month. The Internet Watch Foundation recorded a 35% increase in child sexual abuse images and videos from 2016 to 2017, rising to 80,318 reports. And in the 18 months since sexual communication [with a child] with a child became an offence in April, 2017 thanks to the good work of the NSPCC, the police have recorded more than 5,000 online grooming offenses.

Now given this pretty appalling picture and following the publication of the UK Government’s Online Harms white paper a couple of weeks ago, PA Consulting believes that the time is now ripe to reboot the safeguarding ecosystem, at least as far as the online context is concerned, and have published their proposals in a report called “A Tangled Web, rethinking the approach to online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” or CSEA as it’s called.

And today’s guest is the author or co-author of the report, Nick Newman, Defence, Security and Public Safety expert within PA Consulting’s Vulnerabilities team. Nick is going to help guide us through the report. Thank you, Nick for inviting me over.

Nick, can you give us a resume of who you are, your background and PA Consulting’s involvement in this safeguarding field?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Yes, of course. I lead PA’s Homeland Security team. So we work right across the spectrum from Counter Terrorism and Serious and Organized Crime through to work around Prevent, which looks at Counter Terrorism and Extremism.

But for the last five years, we’ve had a real focus right across the company on particularly online child sexual exploitation and abuse. It’s based on the fact that we’re a technology and innovation consultancy, our clients include everyone from Government to law enforcement organizations to the technology industry and the charitable sector. So it makes sense for us to see if we can find a route to bringing that community together to find the best response to this appalling crime.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Thank you. Let’s begin at the end. What are the conclusions of your Tangled Web report?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

We first got involved in this about four years ago when we facilitated the first “hackathon” for the “We Protect” Global Alliance and we’ve stayed involved throughout that period. Last year they asked us to write the first global threat assessment and two things struck us.

The first was the scale and pace at which this crime is evolving. But secondly was, what a fragmented landscape it is with the vast range of organizations that are all providing a really important contribution. And so I think our primary conclusion was that if this community had a single front door, a single point of entry to coordinate the collective efforts and responses and resources of all of this community, that would drive a much more efficient and cost-effective response.

But I think our second conclusion was, we think that there are very distinct threats and challenges emerging now in the online space, and we think we need a very deliberately tailored response to each of those.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. So is there a definition of CSEA, of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

In our report we’ve used the definition published by the Government in 2017, which was that it is a form of child sexual abuse, which occurs when an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, manipulate, or deceive the child or young person under the age of 18 into sexual activity.

Now that could be an exchange for something the victim needs or wants or it could just be for the financial advantage or increased status of the perpetrator, and it’s important I think that they’ve added that the victim may have been sexually exploited even if the sexual activity appears consensual.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes, and the age of consent is something that we might touch on later. What is the “We Protect” Global Alliance, and how does that differ from the Internet Watch Foundation because the way it was described in your report, it sounded quite similar?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

The Global Alliance was formed in I think 2015 actually. We Protect was something that former Prime Minister David Cameron launched back in 2014, and he had this vision that if we could get all of the technology industry together, and the best innovators and brightest minds, we could find much more creative and innovative solutions to dealing with the online aspect of the threat.

And now we organized and facilitated that first event. We had an extraordinary range [of people] I think there were 68 of the top technologists from the top 40 or so technology companies together for two days in a really immersive environment. And some extraordinary ideas came out of that workshop and the next year building on David Cameron’s initiative, but also the Global Alliance initiative that had started in America. And we brought the two together.

Now the Global Alliance has a much broader remit than the Internet Watch Foundation… it’s not constrained by any particular technology solution or opportunity. One of the things it’s really set its mind to is just raising global awareness of the nature and the scale of the threat, and bringing together all of those that are involved in this so that they can operate collaboratively to find better solutions.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. Okay. The IWF is very, very clear, very focused on identifying and removing imagery online. Okay. So in your report, which is actually a very interesting read, it’s not unapproachable at all, congratulations on that, you say that the threat of CSEA manifests differently on the “surface web” from the “dark web”.

So you’ve got the surface web, we’ve got the dark web, you’ve got the same thing, but it manifests differently. So could you explain what the dark web is and what this difference is, how does CSCA manifest itself differently there from the surface?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

I think it’s important to start with a view we took last year when the Home Secretary Sajid Javid, made a really bold pronouncement that he wanted the tech giants to do more and that he was willing to regulate or legislate to compel them to do so if they were unable to make significant changes unilaterally. Our concern was that it was characterizing the problem as activity that happens on the open internet, the piece that we all use for our day-to-day activities, whether it’s business or education or social activity.

Now of course that is an area that is suitable for regulation, but our concern was that the internet is a bit like an iceberg. The surface web, the bit that we all use when we use the popular search engines, is like the bit of ice that we see above the surface of the ocean, but the bit beneath it, the deep web and the dark web, is the piece best described as the bit that isn’t indexed or categorized by those traditional search engines. And, and it also needs special software or authorization to access. Now one of the most commonly known as is the TOR network, the “Onion ring”, which is a highly encrypted system that provides secret access for those users.

Now, of course, that has some beneficial characteristics. So if you are in an oppressive regime, if you’re a journalist trying to get news out of a difficult regime, then that privacy is vitally important. But unfortunately, it’s widely used by criminal enterprise, and so now it’s a hub for trading in child sexual abuse, imagery, drugs, weapons, and all sorts of the appalling crimes that are almost beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. And I think a big example or a well-known example of the dark web was the Silk Road. It hit the headlines a couple of years ago, and was ecommerce, almost regular ecommerce, almost like Amazon for illicit goods.

Nick Newman PA Consulting

That’s right. And I think what we were pointing to here is that by shouting at the web giants to sort out the regulation of their services, that doesn’t touch the dark web. Our concern is that a huge amount of this threat emanates from that dark web space. It is those international organized crime groups that are running these large ecommerce platforms for trading in this imagery for trading and drugs, trading and firearms and so on. That is part of the source and certainly something that helps to amplify the scale of sharing of not just imagery, but also the sort of the “operational trade craft”, that the paedophile networks are able to use to keep themselves safe from penetration by law enforcement.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. Now the operational trade craft, that sounded quite a kind of a fascinating topic, which also at the same time sounds utterly horrendous. What is it?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, when PA Consulting first became involved in this space working in the early years of CEOP, the Child Exploitation Online Protection centre, it was clear that paedophile groups were intensely private. They would typically be private individuals who were petrified that they would be caught. They were petrified that if law enforcement were to locate their homes or the places they were operating from, that the evidence of their crime would be there on their servers.

And what we’re seeing now is that these groups are able to communicate much more freely in these highly encrypted, secure sites on the dark web, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to be penetrated by law enforcement, and so it creates this “safe haven” where they can share tips about how to groom children. The most disturbing thing that we encountered when we were researching the global threat assessment was that the membership fee to be part of these networks is often to produce new abuse imagery. So if you can produce a video clip of a child being abused that hasn’t been seen before, or new photographs of a child that hasn’t been seen before, then providing that every month is your membership subscription fee.

Neil Fairbrother

And that then makes it very hard to penetrate, because then you would become a perpetrator yourself. If a law enforcement officer was trying to penetrate one of these organizations and it has to provide that kind of imagery that makes it very hard.

Nick Newman PA Consulting

I wouldn’t want to go into the techniques and tactics that law enforcement to using to penetrate these sites. And clearly, these are sophisticated intelligence operations and the Government has been very clear that they are using the support of GCHQ working in tandem with the National Crime Agency (NCA) to go after these threats. And there have been notable successes.

But as I say, we were concerned that if the rhetoric remained focussed solely on the surface web, we would be missing this particular challenge in the dark web. But also, we think there’s the physical world side of the problem as well, which is young children, as they become more socially active online, are getting drawn into online social media and gaming sites, that is also creating a point of vulnerability for the children.

And so we think if you can be much clearer about the response to disrupting the dark web, the response to regulating the surface web and the response to educating young people about how they interact with the web as they start to become more socially active, than we’re dealing with the whole spectrum of the problem, alongside our traditional responses to physical abuse.

Neil Fairbrother

You’ve mentioned some pretty serious crime and talking about serious crime, you also want to link your proposals to the UK Government Serious and Organized Crime strategy, the SOC strategy. How, how does that report fit in? Because you’re making a claim that you want to put this on a par with things like anti-terrorism. How does that fit in?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

We’ve been working across counter terrorism and a serious organized crime and cybersecurity for many years now. And when we look particularly at this, the counter terrorism and cyber mission, you see a level of maturity and organization that makes it very, very straightforward to engage with from an industry point of view. It’s clear who is organizing strategy and policy and how the operational response is aligned across different parts of the organization. We don’t yet see the same maturity in the collective response to CSEA. Now there’ve been huge strides made in law enforcement, the joint operations team, between GCHQ and the NCA. The alignment between the NCA and the National Police Chiefs’ Council is genuinely regarded as world leading, but of course there’s a much wider community here. How do we harness the collective talents and fire power of the technology industry and the charitable sector so that that whole community is operating together?

We think there’s still an opportunity for a much clearer alignment of how that community is organized and orchestrated, and we’d like to see an element put of the heart of this. We call it the Online Harms Safety Centre. You asked about the Serious and Organized Crime strategy and the most important thing that points to, is the creation of the whole serious and organized crime system. So at the national level, the national crime agency, then we have the regional organized crime units, and then we have the role of the national policing, individual police forces. How we bring all of those together so that there’s a collective and organized response, which brings the best value for money, is the next challenge for that organized crime world.

Neil Fairbrother

And this is where the Online Harms Safety Centre, OHSC, that you proposed, comes in I guess.

Nick Newman PA Consulting

That’s right. Now we already have a number of organizations, and the Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre (CEOP) in the National Crime Agency is a key part of that, but what we don’t have is a single front door. Five years ago, when we were thinking about the response to Cybersecurity, it was the industry that said to government, just give us a single front door, a single point through which we can communicate, offer our skills and our capability, but also a single voice from the government. And so, we would like to see something of that structure put in place at the head of our UK Serious and Organized Crime strategy: not replacing the organizations that are already there, but orchestrating them.

Now we thought about where there are parallels for an organization that can organize without having authority or responsibility or all the funding, because we would never advocate taking roles or responsibility away from pre-existing organizations. A great example is the Military’s Permanent Joint Headquarters that doesn’t own any planes, any tanks, any ships, but it can bring those elements together for any military contingency. They’re owned of course, by the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.

Neil Fairbrother

It is an interesting comparison to make because this is a kind of war that we are engaged in here, isn’t it?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well it’s certainly a battle. I mean, you’re right, it has the characteristics of a war in a sense that the Home Secretary described this as one of the most dangerous threats he’s seen.

The Serious Organized Crime strategy made clear that more lives are lost in the UK from serious and organized crime than they are from any other national security threats. And also, for child sexual exploitation, it isn’t just the point of abuse that we should be concerned about, but this is a whole-life impact on the victims. And so yes, we would advocate a war footing of the response, but by that I mean the way you organize, I mean having a single entity that’s able to orchestrate the collective resources and activities, and power and talent actually right across industry and the charitable organizations that are doing such brilliant work.

Neil Fairbrother

Yes. Okay. So we’ve been talking very clearly about illegal harms, child sexual exploitation and abuse. Could the OHSC, the Online Harms Safety Centre, also take on “legal arms” such as cyber bullying? It’s not pleasant, it’s harmful, but it’s not illegal, or at least not yet.

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Yes, we were clear in the report that we could see clear opportunity to extend the remit of such a centre. I mean, for us it’s vitally important that the most urgent and larger scale threat is tackled first, and that is quite clearly child sexual exploitation. But of course, the characteristics of how we deal with harms on the Internet will have many, many common features, not least the way that sort of organized criminalities able to perpetuate this sort of dark web environment, but also the way the criminals and victims are interacting on the web. And finally, of course, how children are educated to understand what those risks are now. And there’s an opportunity of course, for this to extend beyond children, to all citizens as we start to think about how all of us are vulnerable to that sort of online crime.

So, yes, there’s clearly an opportunity. I think it’s like eating the elephant, isn’t it? Let’s start with a bite size piece and we’d like to see the online that the CSCA piece of this mission tackled first.

Neil Fairbrother

There are myriad agencies involved already today. It really is a Tangled Web. You’ve got the Home Office, you’ve got DCMS, you’ve got the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department of Communities in Local Government, amongst others. How do all these fit together and do these inter-departmental interfaces represent weaknesses that can be exploited?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

I think the government’s Online Harms white paper has made a great step forward in better alignment across Government. It is the first time that we’ve really seen Government speaking with one clear voice on these issues and the breadth of these issues, but I think also if you look at this through the lens of Government perspective, each part of Government we’ll have a particular concern or area of interest or focus.

Some will be thinking about terrorism and extremist material online. Some will be thinking about child abuse imagery. Others will be thinking about self-harm and incentivizing or helping people understand suicide. If you’re industry, looking at the other end of this problem, you own the platform or the devices that are hosting this material, it can be quite bewildering to see multiple Government voices coming at you. So I think the Online Harms white paper is a first step. Is it an opportunity to provide a point of weakness? No, I think the lack of regulation is the principle weakness and I think the difficulty of disrupting dark web activity is the second primary weakness, which is why we called those out so distinctly and advocated very specific and tailored responses.

Neil Fairbrother

You know, you kind of referred to this in your answer just now. You mentioned there’s a mixed bag of indicators being used. Now to measure impact, you need clearly defined indicators so you can assess the before and after of whatever the intervention is. And if all of these different departments and agencies are using a mixed bag of indicators, how do you maximize the impact? Do you need to get these indicators lined up so that there’s a consistency somehow?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

I think the first thing we identified was that there’s a tendency to measure the outputs. And so, historically we look at how do we address the offenders? How do we pursue the offenders and how do we safeguard the victims? Now, both of those indicate that the claim has already happened and it’s reactive. And almost universally when we were speaking with the stakeholders across this space, they were saying we really want to move the response to be much more proactive, preventing the abuse happening in the first place, preventing the imagery appearing online, not just identifying it when it’s there and taking it down quickly.

So we need much more sophisticated indicators of the outcome, the number of victims that are safe guarded, but also the measures that we’re taking to disrupt international serious organized crime groups, to take down these dark websites, limit the number of paedophiles that are able to operate on the dark web, improve the education of young people so they have safer interactions online. There’s a whole raft of preventative measures that we should be putting in place and frankly measuring our success.

Neil Fairbrother

In your report, there seem to be two main groups that you have identified that are responsible for CSCA. You’ve got the purely criminal, with no interest in children other than for criminal exploitation, getting them ensnared in drug running, County Lines for example, or even to sell to them so that they become a victim twice over, they become addicts.

And then as the paedophilic criminal, the sexual motivation. Overlaid on top of that, you’ve got this very bewildering and complex and expensive response ecosystem that you called the Tangled Web, and you’ve got a nice neat diagram on page eight of your report. Would one legitimate action be to decriminalize the supply of drugs and make them available in an open regulated market, and thereby doing away with at least one of these two criminal groups that destroy children’s lives?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

I don’t think there’s such a close coupling between drugs specifically and child sexual abuse imagery, or indeed any other criminal commodity. I think that what we have identified through last year’s work on the global threat assessment, was that there is this growing wave of international serious and organized crime, which as you say, the perpetrators of this are doing it for financial gain – there is no interest in the specific commodity that is being traded.

And so whereas historically our efforts have been focused on the paedophile offender and preventing their activity and safeguarding the victims, we now have this new group that we have to tackle who are quite simply running global criminal ecommerce platforms for large scale financial gain. Of course, they’re typically hosted offshore, so this requires an international response.

It’s highly sophisticated, very, very technically developed, and so it requires the very best that the UK Government and intelligence agencies can bring to bear against that threat. The government’s been clear that GCHQ is now supporting the National Crime Agency and as we’ve said in the report and we think it’s here that they can do the most good. You have to fight wolves with wolves, and we should be putting our very best intelligence assets against those criminal platforms.

Neil Fairbrother

You mentioned that a lot of the action going on is reactive, it’s post the event; serving takedown notices and so on and so forth. And from a technical perspective, part of the issue is volume. Anyone with any form of digital camera can take a photo or video of absolutely anything at any time. But interventions at the network or service provider level are after the fact, they’re too late, the damage has been done. The child has been abused, they’ve been ensnared.

Is there an argument that says that the camera makers and the smartphone makers that could use their incredible technology that’s inside their devices to disable this ability at source. In other words, they point the smartphone at a child, a naked child and they can determine through all of their neural networks and AI-based technology inside the camera what that image is and it disables the camera Could something like that happen?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

We looked at this very closely when we organized the first hackathon, and the idea that PA Consulting has sponsored since that event four years ago was the idea of a “Digital Green Cross Code”. Really quite simply the digital equivalent of the Green Cross man, the safe crossing that we have on the road. We were brought up by our parents and our teachers to understand the hazards on the road and that if we complied with the Green Cross Code and we only crossed on a green light, then we should be safe. It didn’t guarantee our safety. It also didn’t penalize us if we crossed on red. But we were educated to understand the risk and take appropriate action and we would advocate the same being deployed on to the online space.

This is the new hazard that to children and young people are encountering. Now, how do you deploy that? Well, there are choices of course, as to what can be done on the device, what can be done by the communications network provider and what can be done by the application host, the social media platform. We’ve been working with AI companies for about four years on this and our sense is, the best place to put it is as code embedded with the application layer, that is those that are hosting the content that is being streamed across the Internet. That is where you can see these images and you can see the behaviour. It’s very difficult for the network provider or the device provider to do this, because typically the content will be encrypted and so not visible to the manufacturer.

Now could you put it on the device to block the camera? That that also has real challenges about determining what is an illegal image. One of the things we looked at was the spectrum from a clearly illegal abuse image of a child, right through to a naive image taken by a parent of their child in a paddling pool in the garden, which maybe was probably misjudged to take a naked image of a child and certainly mischarged to put it on the Internet, but not criminal. And how would you draw the line between that naivety and extreme criminality? That same page taken by a parent – what if it’s taken by a neighbour surreptitiously? It’s impossible for the device to make those distinctions. It’s impossible really for the social media providers to make those distinctions. So this is an extraordinarily difficult technical problem. It also has legal aspects. It has ethical aspects as well.

What we are clear about is that spotting a pattern of risk in the same way that as adults do. When we use our credit cards – credit card companies are looking at multiple points to see where the risk is or any anomalies in our use and saying, just pause on this transaction. That’s what children need when they’re interacting online.

Neil Fairbrother

It’s all about context.

Nick Newman PA Consulting

It isn’t indeed.

Neil Fairbrother

Now it seems unbelievable that some countries only just beginning to take this problem seriously. Why is it? Why don’t some governments think that this is a problem? Why are they only just beginning to realize that it might be a problem?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, of course, if you watch some of the major reports of child abuse rings in the UK, some would say that we’ve been pretty slow off the mark as well in this country. Then again, we now have the fastest response of takedown of this imagery anywhere in the developed world.

I think when we were researching the global threat assessment, we were very aware that there are really difficult and challenging cultural distinctions between different regions and societies, and that includes issues from different age of consent, to attitudes to, for example, homosexuality, which changed the way people view privacy and conduct on the Internet. And so we have to be very aware of those cultural differences. And incidentally, we’ve been asked to write the next global threat assessment and that’s one of the areas that we’re keen to focus on. But I think the other challenge is that in the developed world, we’ve seen the rapid development of high-speed broadband access coupled with ubiquitous access to webcam-enabled smartphones.

Most children now have got access to a mobile device, they can take images instantly and they can upload them to the Internet immediately, pretty much anywhere in the country. Now that’s coupled with a well-developed educational system that is itself though, still struggling to keep pace with growing technology. So, we’re really concerned that as we see the proliferation of these technologies into the developing world with this imbalance between the access to technology, but the quality of education and some of those countries that we could see a rapid proliferation of this threat.

Neil Fairbrother

Okay. Now, speaking of other countries, you specifically detail Australia’s regulatory approach in your report, especially the work of their “e-Safety” Commissioner. What is it about that, that piqued your Interest?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, they were the first nation to regulate, and in their case they first of all looked at cyberbullying of children and young people in Australia. And two things struck us from their experience.

The first was, once the regulation was in place, they enjoyed a hundred percent compliance, so it’s not that the tech companies are unwilling or resistant to complying with these new norms of online safety, but they prefer to do so within a clearly documented regulatory framework. So, where that was put in place, they saw 100% compliance and if there was a flag raised about imagery that really shouldn’t have been on the Internet, those web companies were responding immediately to take it down.

I think the other thing that we learned is that they very quickly realized that the scope needed to be far broader than cyberbullying of children. They extended to all Australian citizens and they’re now extending it far beyond just cyberbullying, and so we’re now starting to see the convergence between their extension of these powers, but also the sort of powers that the UK is just about put in place following the consultation on the online harms white paper.

Neil Fairbrother

Australians have a quite a reputation of being a, a pretty fiercely independent bunch. How did the population take to the expanding role of regulation as it impinged on adults?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, it was by popular demand, from our conversations with them that they’ve got a really sophisticated and highly successful response to dealing with cyberbullying. And as the nation gained more awareness of how successful the e-Safety Commissioner was being, it was a natural next step to start to expand the remit. I think there’s something to be learned by all of us there about how we eat the elephant in small bite-sized chunks. And I think that they made a great start there.

Neil Fairbrother

We’ve talked about educating children with respect to CSEA in a previous podcast with Adrian Katz who’s a very well-known researcher and author in this area. She had completed a two-year study of the preparedness of schools to deal with bullying and cyberbullying, and her conclusion was that the school systems really are not equipped to do this, neither the schools or the school system. So, who will provide the professionalized and systematized training and who will take that training?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, first of all, I completely agree with Adrienne’s analysis. When my own children were growing up, I was a school governor and it was very clear to me then that this is a unique challenge that possibly for the first time in history, children are becoming more tech savvy than their parents’ or teachers’ generation.

And teachers would say to me, I don’t know how to teach this, because I didn’t encounter it when I was growing up. I have no first-hand experience of the sites that the children are using or the risks that they’re exposed to. So I think we do need a much more systematic and structured educational intervention and naturally that would be owned and led by the Department for Education. But this is where we saw the Online Harm Safety Centre playing a really key role.

So we talked a lot about how we disrupt the dark web and how we regulate the surface web, but we think the third pillar is to use the Online Harm Safety Centre as a coordinating instrument that has this amazing access to government, law enforcement, industry and charities to coordinate and orchestrate that collective response. So a single voice, a single coordinated response, but executed through the Department of Education in tandem with schools and youth organizations so that we really address the problem end-to-end.

Neil Fairbrother

So when’s it going to happen?

Nick Newman PA Consulting

Well, the Government’s just started its consultation on the Online Harms white paper. We are currently entering a spending review. We know that they want to completely reinvigorate their response to Serious and Organized Crime strategy from all the rumblings that we pick up with our stakeholders. Now is the moment when this Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is committed to making a real impact on this particular threat of online child sexual exploitation. So I’m optimistic that, in the spending review, and in the follow on from the Online Harms white paper, we’re going to start to see some restructuring and some reorganization. Now, whether an Online Harms Safety Centre, or whether they tackle it slightly differently, of course, I’d be delighted to support in any way we can to see anything that helps bring these communities together, so that we have the most effective response to protect our children.

Neil Fairbrother

Quite right too. Nick we’re out of time, thank you so much. We’re out of time it has been absolutely fascinating. I’ll put a link to report on our website. Please download it. Thank you.