In the twelfth episode of Forensic Fix we catch up with Debbie Garner, Retired ICAC Commander from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) in the US to discuss her background and how she got into the world of child exploitation, industry issues, her current work on being an advisory board member for several important missions and a general chat about child exploitation, Mobile and Digital Forensics.
In this episode, Adam Firman is joined by Debbie Garner, Retired ICAC Commander from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) in the US, Debbie has been working in the Law Enforcement world for 33 years so she has a wealth of experience within this industry and shares the highs and lows of what is an extremely challenging but rewarding career.
Debbie shares her insights and thoughts into the dark world of child exploitation and explains how even when retired from Law Enforcement she is continuing to combat child exploitation via a variety of working methods such as being a founding board member at Raven amongst holding other inspiring roles.
Please connect with Debbie to see some of the great work she is part of - Debbie Garner | LinkedIn
Thank you for listening to Forensic Fix - a podcast brought to you from MSAB.
Adam Firman (00:01.582)
Hello and welcome to episode 12 of forensic fix a podcast brought to you from MSAB where we invite guests from the industry to discuss the latest news in DF IR current issues and a general chat about all things digital forensics and investigations So I'm your host Adam Firman tech evangelist here with MSAB and I am absolutely delighted to announce that today as our guest We have Debbie Ghana joining us for episode 12 of forensic fix so Debbie I was
Being a LinkedIn detective here, but you've got an extremely impressive career in law enforcement and sorry to date, but it goes back 33 years of experience.
Debbbie Garner (00:40.068)
It does. It's okay. I don't, I don't, I don't mind. I don't mind being dated.
Adam Firman (00:45.186)
And during that time, you've worked narcotics, you've been a special agent, and you've held various high-profile positions with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, the GBI. And in 2013, you became the ICAT commander for the GBI, working on child exploitation within the Computer Crimes Unit, where you held that position for eight years. Now, following your impressive law enforcement career, you've held some roles within the private industry.
but you've always remained close to your passion and beliefs by continuing to be an instructor and an advisory board member for some extremely important missions. Now, you're a self-proclaimed nerd cop. That's a term that I love and a certainly how I would have described myself. And one of my colleagues got me to mention that he had the term smart cops. And I believe you've had a conversation with Greg about that, Greg Masterson. Yeah, he loves the nerd cop and the smart cops. And...
Debbbie Garner (01:26.384)
Yes?
Debbbie Garner (01:37.048)
Yes.
Adam Firman (01:42.806)
He thinks that's no longer are we seen as the geeks.
Debbbie Garner (01:48.264)
Absolutely. So can I tell you how the NARDCOP came to be? There's a story, and I'll try to shorten it, but when I became the supervisor of the Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes Unit at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, there were these amazingly smart agents and digital forensic investigators, and our digital forensic investigators were non-sworn in my office.
really were not getting the respect and the love that I felt they deserved. Even people within our own agency and people outside of our agency truly didn't realize how amazingly knowledgeable and intelligent and creative and passionate that these people working these technology related investigations were. And they...
even sometimes derogatory comments. And I felt as though as their supervisor, it was my job to change that. So I sort of embarked on a marketing campaign for lack of a better way to say it. And that entailed a lot of press releases for all of the...
amazing work that they were doing, all the proactive operations, all the digital forensics. Every arrest that we made or proactive operation we made, we talked about the digital forensics that were behind that as well. And as I started posting a lot on social media, on LinkedIn and Twitter about all of their amazing work, I needed hashtags.
So one, I stole one from the Texas Department of Public Safety. They were using predators of predators, hashtag predators, and I loved that. So I used that. And then I was like, you know what? Nerd cops. So hashtag nerd cops. And I started doing that around 2016 or 2017. And it seems counterintuitive, but I really, really thought it fit. And we embraced the nerd, you know?
Debbbie Garner (04:01.464)
In our office, we even had it put on the walls, painted on the walls, hashtag nerd cops and you know, some binary, like we nerded out totally in our office and it became their identity in a good way. And it actually earned them a lot of respect. It got a lot of attention and it earned them some respect. So nerd cops actually started out as sort of a marketing morale type.
type thing.
Adam Firman (04:31.926)
No, that's really great. And I come from exactly the same background in our forensic unit, we had sworn cops like myself, and we had non swarms. So civilian investigators, we would class them as. But it was a really good mix, because sort of that the cop and my sort of investigation brain worked really well with my civilian colleagues who
Debbbie Garner (04:43.697)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Firman (04:58.022)
understood Linux, I understood the pseudo world and the binary and between us we help teach each other. So the fact that you celebrate that is really clever.
Debbbie Garner (05:04.902)
Yes.
Debbbie Garner (05:09.88)
And when I started using it on social media, it sort of took off. And it's a lot, it resonates. I find that it resonates with a lot of people in this industry worldwide.
Adam Firman (05:24.438)
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And in that sort of short summary, we went off on a tangent about nerd cops and rightly so, but I gave our, I gave our listeners a small insight into your history and the journey that you've been on and why you're passionate about educating people in regards to the global issue of child exploitation. But for those of maybe across Europe and this side of the pond, who aren't aware of the work that you've done in this space, can you give us some more detail about your past?
Debbbie Garner (05:34.554)
Oh.
Debbbie Garner (05:44.071)
Yes.
Adam Firman (05:54.154)
your career path and how you ended up being a board member for some of these amazing programs.
Debbbie Garner (06:00.056)
Sure. So, you know, I started out with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation very young, right out of college. You know, I went to college here in the United States at the University of Georgia. And in order to graduate with a criminal justice degree, you had to do an internship. And I did mine with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and was hired after that about six months later.
I started out as an undercover narcotics agent. At 22, they hired me to drive all over the state of Georgia, buying illegal narcotics undercover in my own personal car for $17,000 a year. And I thought it was fantastic. Now, they don't do that anymore. But from there, I worked healthcare fraud for many years. I-
Adam Firman (06:47.103)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (06:55.044)
worked in our fusion center, our terrorism intelligence work unit helped manage the terrorism intelligence side of our fusion center here in Georgia. And I managed a work unit that investigated all types of crimes, rape, robbery, homicide, political corruption, officer involved, use of force.
And then, like you said, the last eight years of my career was as the Special Agent in Charge of GBI's Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes Unit. And whoever holds that position in our agency was also the IPAC commander for the state of Georgia. And I will say by far that was my favorite assignment of my career. I went into it admittedly not having worked those types of investigations before.
And I was supervising people that knew way more about those types of investigations than I did. So I learned from them. I knew how to investigate. I knew how to manage. I knew how to be, for lack of a better way to put it, a supervisor, an administrator. But they are the ones I learned from the people that I supervised how to work these technology-based investigations. How, you know, I learned about digital forensics from the digital forensic investigators that I supervised.
I learned about the tools from them, you know, all of those types of things. You know, when I retired and moved to helping companies in the private sector and continuing to help law enforcement with their mission, I, you know, wanted to remain connected in this field and wanted to still remain a part of the mission.
and did join several organizations, one of which is Raven. And Raven is a lobbying organization that was formed to lobby Congress here in the United States for additional funding for the ICAC task forces. There were other ICAC commanders that retired about the same time I did, and we had all become friends. We had all truly become friends. We were coworkers.
Debbbie Garner (09:12.888)
and colleagues, but who became friends. And when we retired, we all felt as though we had left the people that we were supervising in this overwhelming situation. That they had this overwhelming workload of cyber tips, and if they were working proactive investigations adding to that, their budgets did not have in them what they needed for digital forensics tools or for enough people to work.
Adam Firman (09:24.363)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (09:42.204)
those all of those mini cyber tips and it was they were burning out and so we took it upon ourselves to form Raven to lobby Congress for additional funding for the ICAC task forces. Congress here in the United States has heard from great organizations like NICMEC and Thorn and they have they have educated them on this problem but they never had heard from law enforcement. How does it affect
law enforcement, once those cyber tips go from NIC-MIC to law enforcement, they had never really heard that side of the story. So we are educating Congress on that, as well as assisting them with legislation that helps law enforcement work these cases faster, more efficiently, that sort of thing. You said other boards. I was just, I was super excited to be...
Adam Firman (10:13.911)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (10:39.128)
I'm asked to serve on the techno security and digital forensics conference board. We're currently going through all of the submissions for speaking at the conference in Wilmington this year. So, yeah, that's, I'm sure I'm missing some things, but.
Adam Firman (11:01.842)
Yeah, so I was gonna, one of my questions was to ask you about techno security. Um, that's a great position to hold and you and I have seen each other from attending their, um, Wilmington's a great conference and there's some amazing presentations that really I found that help people to get people thinking on how things can be improved, how they can go away and improve things in their local state area, for example, and a real eye opener. And
As a board member, you've probably had an insight into that. It must be really hard to steer and choose on what content to select. How on earth does that selection process work? If you can reveal anything.
Debbbie Garner (11:35.014)
Uh-huh.
Debbbie Garner (11:43.068)
So I didn't know until I started doing this. This is my first year helping to go through a lot of the submissions. And I know I've submitted before and always wondered what are they looking for? Because occasionally some are chosen. The ones I think they may be weak, they choose. And the ones I think are strong don't get chosen. But there is a selection process. And without going into too much detail, all the board members...
I think there were about 160 submissions this year and we're trying to choose about 60 to 80 to actually present. So there is a metric system. Some of the things that are looked at is it an up, is it a up and coming topic? So it might be obviously artificial intelligence or you know, or cryptocurrency. There's some.
Adam Firman (12:16.319)
Wow.
Adam Firman (12:21.512)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (12:37.244)
secure and it's not all, you know, my background really in the technology space is CSAM and mobile phone forensics. That's what I know the most about. But there are a lot of cyber security type issues that we're looking at as well. But is it an up and coming topic? Is it a hot topic right now? Is...
Adam Firman (12:46.423)
See you again.
Debbbie Garner (13:04.836)
What type of credentials does the speaker have? Are they a valid expert in their field? So there are a lot of things. One of the things I will say is, I'm sure that there are great submissions that aren't chosen because they, there's so many great submissions in trying to choose the best of the best.
Adam Firman (13:08.265)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (13:13.591)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (13:31.521)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (13:35.129)
is really what we're doing.
Adam Firman (13:36.938)
Yeah. But now I'm looking forward to this year's conference. Fingers crossed I'll be lucky. Like you say, I've put some in that I think are strong, others that I think maybe not so, but it's always surprising which ones come back.
Debbbie Garner (13:44.872)
Absolutely.
Debbbie Garner (13:51.976)
I submitted a couple this year too prior to being asked to be on the board and I have to recuse myself. I don't want to vote on mine so mine will be voted on by others just as we're doing, just as everyone else's is and we'll see where I land as well.
Adam Firman (14:12.846)
That's good. At least they haven't said to you, no, you can't do it. It's just you're excluded from those votes.
Debbbie Garner (14:16.664)
Right. It's just, mine has to go through the same thing that everyone else does.
Adam Firman (14:22.722)
And presenting at Techno is a great experience and even attending the conference you meet so many great people find out about where technology is advancing and being online is great but you cannot beat that face-to-face interaction.
Debbbie Garner (14:39.832)
Oh agreed. There are so many people and I know you experience this too. There's so many people that I feel like I know online or at least as colleagues, you know, that I know online that we interact with every day on LinkedIn and Twitter on professional social media and then you finally get to meet them in person at conferences like techno or crimes against children or an ICCAC conference or something like that and it's actually a lot of fun.
Adam Firman (14:49.964)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (15:06.668)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (15:09.304)
One of my favorite things to do is go around and talk to, I talk to virtually everybody at every booth when I go to conference.
Adam Firman (15:15.294)
Yeah, and I think that's the sorry to burst people's bubble that they think like vendors despise each other. That's not the case at all. Everyone's working in this, yeah, people are working in this space because they believe in that mission and you will find vendors, funnily enough, having a drink together and chatting because we're all in this industry for the same reason.
Debbbie Garner (15:23.332)
No, it's not the case at all.
Debbbie Garner (15:37.96)
We really are. Many are former law enforcement, not all. So we have that bond. And we see each other all the time. And like you said, all the vendors that I have ever met are truly simply trying to help law enforcement with their mission. Each tool maybe does something slightly different. There's different price points. There's like, it is truly a...
I think a collaborative effort and all of us in this space know that multiple tools are needed often. So it's, it is the vendors actually are friends from competing companies.
Adam Firman (16:12.097)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (16:20.734)
Yeah, yeah. And that leads me very nicely onto my next question. So you obviously, we've been through, you've got vast knowledge and experience working in the child exploitation world. What would you say are the biggest challenges that face law enforcement today with tackling this global issue?
Debbbie Garner (16:43.612)
So I mentioned it slightly, but I believe it's the overwhelming caseload. So just in my own experience, and I'm an instructor for NICMIC right now and teach law enforcement about the CyberTip line when they're new ICAC investigators or crimes against children investigators. So I teach them about CyberTips and from a NICMIC perspective.
Adam Firman (16:50.367)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (17:11.728)
But just in Georgia, or well, we'll start nationally or globally, you know, NICMT received 32 million cyber tips last year. And most of those resolved internationally, but if we're talking in the United States and then going even further down to Georgia, Georgia received 30,000 cyber tips last year. And we have one and a half people to review all of them.
Adam Firman (17:34.284)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (17:41.844)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (17:42.316)
And then in that office, there are 16 people who investigate cyber tips. And then there are local law enforcement throughout the state of Georgia that help us. But it's an overwhelming situation. And I know the agents in my office probably commonly had 90 to 100 cases. There's no way you can work 90 to 100 cyber tips at once. But they're constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing based on information they get back, whether it's
information from a search warrant return or from a subpoena. They get information from an intelligence analyst indicating that the offender may have access to children or in their constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing all their cases but they know that they will never get to them all. And they know that there are children who are waiting in that stack of cases to be
Adam Firman (18:20.426)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (18:36.56)
for someone to help them and they will never get to them because there's not enough time. There's not enough time in their day to work all their cases. So the overwhelming caseload is an issue. Now, once you triage them all and they get, that's where sometimes digital forensics can come into play, but even before digital forensics gets to the point where it can help, whether it's
Adam Firman (18:38.807)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (18:45.)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (18:51.447)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (19:06.769)
faster imaging or faster processing of the data from mobile phones or anything like that, they have to get to that point. Yes, so the overwhelming nature and then what doesn't help are things like AI generated
Adam Firman (19:16.138)
Yeah, you still need the boots on the ground. Yeah.
Adam Firman (19:25.099)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (19:33.376)
One of the things that Raven is working on is standardizing the information that the internet service providers have to provide to NICNIC. And there's other organizations that are like, we're all working on this together, but standardizing that information because sometimes you don't have enough information to even start a case. But there are many, many things that, you know, sort of make this more difficult.
Adam Firman (19:49.46)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (20:02.88)
And the volume of cases is one, things like AI, generated CSAM, AI can be great on the other side, trying to find first generation CSAM, but it can also be detrimental in creating computer generated CSAM. So that is going to be a huge issue for a lot of reasons, both technically and legally.
Adam Firman (20:09.402)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Firman (20:15.915)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (20:22.612)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (20:32.976)
and you know globally so
Adam Firman (20:34.806)
Yeah. And it makes you want like my previous guest, Jen Hoey, and it just came out before we recorded that podcast about Facebook or Meta with their end to end encryption. And rightly so, it made Jen quite upset and angry about it, which I totally understand. Should these big tech companies pay tax liabilities to fund law enforcement? That would be a start.
Debbbie Garner (21:04.476)
That's a really good idea. I haven't thought that all the way through, but that's definitely a, that's not a bad idea. Yeah, I was, you know, Facebook had said several years ago that they were going to implement end-to-end encryption. They got some feedback, they did not, and now they have decided to do that again. And I...
Adam Firman (21:26.966)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (21:32.288)
those of us in this space are super disappointed by that. Disappointed is not strong enough.
Adam Firman (21:36.45)
Yeah.
Yeah, and I was really disappointed in people are going to shoot me down, but I'm an Apple person, use Apple. And when they first came out and announced that they were going to start scanning people's iCloud accounts, I thought finally Apple are driving this innovation because they have the technology. They're doing it whether we know about it or not. But they're open. And I think if you walk down a street and surveyed 100 people, probably 90 of those people would agree.
Debbbie Garner (21:55.143)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (21:58.812)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (22:07.685)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (22:08.634)
I don't have CSAN material, so yes, scan. But for some reason, they backpedaled on it. And I still to this day just don't understand the reasoning for that.
Debbbie Garner (22:11.653)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (22:19.972)
You know, I've read a lot of articles on both sides, because again, I truly try to understand both sides so that I can form my own opinion, but also fight better for what I believe. And many of the privacy advocates and, you know, arguments about the scanning on Apple devices really don't end up holding up.
But it is very interesting. I would encourage your listeners to go out. If they're interested in that, there are many, many articles that sort of give both sides of the coin. So.
Adam Firman (23:02.146)
Yeah. And it's interesting because as digital forensic companies unravel what these companies are storing about us on our mobile handsets, Apple and Google are classifying our photos. They're running OCR over them. You literally can run a search in your phone gallery for a word and it will find it within a picture. Well, how do you think that's happening?
Debbbie Garner (23:16.199)
Yes.
Adam Firman (23:29.854)
Do you not think that these tech companies are getting that data back to make their platforms better so that they're doing it Yeah
Debbbie Garner (23:35.148)
It does seem hypocritical, right? To say we're not going to do this, but yet they're doing all of the things that you just mentioned.
Adam Firman (23:44.702)
Yeah, yeah, and it does. And you're right in saying that it's good to have both sides of the argument, but a lot of these people who are against it, they like the fact that they can run a search for their dog and bring all the pictures of their dog back. Well, Apple of running that technology, so why not let them run it for good? But yeah. So.
Debbbie Garner (24:00.515)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (24:07.332)
Yep, agreed.
Adam Firman (24:13.046)
You touched on Raven, and you were one of the founding board members of that. And like I said, I can understand the mission behind Raven, and I think it's a really, really good idea. Because one of the difficulties that I saw we faced in the UK was not only Parliament, as we call them, but ours was our criminal justice system. So when we were taking cases to court for trial and the actual judges,
were not understanding of the technology and what was available. I've been in trials where there was a later smartphone and they'd be like, right, I want that. And they'd always use this term, which isn't technically correct, but I'll paraphrase them. I want that phone downloaded by the end of the day in the report back here. That doesn't quite work like that. So to me, the whole education space needs to expand from Congress, Parliament,
Debbbie Garner (25:00.221)
Yeah. No.
Debbbie Garner (25:11.964)
Yes.
Adam Firman (25:12.282)
also into the actual criminal justice system. Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (25:15.204)
Agreed. So it's interesting for me to hear that you have those same issues here in the States. It is, at least in my small world in the state of Georgia, we tried to educate judges. It's very difficult. They do have judges training occasionally, but it's hard to get them to go to training that they weren't otherwise going to, and then to get your block of instruction in.
But prosecutors and judges, you know, do need to know about technology. I will say when I first started as the ICAT commander in Georgia, even the prosecutors didn't understand some of the technology. And because of that, the case would sit on their desk because they didn't understand how to explain it to a jury. No matter how many times we would say, we will handle that.
let the digital forensic investigator handle that. These are the, you know, this is a collaborative effort. We will help you explain it. They were a little bit scared of it. That has, thank goodness, I don't wanna say it's taking care of itself. There's still prosecutors that are like that. But more prosecutors understand technology now because it's not just technology. Like it's not just CSAM investigations anymore. It's all investigations. Every investigation has a technology component.
And virtually every investigation, every criminal investigation, has a mobile phone component.
Adam Firman (26:47.658)
Yeah, it is a part of law enforcement training now in the US.
Debbbie Garner (26:52.94)
Um, sometimes. So, because as you're aware, we're so fractional, you know, we're sort of spread out many, many jurisdictions. So it sort of depends on which law police school, which law enforcement training academy you go to as to what type of technical training you're going to get. And also it depends on if you're going to be, let's say a patrol officer or a detective will receive, will hope.
Adam Firman (26:55.027)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (27:21.608)
hopefully receive additional technical training. But it varies, and sometimes they have to seek it out on their own, it's not necessarily automatically provided. But providing that education to law enforcement at every level, prosecutors, and like you were mentioning, judges. Judges need to understand as well, because some of their asks, like you mentioned, some of their requests, their asks, their demands are...
undoable. You can't, you know, it's sort of my one of my favorites from prosecutors is give me a full, I want everything on the phone. Give me full forensics, you know, and you're like no you don't really want that. Would be, you know, to me digital forensic investigators tell them about the case, tell them what you're looking for, tell them what you need, educate them about your case, they become your partner.
Adam Firman (27:53.782)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (28:03.468)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (28:21.656)
in your investigation and let them do what they're trained to do.
Adam Firman (28:27.042)
Yeah, I was talking to an ex-collegate, ex-law enforcement colleague a few days ago, and he's currently developing internal training for sort of new recruits. And he's got an old case file from a phone extraction for a narcotics job. And he said it's the perfect piece of evidence because it has relevant search terms to look for. It's got the smoking gun.
But it's also got a lot of other material that can cause officers to go down rabbit holes that they shouldn't be. And he likes that case file because it's really good at telling people, you've got to be focused. You've got to have an investigation plan in place. If you were verbally interviewing someone, you don't go in there and talk about everything. You have a plan. You plan for that investigation, and digital evidence is the same. So like
Debbbie Garner (29:04.328)
Sure.
Adam Firman (29:22.782)
Like you said, the judge asking for everything. We can't do that anymore.
Debbbie Garner (29:26.508)
Right, especially with the size of phones. There's no way. You know, I think what we lean towards in the US is, say, patrol officers, people who are going to answer calls for service, need to know certain things. They need to know how to seize digital evidence. You know, we have had instances of officers going out to take a report of, say, a sextortion report.
and they are asking the victim to email them you know, the videos and photos. They just don't know, they're like, okay, well that's how I can get them. So there's training around, you know, patrol officer, then there's training detectives need. We did in my office, a little bit back to the nerd cop thing, we did create some training for everyone else in our agency.
Adam Firman (30:05.312)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (30:25.02)
because there was a time where they were asking us, hey, how do you get information from Facebook? How do you write a search warrant for mobile phones? How do you turn an IP address into a physical address? They didn't know these things. And so they would call the agents and the digital forensic investigators in my office and ask them to do it. Well, we couldn't work everybody's investigations.
Adam Firman (30:40.415)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (30:52.976)
So we created a training curriculum and to the credit of our leadership and our agency, we asked them to put it into our academy and there was technical training added to our academy for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that taught them how to get information from internet service providers and write technical search warrants. You know, because...
Adam Firman (31:17.372)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (31:18.608)
They needed to in every investigation, whether it was a homicide or an officer involved use of force or a fraud case, they still needed to do all of those things. But they were asking us to do it and we couldn't do all the work, so.
Adam Firman (31:26.274)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (31:33.21)
Yeah, and it's true because I remember when I joined that sort of digital forensics world, it was mainly CSAM work on computers. And we were investigating people who had more storage than our entire lab. And, but slowly I saw that evolve where sort of phones were 20% of the workload of our department and it slowly outweighed and then other devices came along, such as drones, then vehicle forensics.
Debbbie Garner (31:44.743)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (31:58.64)
Oh yeah
Adam Firman (32:00.166)
And like you say, every crime scene was a digital crime scene in the end, whether it, whether it's CCTV body worn cameras, vehicle forensics, internet of things that are housed around people's houses.
Debbbie Garner (32:04.269)
It is.
Debbbie Garner (32:07.696)
Yep.
Debbbie Garner (32:14.968)
Ring doorbells. Or I don't know if you have like video camera doorbells. Yeah.
Adam Firman (32:16.628)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (32:20.318)
Yeah, yeah. So, and then you've got to deal with, is it a ring doorbell? Is it a euphy doorbell? Is it a Chinese knockoff doorbell? And these are all the things that cops are having to change their mindset. And like you say, when we began, it was CSAM. And I think the majority of sort of the phone work that I was doing before I left was fatal road car collisions. But was the phone in use at the time? And it was...
Debbbie Garner (32:28.268)
Right, right. Yes, yes.
Debbbie Garner (32:44.932)
Yes.
Right.
Adam Firman (32:50.818)
pretty much our forensic unit ended up being involved with 90% of the crimes that were going on in our jurisdiction.
Debbbie Garner (32:57.768)
Absolutely, and that's not going to slow down. That is the way it is now. There have been several studies done about how digital forensics is considered more important than DNA in many, many cases. In fact, because DNA isn't in most cases. But digital forensics, mobile phones are.
Adam Firman (33:20.514)
And this is working beautifully because this leads into my next question, which from my intensive detective work on LinkedIn, and I've answered some of your, your polls that you share, I can clearly see that you're interested in how law enforcement is using AI and cloud to help develop and enhance their practices. And from the research that you've carried out, what have been your discoveries about how law enforcement are using it and could be using it?
Debbbie Garner (33:37.316)
Yes.
Debbbie Garner (33:48.828)
So we'll talk about cloud first since that was sort of pre, that issue is pre AI as far as it being an issue. You know, one of the things, one of my responsibilities has been to sort of educate law enforcement executives. I'm not a digital forensics practitioner. I was a decision maker that who knows a lot about digital forensics.
Adam Firman (33:56.98)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (34:18.844)
Um, so my job has been one to educate executives who are scared of the cloud, you know, about the cloud. So, Hey, what are your concerns? And let's talk about those and then educating them on security and the advantages of going to the cloud. Um, you know, all of these things in the difference between cloud and on-prem.
Adam Firman (34:40.958)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (34:45.648)
sometimes law enforcement executives just are, they don't wanna be the first one to do it. They don't, they need to have some reassurance that all of these scary things that they're hearing, have been, those risks have been minimized. And so a lot of it, that was a lot of what I was doing. So talking about, you know, the advantages of the cloud, cloud computing is a lot faster.
Adam Firman (35:03.03)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (35:15.136)
It can be cheaper in the long run. It can, you know, it's more versatile. There's a lot of things that are advantages to operating in the cloud. And with all of the digital forensic companies coming out with SaaS products and, you know, all of these things, law enforcement needed to be prepped for lack of a better way to put it to...
Adam Firman (35:16.967)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Firman (35:26.146)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (35:40.896)
to feel that using those products are okay. So the cloud, and then really the same thing with artificial intelligence, but really my interest in artificial intelligence has been with a company trying to find first generation CSAM. So there are companies that are trying to develop tools, and when I say first generation CSAM, I mean CSAM that's never been seen by NICMIC before or IWF.
Adam Firman (35:57.003)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (36:09.492)
or Thornton, like it's not in a database that is typically used Project Vic, it's not in those databases. It's new CSAM. So you seize a phone and you use whatever hash database you use to pull out the known CSAM, there could still be unknown CSAM in there, first generation CSAM.
Adam Firman (36:09.878)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (36:31.45)
And that's the problem that we face. And we spoke initially about that that's the biggest issue that I know some police jurisdictions here in the UK. And this will probably frighten you that once they get those hits back, if they've got enough to prosecute and charge, that's it. They move on. They do not review the rest of that work.
Debbbie Garner (36:48.708)
Yeah, I have mixed feelings. I'm not going to lie. I have mixed feelings. I understand wanting to arrest an offender, move on to the next case, because there's so many. I understand that, but you are not really serving victims that need to be found. So there are companies, and I'm not going to mention them, but I'll put them in categories. There's companies that have tried to.
Adam Firman (36:50.542)
Mm.
Adam Firman (37:05.406)
Yeah, because of all that first generation. Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (37:15.368)
tried to develop a tool to find first generation CSAM by doing it themselves, developing the AI tool themselves. And they're using it by combining sexual images with young children. Like they're training the AI tool on young faces and then sexual images. Those really aren't working very well.
Adam Firman (37:40.736)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (37:44.696)
If you need to train an AI tool, you need to train it on using CSAM. And that is a challenge. At least here in the United States, private companies can't have access to that. Now, in the UK, and there are some other countries where they have given private companies access to actual CSAM to train their AI tools.
Adam Firman (37:51.106)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (37:56.012)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (38:09.732)
And there are companies that have worked with law enforcement to use real CSAM to train their AI tools. And then if we go larger, Google and Meta have access to CSAM that comes through their platform, and they are using it to train tools to find first generation CSAM. When that will make its way to law enforcement, I don't know.
Adam Firman (38:09.74)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (38:33.906)
Yeah, because and that's the hard part because exactly like the point I just raised and I was very lucky that and again, you said the US is fractional, I can understand it because of the size of the US but even in the UK, we were fractional that I was very fortunate sort of the police force that I worked for had a gentleman called Simon Bailey, who was yeah, he was to he was to
Debbbie Garner (38:59.912)
Everybody knows Simon. Yeah.
Adam Firman (39:02.822)
sort of chief of child abuse for the UK. So he was very passionate about the industry. And we searched every image, didn't matter what, um, Cade or Vic highlighted. We still went through every single image, but that wasn't the case up and down the country because of their workloads. They say, for example, they got enough hits, come back from Cade, they prosecute the case and move on. Um, but it frightened me because of all that first generation potential victims that they're missing.
Debbbie Garner (39:22.629)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (39:28.068)
Yes. Yep. I mean, you know, I try not to judge what other agencies decide to do with their resources, you know, because everybody has different resources. They have a different number of people. They have different laws that they have to adhere to. They have different budgets and different digital forensics tools. And so I try not to judge.
I definitely have opinions and I want every child that needs to be found found. Um, it's going to take a lot more resources for that to occur.
Adam Firman (40:06.834)
Yeah, and I go back to my earlier comment, that's where we should be hitting Zuckerberg and people with big taxes to help fund these sort of... because it's part of why they're... it's no different to say for example McDonald's who pay a higher tax for litter, because it's an obvious issue that's going to come out of a fast food chain. Yeah, to me it's... yeah.
Debbbie Garner (40:15.077)
Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (40:28.644)
Ah, right. Yeah. Consequences. There's consequences to them operating, and so they need to help with managing those consequences.
Adam Firman (40:40.506)
Yeah, because I'm aware that I think Facebook certainly has, but where they have, and you and I both know because we've seen the toll that this has taken on trained sort of law enforcement professionals of reviewing that stuff, that Facebook, from what I've been told, pay fairly minimal for people just to sit there and review CSAM all day, which is horrendous. Yeah. But yeah.
Debbbie Garner (40:54.211)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (41:01.484)
Yes, that's my understanding.
Debbbie Garner (41:09.466)
I have a lot of contact with their trust and safety departments across many platforms. And while they say that they're concerned about the people that are doing this work, then I hear things like that. And I do worry about those people. I don't know how to say this.
Adam Firman (41:29.758)
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Debbbie Garner (41:37.428)
In law enforcement, I don't know if we have a different mindset. We know that we're going to see horrific things, whether it's CSAM or violent crime scenes or violent car crashes. We know that that's part of our profession, but for someone who gets a job with an internet safety platform, I'm sorry, an internet service provider doing that type of thing.
that would be, that would be, I would fear for their mental wellness, just like I do ours.
Adam Firman (42:11.962)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it does, it takes us toll eventually, I think, which is why there's normally shelf sort of lives in law enforcement that, hey, I'm going to be in this department for so many years, because generally you'll burn out whether it's your work in traffic and picking up fatalities and. But yet, and
Debbbie Garner (42:18.792)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (42:35.808)
It is. Do you now in the agencies that you've worked for or agencies that you know about, are there time limits for some types of work?
Adam Firman (42:46.95)
There is, but not for a mental health wellbeing. So for example, you could be on a plain clothes surveillance team and you may burn your time because you become too well known. But working in CSAM certainly wasn't, like when I first joined, we used to have mandatory counselling. That was then taken away for cost saving. Yeah, for cost saving.
Debbbie Garner (42:50.276)
Oh wow.
Debbbie Garner (42:57.861)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (43:09.66)
Really? Wow. That's startling.
Adam Firman (43:16.2)
It was then changed to an online survey. Do you think you need help? Well, by the time you tick that box, it's probably too late. So yeah.
Debbbie Garner (43:22.768)
Yes. And sometimes people don't tell the truth if they just have to check a box.
Adam Firman (43:28.106)
Yeah, yeah. But again, I was only talking from my own experience. That there may be other police forces in the UK where you're completely looked after and...
Debbbie Garner (43:34.437)
Right.
Debbbie Garner (43:40.588)
It's very different across the across agencies in the United States. It's talked about a lot and within the IPAC task forces, mental wellnesses. And I, you know, but not everyone has access to wellness services or resiliency training or anything like that. We did. Um, and we even increased hours, you know, our wellness program sort of expanded it while I was there. Um, but.
We still could have done more with a more robust budget.
Adam Firman (44:14.674)
One area that I always think, because like the server that Andrew Rathbun set up with the DFIR Discord server, technology-wise, this industry is amazing at sharing and helping each other in law. But in that sort of mental health and wellbeing, I know DFIR fit and things have tried to get off the ground, but there's no, it doesn't seem as well sort of vocalized at the moment.
Debbbie Garner (44:21.18)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (44:26.405)
really is.
Debbbie Garner (44:41.944)
And it's different across countries and even within the United States, different across every jurisdiction in the United States. I do think maybe at least here in the States, CSAM investigators, maybe it's talked about more and here in the United States, mental wellness is being discussed more and more and more for all of law enforcement. So there is a change
Adam Firman (45:02.294)
Mm-hmm.
Debbbie Garner (45:11.6)
But it's very slow and like you mentioned, when budgets need to be cut, that's one of the things that gets cut.
Adam Firman (45:19.118)
Yeah, and unfortunately, it's left us like a tick. But we're still looking after them because they're getting a yearly survey. Well, it's not red. Yeah.
Debbbie Garner (45:28.472)
I don't think that's sufficient personally, but...
Adam Firman (45:31.326)
Yeah and it leads me perfectly onto my, sadly my final question of the day and this one is the 64 million dollar question. If I could give you an open checkbook to solve child exploitation, how would you use it?
Debbbie Garner (45:39.939)
Oh wow.
Debbbie Garner (45:48.496)
Oh wow, okay, I needed to prep for this one. So this is just gonna be off the top of my head to solve child exploitation.
Adam Firman (45:58.59)
Or at least put a dent into it.
Debbbie Garner (46:00.12)
Okay, so my... Can I break up the funds? So I can do any, okay, so, you know, the first thing I would really wanna do is enlist other experts. Develop a think tank, not use much of the money, but develop a think tank of law enforcement, digital forensic researchers, tech, you know, really smart people who are developing these tools.
Adam Firman (46:07.27)
You certainly can, this.
Debbbie Garner (46:30.288)
and internet service providers. I would want to do a think tank. Everybody around the same table. I literally have never seen, I know that there's task forces and there's, you know, Interpol and there are places where a lot of us get together, but I've never seen internet service providers, you know, nonprofits, law enforcement, digital forensic companies, a lot of them, even competitors, you know, I've never seen them all around the same table trying.
Adam Firman (46:54.966)
Mm-hmm.
That's a really good point.
Debbbie Garner (46:59.144)
trying to solve the problem, legitimately trying to solve the problem, putting their competitive aspects aside, which I don't know that that's possible. But I know at least in my experience, I want to throw people at the problem. There's more cyber tips. We need more people. We need more money for digital forensic investigations. I have heard many people say we can't arrest our way out of this problem.
So it's going to be a combination of education. And I think education starting in schools. We don't really have mandated internet safety curriculum in schools in the States. It's left.
Adam Firman (47:31.054)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Firman (47:41.789)
Which is the point Jen, my previous guest, was sort of really helping to change in Australia.
Debbbie Garner (47:46.448)
Yes, so education and then this, I don't want to say task force, this group of all of the players, all of the players in the same room, law enforcement, this is our problem, these are our problems, technically, digital forensic companies, oh, we can solve, we can build this, you know, that type of thing.
The internet service providers, hey, we can certainly, you know, educate people more. We can certainly change our policies. We can, you know, we can do things as well. And lawmakers, I left out lawmakers. So all in the same room, trying to solve the problem, as opposed to me talking to lawmakers and then talking to the internet service providers and then talking to the digital forensic companies. I want everybody in the same room.
Adam Firman (48:23.02)
Yeah.
Adam Firman (48:40.36)
And that was the reasoning of an ICAT commander. Methodical, targeted and a full investigation. I like it.
Debbbie Garner (48:47.492)
I mean everybody in the same room. I solved small problems that way. Everybody gets in the same room and we're gonna talk this out. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna we're gonna solve this problem. Small problems. Big problems. Everybody in the same room.
Adam Firman (49:01.97)
That's a good way of dealing with it. And I just want to say a huge thank you and as early for you, Debbie, for joining us. But I'm sure our listeners who haven't come across you so far will have found your journey and your experiences extremely insightful. And in my show notes, I'll post a link to your LinkedIn profile so our listeners can reach out and connect with you and see the great work that you're helping to sort of achieve in this industry. And hopefully I will get to see you in June, Debbie, but thank you very much for coming on.
Debbbie Garner (49:29.208)
Yes, absolutely. I hope so. I hope so. Thank you for having me. I've had a blast chatting with you.
Adam Firman (49:35.547)
no problem. Thanks, Debbie. Bye bye.
Debbbie Garner (49:36.88)
All right, thanks.