Matt Foosaner: Parents Must Be Cyber Vigilant

Matt Foosaner: Parents Must Be Cyber Vigilant

PHOTO BY SARAH HUNTINGTON

By Leonard Shapiro

In 2005, Matt Foosaner was running a tactical communications team for the Sprint Nextel Corporation when the team received a call from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) while it was deployed to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina hit. In its wake, there were 5,000 missing children separated from their parents before, during and after the storm.

Foosaner set up an Emergency Response Team that allowed law enforcement and emergency service providers to communicate with each other and help find all those children. It was no easy task.

“They were all over the place,” he said. “Houston, Denver, Southern California. There were kids less than two years old, some weren’t even old enough talk, to tell us their last names. Some had no birth certificates. But one year after Katrina, the last child was reunited with their families. It was very rewarding.”

So much so that Foosaner was soon asked by the nonprofit NCMEC to serve on its law enforcement committee, and he is now is a member of its board of directors.

Over the years, that response team has been involved with a number of other high profile situations, including the Virginia Tech shootings, the D.C. Sniper threat, the space shuttle Columbia catastrophe and 27 presidential declared disasters, seven national special security events, 115 field training exercises plus joint terrorism and drug enforcement task force operations.

As a volunteer with NCMEC, Foosaner has helped the organization founded by John and Revé Walsh become aware of new, constantly evolving technology and how to use it during their own investigations.

Foosaner, his wife Terri and their three children live in the Middleburg area. A University of Maryland graduate who says, “I just love deploying technology in support of mission critical operation,” he spent 15 years at Sprint/Nextel and now has his own consulting firm, Critical Communications Solutions, based in Middleburg. He’s also very much involved in spreading the word both locally and nationally on facilitating the safe use of technology between parents and their children.

“Every year, there are 800,000 children targeted by sexual predators in the United States,” he said. “That includes runaways who get lured by sex traffickers. These kids are all races, from all different economic strata. There really is no single demographic, and the current state of technology makes it possible for a lot of bad things to happen.”

As a result, he also has developed a cyber safety seminar called “Parenting the Digital Child.” He’s conducted the seminar at a number of local schools, including The Hill School in Middleburg where his own children have been enrolled.

Foosaner cites research that has shown that over 80 percent of online sex crimes against children begin with predators using a child’s online social networking sites to gather information and eventually make contact.

He recommends installing parenting software that monitors internet usage, including texting, emails and social media sites. He also emphasizes the importance of parents having full knowledge and access, including passwords, for any of their children’s on-line activities.

“Let’s say your child gets solicited on-line,” Foosaner said. “You should immediately go to the CyberTipline that is managed by NCMEC, which you can reach online (https://report.cybertip.org/) or by phone (1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678). They will log it, investigate it and get the information to local law enforcement. Last year, we had 19 million reports of child pornography, solicitation and missing children.”

And the Middleburg area is no exception.

“I’ve had parents come up to me after a seminar with real issues,” he said. “‘My child has been solicited, what should I do?’ No one is immune from this and you are dealing with people who know what they’re doing. Allowing an unsupervised child to get on the information highway is like putting a six-year-old on a tricycle on I-66.”

Foosaner said his soon-to-be 16-year-old son did not get any devices until he was in the eighth grade and “he was the only person in his class who didn’t have a smart phone.

“The best advice I can give parents is to develop open communication with their children. There should be no consequences if a child reports an issue, and it has to be mitigated right now. Give your child a hug, and take the information to law enforcement and NCMEC. Don’t wait.”.