← The Rest Is Politics
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Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts, and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com.
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Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question time with me, Alistair Campbell, and with me, Rory Stewart, we're going to talk about the killings of protesters by ICE in Minnesota. We're going to talk about the Tory party. Can they get back to the center? Should they get back to the center now that Suella Braverman's left? And also a little look at oratory. And in the second half we're doing something a bit different. We've taken you up in your suggestion, Roy, last week that I talk to the people who are trying to get governments to act against online child sex abuse.
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B
Let's start with with Minnesota. This is something that has been dominating the US Media for a very, very long time now. One of the things I notice looking at the US Media is while we are all very, very focused on issues like Greenland or insults to British troops, their focus is very much on what's happening to democracy inside the United States of America.
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A
Well, it's an issue of a question, Madelon. Do you think that MAGA era immigration enforcement is trying to force Americans in the world to distrust their own eyes and ears by portraying Alex Pretty as a dom terrorist despite video evidence and witness accounts that contradict the administration's narrative? And could this deliberately vague label be expanded to target political opponents next? I think Stephen Miller, the Goebbels figure in the Trump administration, was the first to coin that. But actually J.D. vance was straight out the traps again. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security person in charge of that Trump seems to be backtracking a little bit, saying that he had a very good phone call with Governor Tim Waltz who he spends most of his time abusing. But look, the question, Madeleine's question is the one that's right. This is reference to George Orwell. You know, don't believe your own eyes. I think my own eyes watch that killing pretty closely. And as with the previous killing in Minnesota, it looked to me like a murder. I don't really see the guys being under threat.
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B
Yeah, well, I mean, let's try to take a step back for a second. So I think no doubt at all, it looks from the footage clear as though pretty has been pushed onto the ground. A officer from ice. I don't know why I'm using the word officers, being overly polite and deferential towards these thugs. But removes his holstered weapon. We can get onto that in a little bit. And then he's shot. He's basically executed when he's defenseless on the ground. So maybe there are different directions we can go in. And the amazing thing about the US Media is that they've covered every angle from every angle. So I'm sometimes struggling to work out what we can really add as Brits or Europeans to this conversation. But one thing of course, is the social media environment. So I was on yesterday, following up on Truth Social and Donald Trump saying that he was going to deploy Tom Homan up to Minnesota, as the borders are to Minnesota, to sort it out. And that of course reminded me of a narrative that you and I don't normally see, which is if you follow the Truth Social posts by Donald Trump and the replies to is full throated person after person saying, hell yeah, go get them, Tom. Endless memes and pictures of Trump in ICE uniform. Trump and Homan, people looking, powerful looking. And the narrative, as you say, reinforced again and again that thank God for ice, they're saving our country and there are these domestic terrorists who are trying to undermine it. And he ended up at the end of this, of course, repeating his attack against a congresswoman, accusing her of stealing $40 million. Again, an amazing Trump move. This is the most corrupt precedent that the United States has ever seen. He doesn't make any secret at openly sending his family out to get enormous billion dollar contracts in Saudi and UAE before he even visits those places, his family members quite openly. And I was talking to people in Davos who've been in to see them recently. They spend half the meeting just talking about deals. Half the meeting they're meant to be talking about foreign policy. The other half meeting, they say, oh, by the way, while you're here, dear representative from country X, how about this deal? How about that deal? How about the other? So incredible that what he's decided to go after her for is an allegation.
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A
Of corruption and the industrial stale. Pardons. We've seen more. The pardons don't even get covered. Now you pay to get pardoned. Now you pay Trump.
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B
So social media one, a second one is the point that you've pointed out, which is the fascist rhetoric coming out of Stephen Miller, both domestically and internationally. Strength is what matters. Go after the others. I think the third thing maybe we picked up in Davos, which is the extraordinary deference and compliance coming from the US Financial and business elite. Essentially all they said to us was, well, it's okay because the markets are not going down. It's extraordinary. It doesn't matter what he does in green. It doesn't matter what he does. If the market's not going down, somehow the world is fine. Rather than saying, well, is it possible that you guys in the markets don't care about international peace and security? For some reason or don't care about.
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A
Domestic terrorism or are driven only by the bottom line and also driven by fear. That was the other thing that came over talking to people at Davos. When you talk to people, it was the constant gap between what they say in the privacy of their own homes and meetings and even in that sort of looking over their shoulders. I mean, it is a climate of fear. And I think what's happened in Minnesota, I thought Trump's truth Social post yesterday after his conversation with Tim Waltz, and we're on the save wavelength and I'm sending Tom home and to sort it out, and they're getting rid of one of the people who was there. So he's obviously, I think, worried. But you know, the thing that worried him was the fact that the National Rifle association came out against them because they. Because they'd been criticizing this guy for carrying a gun.
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B
Right. So this has been fascinating. So just to sort of maybe this is something that international listeners would get. The US Doesn't. The US Media is not as perplexed as most British and European viewers will be the fact that Pretty, who is a emergency room nurse with progressive liberal views demonstrating against ice, is carrying a holstered pistol at his waist now. And this really shows this is right. Something really weird about the U.S. right. So, you know, I come from Shoshana's family, extremely sort of Democratic, liberal family. My mother in law and my father in law completely horrified by the idea of weapons. In fact, they think anyone who carries weapons pretty close to being a maga deplorable. You know, the grandkids are not allowed to go around with nerf guns and plastic guns. Right. This is very deep in a lot of the liberal progressive psyche in the US So there will be, if you're from Connecticut, you'll be thinking, what on earth. What do you mean? This guy is like a liberal progressive emergency room nurse walking around with a weapon strapped to his. But of course, it's a reminder that Minnesota is different. I mean, Connecticut, you can't come in. You don't see people walking around malls in Minnesota with a weapon like that. The gun licensing laws in Minnesota, because it's a wilder, bigger state, are much more liberal than they would in the blue heartland of places like Connecticut.
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A
But it did mean that yesterday you had the kind of progressive left and huge marches against what was going on on the same side of the argument for one day with the National Rifle association, because the issue of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms is also part of this But I think the point about Orwell and believe the site, you know, believe in what you actually see as opposed to what you're being told. This is the Putinization of America, if you ask me. This is right to the heart of. We have to have our own narrative on whatever situation pertains before us. And they don't mind the Stephen Millers, the Christian Olms, the J.D. vance's, they don't mind if they are put in front of a microphone and say things which are totally disproven by images playing in the background. And that is dystopian. So when you, when you add that to the sight of these thugs, as you call them, and look, they're openly admitting these guys are not being trained in the way that most.
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B
They're getting six weeks of training instead.
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A
Of six training instead of six months. They are clearly being told that you are God's chosen children and you are completely immune from any. The guy who it seems has fired at least one of the shots, the guy, Bevino, what's his name? Gregory Bevino, the guy in charge of the guy walks around in an SS code. He has basically said that they've taken him off the scene and nobody's going to know who he is. So there's a Renee Goode. When she was killed, her car was sort of just removed from the scene before the authorities could actually see it.
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B
One of the weird things going on is the administration is basically saying that the Department of Justice, which are the only people that can take cases against the ICE officers, work for the President and therefore will not take cases. So it doesn't matter what these officers do. The normal checks and balances in the uk, as you know, I don't want to be boring about the uk, but if a police officer shot somebody, a fully independent process happens, running all the way through to the courts to prosecute that officer, often to the fury of the officer and the police association, everybody feels they're being unfairly treated. But the idea that the Prime Minister would simply articulate full immunity. There will be no investigations, nobody's going after them. If you're an ICE, you're immune. $170 billion is being invested into ICE. $170 billion more than has ever been spent on any non military organization in world history. This is more than is spent on any army in the world. Much more than spent on any army in the world except for the US and China. It dwarfs the expansion of the Russian military. This is more than we spend on two giant aircraft carriers, Tridents Tens of thousands of soldiers is being spent just in this new entity for immigration enforcement. So it's a massive paramilitary armed organization recruiting on the basis, as you've pointed out in the past, of very, very explicitly white nationalist posters harping back to 19th century American racist ideas of Manifest Destiny. And apparently with complete immunity from prosecution from the Trump state being run deliberately not into Republican states, but into the Democrat states. And no accident that the state they've chosen is the place who's being run by the Vice President, Kamala Harris.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Rory, your beloved former party, the Tory Party. Fiona Jackson, trip plus member from Leicester. After Suella Braverman's defection to Reform uk, the latest in a series of high profile departures. What does the future look like for the Conservative Party? Now, you're very excited about this group that's been started by Andy street, former mayor of the West Midlands, and Ruth Davidson, former Tory leader in Scotland. Is it tempting you back?
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B
Well, it's an amazing group. So I would like to firstly say they've done some really interesting polling. It's a new movement. It's a movement for the centre, centre right. The movement is called Prosper. And they've done some polling with more in common that have found that something like 22 million people in Britain identify as being centre centre right, big chunk. And of those, 7 million currently describe themselves as politically homeless. And I imagine there will be a number of people listening to this podcast who would see themselves as from the centre and politically homeless, looking for somewhere to go. And so this is an organization that says essentially what's being offered by the current parties doesn't meet it. Kemi Badenoch has taken the Tory Party a long way to the right. She's somebody who voted for Brexit, campaigned for Brexit. The Labour Party, they would argue, has also got trapped by left wing Labour backbenchers. And there's a huge space in the center ground. And their message would be join, prove to these parties. I mean, one of the things they probably say is this isn't a party, it's a movement. But what they want to do is they want to prove to those parties that actually the centre is popular. One of the things that, you know, Morgan McSweeney will be hearing or the Tory strategist we heard from pollsters is nobody is in the centreground. There aren't any votes there anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. Nobody wants that anymore. And that isn't what more in Commons suggests. So what they're saying is sign up free Membership. But if you could get, let's say 50,000 people joining this new movement, it would be very powerful because it would immediately say to these other parties, here is this huge group in the center ground. So I'm trying to encourage people to take an interest and join this movement. The movement is called Prosper and if you look for it, you've got to look for prosperuk.com to sign up. Prosperuk.com to sign up. I think it's really interesting and it doesn't cost you anything to sign up, but just by signing up you show that you think Santa might have a hope in British politics.
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A
Sounds like an insurance company. Prosper uk.
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B
That's right. We're insuring against the horrors of reform. And Nigel Farage.
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A
So you, so the sorts of people we're talking about, David Gauke, your hero, Amber Rudd, the kind of centrist, slightly Michael Heseltine.
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B
Yeah. So on the older edge and on.
- [16:19]
A
The other side, the ones that are defecting to reform are the people who were on the kind of really the right wing fringe of the Conservative Party. You often quote James Johnson, the pollster, and I heard him on the radio yesterday who was saying that your strategy would be a disaster for the Conservative Party because reform. The voters that the Tories have lost have gone to reform and there are still an awful lot more who still might.
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B
Absolutely. So, so you're quite right. James Johnson, big pollster, friend of mine. And so we have a lot of arguments about this. So James would say, listen, Rory, you, Rory, as an individual and potentially as an independent, might have a shot running to be mayor of London because London is quite centrist and progressive. But if the Conservative Party is running the country, he tries to argue those centre voters, they lost them in 2015, 2017 and they're never coming back. And that they've lost about a third of their vote share or even half their vote share since the last election to reform. So the only chance of the Tories winning is to get those reform voters back. I'm in a massive bet against the James analysis. And I'm with let's create a center movement proves this energy in the center because the logic's there. Here's the logic. The logic would be that actually reform is doomed. That vision, which is the Trump vision of the world, is nasty, incoherent, dangerous, bankrupting and unpleasant. On the other hand, the vision sold by the left of the Labour Party, sadly is likely to lead to economic stagnation, more expenditure on more and more things, avoiding tough decisions More and more regulations, the center ground. And I'm not really getting into the question of whether the center ground needs to be center right, center left, whether it's new labor or it's my vision of the world. But it's a vision of the world that says Britain needs to be pragmatic, dynamic. We've got to get the economy going, we've got to deregulate, we've got to get debt and spending under control, we've got to support entrepreneurs, we've got to support business. We've got to do it in a way that's liberal, progressive, that believes in international institutions, believes in human rights. A vision that feels more like Mark Carney and less like either Nigel Farage.
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A
Or Kiyosana or Matt Hancock.
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B
Or Matt Hancock.
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A
The thing that I thought was missing, well, the thing that's definitely missing from reform is new ideas for the future of the country. It's just a load of slogans, a load of kind of right wing talking points. I didn't sense in this Andy Street, Ruth Davidson, Amber Rudd, David Gawke thing. I didn't sense any. A debate about new ideas coming. I sense that they feel slightly put upon that people can't see that they are more sensible than what the country is now facing. But actually, surely all of these people on the left, whether it's the Greens or Labour or Lib Dems or all of the parties, it's the ideas that are going to, particularly in opposition parties, the ideas are what are key. And I don't see where they're coming from.
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B
Absolutely. So ideas, they need to be much, much clearer about what they would do with the economy and they need to be more honest about it. It is a vision about cutting spending, lower taxes, more focus on making it easier to start businesses, easy to innovate.
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A
Reform would say all of that.
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B
Reform can't really say all of that because all their instincts again and again faced with any choice is always to lean into their base, which is an older pensioner base. So it's always actually about supporting triple lock pensions, supporting welfare. So occasionally Farage to decide.
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A
By the way, my God, that was illustrated by the audience with the Suella Bravo defection. It was very interesting stylistically. I thought they had the audience in black and white and her in color. I don't know how they do that, but it was quite clever. But virtually there was one point where, where she was standing on the stage, she was blocking the only woman in this sort of crowd of white haired or bald men.
- [20:16]
B
So. So they need ideas in the economy. And I think those ideas are all about radical reform, getting growth going. They need ideas on the international system, which we talked about in the last podcast. And I'd love to see them say, this is our big vision of Britain and the world.
- [20:28]
A
They, the centrists.
- [20:30]
B
And I think they're missing a trick on Europe. Right. I want to see this centrist movement say, this is how we're going to get much, much closer to Europe, structurally, institutionally. Immediately. They're missing visions on institutional reform. They need to completely reimagine the way that the Constitution works. But they're also missing two other things. One of them is communication, which you keep coming back to. How do you sell these ideas? How do you make people excited in nature? Populism? And the final thing I think, is morality, ethics. The fundamental problem with Nigel Farage is this guy was a big shill for Donald Trump and Brexit. That's all you really need to know about him.
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A
He was also, by the way, he was in Davos at the behest of some Iranian billionaire.
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B
Yeah. Who brought him as one of his staff. If you looked at Nigel Farage's path, what you would have seen is the name of the Iranian businessman. And then underneath, you would have seen, you know, his name.
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A
He's not. He's not. He likes his name and likes normally. And also he's broken. I lost count of how many parliamentary rules he's broken with all his outside earnings.
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B
Right.
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A
And so, again, as with Trump, just doesn't care.
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B
No, but I think as Trump goes on, I mean, we've only seen a year of Trump, another three years, this guy and our own mini Trump is going to be in real, real trouble. You don't want to be in mini Trump.
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A
That's why I think we're at peak reform. The other problem your new group has got is they're very much projecting themselves as being supportive of Kemi Badenoch.
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B
Well, I think probably tactically, I don't have to be supportive of Kami Bending. I'm not a Tory mp, and I think she's gone too far right wing and she's often echoing reforms talking points in a way that's daft. But they have an issue, I suppose, which is that they are trying. Many of them are people who are still members of the Conservative party. They're Conservative MPs. They feel that there was a time when, when the Tories were more center right under David Cameron or Theresa May. And so, yes, they're hoping to rebuild the Conservative Party. I suspect, though, if Cami Badenoch doesn't listen, that we're talking more about a new constellation in British politics.
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A
Okay, Rory, last one before we go to the break. Millie in London. Can rhetoric and the art of communication genuinely change the course of history? Looking back, what are the best and worst examples of public speaking you've ever seen that actually shaped events? Well, Carney's might be.
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B
I think that was a really good example. I think that's a good one. I mean, we talked about in the last thing, but you make a really good case that it could be something that actually goes down in history.
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A
Could do, yeah.
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B
I mean, look, we talk a lot about Churchill, but part of the point is the substance and the moral view. It's not just the language. It's true, you know, Churchill had an extraordinary way with words. But when you look at Carney's speech, it's not necessarily that every sentence is a kind of literary masterpiece.
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A
It's an argument.
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B
It's an argument. And that was true for Churchill. Like him or hate him, he developed a view from the early 1930s onwards that appeasement was catastrophic and that if you went on appeasing, you'd get weaker and weaker and weaker. What's wonderful about great oratory is you get the big idea because governments can always do the small ideas, but generally the small ideas are defending the status quo, inevitably, because you've got used to defending status quo. So if you look at. I was just rereading on appeasement in the 30s, amazing book by Tim Bouverie called the Appeases. And what's so striking is that every individual decision, you can understand why they made it. Why did you give Italy Abyssinia? Well, because you didn't want to drive Italy into the arms of Germany.
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A
Why did you give Russia the Donbas?
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B
Exactly. Why did you give Russia? Why did you give Germany the Rhineland? Well, it was very popular in Germany, and the French didn't really want to defend it. And Hitler said if he gets the Rhineland, he'll sign up to a new non aggression pact history. But Churchill could see the big picture. And I think Carney can see the big picture. And that's true. Your hero Lincoln or Mandela. I mean, essentially their great speeches are about stepping back and seeing the big picture.
- [24:31]
A
And they're often short. By the way, a very good speech I saw recently, which somebody sent to me in Australia, was Anthony Albanese on the national day of morning. Now, he got a lot of stick for his seemingly slightly handed handling of the bondi massacre. But the speech that he made last week on the national day of morning was really, really impressive. Quite short, eight, nine minutes.
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B
Gordon Brown on Scottish independence, the last ever. Evan, that was a great intervention.
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A
Absolutely, yeah. Neil Kinnick. I think Neil Kinnick made two or three speeches that were definitely part of Labour history and therefore part.
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B
And sometimes it's even a phrase, isn't it? I mean, the famous one is tough on crime, tough on the course of crime, but. Which is your Blair comment. But it's interesting how a phrase can encapsulate a whole policy narrative 100%.
- [25:17]
A
Well, I think Baccarney's phrase was this is a rupture, not a transition. And then it was what, what flowed from that. And by the way, people haven't listened to Neil Kinnicon leading. He's got great oratory even in interview. Isn't he extraordinary? Rather than. It's not just about speech.
- [25:34]
B
And he's so lovely to listen to. So lovely to listen to. I mean, he's. I was reminded about, you know, return to our centrist thing, how much more left wing he is than someone like me. I was also astonished by the number of rebellions. I mean, what I couldn't believe is having rebelled 70 times. He said that he could have rebelled much more, but actually the whips were so terrified of his rebellions, they kept sending him home. He would have been well above Corbyn in terms of number of rebellions.
- [25:56]
A
And he became the leader. Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's take a break. Roy. We've talked about Minnesota, we've talked about the Tories, we've talked about rhetoric. I should warn anybody with particularly got young children listening in the back of the car, possibly that the second half of the program is a bit different, but it's also quite disturbing. We're going to be talking about child sex abuse online. This is something Rory and I discussed with some leading campaigners on this in Davos, and we've interviewed them. The second half. This episode is brought to you by Octa.
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Based on what? Based on data.
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B
It already knows data it picks up from your heart. So it picks up what your heart rate is. It can pick up other stuff, actually, there's other settings where you can get into blood pressure, you can get into heart rate variability. It's very good at picking up what activity you're doing. So I was doing cross country skiing. It could pick up from that for the movement, I think, for my hands. And I think it's the beginning of this amazing revolution in wearables, which would allow you, if you were interested, to know how far to push yourself. But if you really are interested in sports activity data, I've just bought one for Shoshana for Christmas, because for somebody who's obsessed with fitness, I think you'd find it pretty useful.
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B
Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question time with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. So Scarlet from Sydney, it was good to hear you mention the International Justice Mission last week and their important work. Please could you discuss in more depth the extremely disturbing but hugely important politics of child sexual exploitation, including tech facilitated child abuse. And Alison, just before we go into this, this is something which was very dominant even when I was in government. I remember even when Theresa May was Home secretary. So we're now back at the David Cameron days. From 2010 to 2015, more and more focus was being put by the police on cybercrime, more and more on images. There were more and more prosecutions in fact, so much so that in the U.S. i think if you look at what's happened to the FBI under Kash Patel, they've actually taken the FBI more off this kind of stuff because they felt it was too much emphasis on it. But what I think I caught the edge off in Davos, but you particularly caught the edge is that it isn't that we've been doing too much of it. We've barely scratched the surface. The problem is getting worse and worse and worse and it's more and more extreme. So this is something you've looked into much more depth than me. And I'm going to hand over to you on this.
- [31:10]
A
Well, I'm going to hand over to two people called Gary Haugen and Molly Hodson who work for the International Justice Mission. That's an organization that exists to campaign against violence against the poor. And I had a couple of meetings with them in Davos and I was genuinely shocked by the scale of this. So it's really sensitive issue. If you've got children listening, you might actually want to leave it here for now. But I do think this is an incredibly important issue. You can listen to two people who have studied it inside out, who've investigated it, who are working with the police to deal with it. But they're looking the reason why this is such a political issue. They're looking to a government in the world like Australia is doing with social media and kids, to take the lead on this and try to get the Law changed in one country and another and try to get the tech on oligarchs to do things that can be done to stop this.
- [32:11]
B
Here's the interview.
- [32:14]
A
Gary. Maybe you start just by telling us what the issue is and the scale of it and why this has become such an important campaign for igm.
- [32:26]
E
Well, you'll probably remember years ago stories of pedophiles from the UK or the US or France or those countries you're naming who would go travel overseas and especially to Southeast Asia, and they would go purchase the ability to sexually assault children. And it was what we called child sex trafficking. There were traffickers who would assemble these kids in brothels or whatever and the pedophiles would travel to go sexually assault and abuse them. And there's been a lot of progress in addressing that. What's happened now is that the pedophiles are not traveling to go do that. They are now directing the sexual abuse of these children online. So they're in front of a screen and a child in Philippines or another place is put in front of a webcam and is being sexually abused for the entertainment of that pedophile. It is now a massive business where hundreds of thousands of children are being sexually abused in front of a webcam for a paying customer somewhere around the world.
- [33:37]
A
Hundreds of thousands, Hundreds of thousands.
- [33:39]
E
To give you a sense of this, because we, we had been working in the Philippines International Justice Mission for years on the sex trafficking of kids, the traditional kind that I was describing. Then we started, as we developed relationships with law enforcement, realized they were getting referral, thousands every month from law enforcement around the world, saying, hey, there's evidence that there's a pedophile who's been doing live stream sexual abuse. And you should know about it because the people are abusing the Filipino kids and there's an abuser there who is doing it in front of a webcam for someone who will pay for it. And they were getting thousands of these referrals. And so they came to IJM because we've been working with them. I said, hey, can you help us do this, help us address it? And so we've done more than a thousand raids to try to work with the authorities to get them out. But then we realized we're just being overwhelmed because we did a prevalence study with the Nottingham University Rights Lab and it proved that there are about 500,000 Filipino children who were sexually abused in front of a webcam in one one year, the year 2022. So that gives you just in one country, how Many hundreds of thousands of kids were sexually abused online for paying customers around the world.
- [35:02]
A
Molly, you were trying to get the kind of message out that this is going on, that the tech companies could do more, that the governments could do more. Is it harder to do that because of the nature of what we're talking about? It's interesting when we were just over the road and I was telling a couple of people what we're doing, and I explained what you were doing and the two women, and they literally recoiled and said, no, no, I don't want to hear. Do you find that an impediment to what you are trying to do?
- [35:27]
F
Yeah, I mean, I find this is a difficult subject to bring up at dinner parties or whatever. When people ask me what I do and I tell them, they're shocked. And I think one of the interesting things is they're shocked because they've never heard of it. This isn't even registered in their mind that this could be a possibility.
- [35:42]
A
Even when in one country you've had half a million kids in one year.
- [35:45]
F
But it's hidden is pretty much invisible as an issue. And one of the reasons it's invisible is because, as you say, it's disgusting. People don't want to hear about it. So, you know, I'm grateful to you for giving us this opportunity to talk about it, because even the media don't even want to go somewhere quite as dark as this. But the reality is that this is a massive global threat to children all around the world. And we're not just talking the Philippines, we're talking in the uk and that's why it's so critical that people pay attention, because these children are at risk right now of. And I think one of the things that really struck me when I first heard about this was in the studies that IJM have done in the operations we've worked with police on. 40% of the children are under 12. That is disgusting.
- [36:27]
A
Let's take a situation in the Philippines where this is happening and there's the child. Who in the Philippines is making money? Who in the uk, France, Germany, US wherever is making money, and who's making money between them? How is that all happening in the Philippines?
- [36:47]
E
What you'll see is there's just all kinds of people who have access to a child that's vulnerable.
- [36:53]
A
Could be a relative.
- [36:54]
E
It could be a relative. It frequently, sadly, is because they have access and trust of a child, but they're living in pretty poor circumstances and somebody offers and they hear about, oh, we could make A few hundred dollars, which is more than they might make in many, many months of work by just taking that young relative of ours.
- [37:14]
A
And.
- [37:16]
E
Forcing them into sexual acts with their siblings. Sometimes we've had evidence of this being done actually with animals and just the most horrible things you could possibly imagine. They have access to a vulnerable child. They then connect with this network to be able to broadcast that.
- [37:33]
A
And it's not the dog whip.
- [37:36]
F
No.
- [37:36]
E
And that's what's fascinating. You think this was all really impossible to find, but in fact, it's using all the regular FaceTime platforms, Meta's platforms, all the standard platforms of video that you would think of. That's why it can be done at this scale where you have half a million children being abused.
- [37:57]
A
Molly, which are the biggest markets in terms of ordering these bespoke scenes around the world, which are the biggest offenders, as it were?
- [38:09]
F
Well, the US is the largest global market for this kind of abuse, lifestyle abuse or proportion. Numbers, numbers. And upsettingly for us, the UK is third. And that makes me feel a bit sick personally.
- [38:22]
A
So this is somebody who is maybe at home on a laptop with a wife.
- [38:30]
F
Yeah. With families, kids having their dinner.
- [38:33]
E
And you might imagine too, the way this exploded during COVID all kinds of people had way too much time on their couch. And if they are inclined to these things. We saw a tremendous escalation of this when people were in their homes. And just as you said, there's. It's a man generally, and yeah, things are going on normally in their family, but he's in his room somewhere and he's in his, you know, fourth hour of entertaining himself. And in this weirdness, he's got connected to a network that will facilitate sexual abuse with child, which he then directs. Do this, do that, do more of.
- [39:07]
A
This in real time.
- [39:08]
E
In real time. And then there's an addictive thrill to it. And so then they want to do it again and do it again. And it's just so frictionless in terms of the payment system, in term of terms of zero accountability in the moment for these massive platforms. One thing is very exciting is that I see the UK stepping up to leadership on this. Things are moving very slowly in the US to sort of move any kind of legislation that would change things. But I'm seeing in the UK that there's an acceleration of, of. Of leadership to actually say, no, we can do some things about this and let's go for it.
- [39:48]
A
Do you agree with that one? Because, I mean, the. This has been going on for years, as you say 2022, half a million kids in the Philippines. Are you saying that because the UK did that thing with Grok and Musk and the bikini fication, the nudification of girls and women, it strikes me the fact that I follow politics very, very closely. I follow the media quite closely. I didn't know any of this until I met you the other day.
- [40:14]
E
Yeah, I'm not saying that we're blitzing ahead to where we should be in awareness and getting work done.
- [40:20]
A
So what's the political drive that you're saying about that?
- [40:22]
F
Yeah, so we're running a campaign at the moment, tech that protects, which is all about trying to get. That protects. We want tech that protects children. Basically, the reason this happens, right, is because this livestream abuse in particular is not being detected. So you can imagine that existing videos and images of children that are circulating on the Internet, the police have seen them, they've given them like a hashtag code so they can kind of find them and pull them down. But live streamed abuse is happening in real time, so it's much harder to detect. And as a result it's just not being detected. But now there are AI tools.
- [40:56]
A
Why?
- [40:57]
F
Why is it not being detected?
- [40:59]
A
Given these tech bros are supposed to be so damn clever and somebody, some, another young woman. I was telling you about this, our producer said that, you know, this is crazy because you put a, if you see a picture of a nipple on Instagram, it gets moderated out. Right now you're saying that because it's live, they can't do that sort of thing?
- [41:17]
F
No, I'm actually saying because it's live, it's been historically really difficult to detect it using usual law enforcement kind of detection tools. However, now that AI tools have been developed which could actually detect and disrupt this kind of abuse and you could literally just embed it on your smart device. So we're talking about any camera enabled device with access to the Internet, right? So if you wanted to live stream the abuse of a child right now with your phone, you could, and you could do it on a normal social media platform. Nothing would happen, nothing would stop you.
- [41:46]
A
I could go into what, Telegram?
- [41:49]
F
Yeah, anything.
- [41:51]
A
And how easy is it? I don't want you to tell me how to do it, but how easy is it for me to find the means and the mechanism then to be able to sit in there saying I want a 10 year old boy and a 6 year old girl and I want them to do this?
- [42:03]
E
No, if that's what you're into, you can just go in and make your inquiries online and you'll get connected very, very quickly towards that.
- [42:09]
A
But why is there nothing that's then alerting and why?
- [42:14]
E
I think one of the most powerful actors or dynamics in this is that the platforms are allergic to any indication that they are looking at what you are doing on their platform and doing anything about it. Because they want you, but you want to feel free to be able to just do what you are doing online. And they. Because of these privacy concerns, Right. It's generally done up in the concerns about privacy. But I find that most people, if they realize, okay, here's a little compromise that we might make on being completely free to do whatever you want online versus hundreds of thousands of children being abused, I think most people say, yeah, let's just stop this.
- [42:54]
F
And that's the thing, right? Because if we can have tools on devices and this is possible, so this has already been proven to be possible. There are safety tech companies that have already developed these kinds of tools that could say like you're trying to look at a prepubescent child that's engaged in a sexual act, that's illegal content. No one has a right to have that on device. Right. We're actually going to stop you from being able to even create that. Can you imagine the number of children who would be protected if the actual abuse was never able to be created in the first place? And that's what on device protection could enable. That's safety by design. It means that we're like making your device safe so that you can't livestream a sexual act with a child. Right. So that's what we're calling for. That's what we'd really love the UK government to take a lead in. But what we're seeing is, you know, that all of this is possible. Anyone could do it tomorrow. Right. But there needs to be an incentive to actually make this happen. And so we're calling on governments to require device manufacturers and operating systems to use these kinds of tools, develop their own. Doesn't have to be a certain product, but that can do that, has that capability to keep millions of children safe around the world.
- [44:06]
A
Is there a danger that AI is going to make this even worse? Presumably through AI, you could do synthetic child abuse stuff. Is that happening already?
- [44:16]
F
Yeah, it's already happening. And I think just a further point on the previous one is that these new tools, these AI detection tools are privacy preserving. So they don't break encryption, they don't break personal privacy, which has been until now one of the Major concerns. But now that isn't a valid concern because you can have these tools that are compatible with keeping your device private because it just stopped it before it started. Right to your point around AI and fueling abuse? Absolutely. What we're seeing now is we saw something like a 1,300% increase in generative AI child abuse material in one year.
- [44:54]
A
1,300% that this is the moment we're.
- [44:57]
E
In where AI can do yes, all these positive things. And in fact AI can be applied to this, solute this situation by stopping your phone from even being able to record this. Or you could use AI to make then synthetic child abuse images. And so that increases the value of any given child abuse image that you have because not only have you made money off it now, but now you're going to make a synthetic additional characterization and then use that for even further exploitation. So again, this is our moment. Either AI is used to actually protect children or it's being used to further abuse them and people are going to make money off of it. I do think, Alistair, that as people just understand that this is happening, they're going to raise their voice and expect their governments to respond. Well, they saw it.
- [45:52]
A
I mean our government saw it through public opinion with the bikini thing. This is on a scale that is so, so, so much worse. And yet I get this sense from talking to you guys that you've struggled to get governments around the world to see this as an issue. Is that cause they're scared of the tech bros. Is it because they're in league? Some of them are in league with organized crime?
- [46:18]
E
First of all, it's just baseline awareness. Right? Because we're busy, we're seeing all kinds of things and they get focused on oh here's a problem that's just difficult to do, but we're seeing breakthroughs in that. I've never had a conversation with a decent person who they weren't outraged that you way you were and didn't say well what could I do about it? And that's why we're here right now. I just do I have a certain amount of confidence as we continue to get the word out and as government authorities are aware of, oh, there are some very doable fixes to this. And yes, there's tremendous power in the tech companies. There are leaders actually in the sector who don't want their devices and don't want their platforms associated with this. But they need to know that the public cares and that it's expensive for their brand to be associated with It.
- [47:13]
A
And Molly, just. Let's just take the UK and the law, because every country will have their own law, and in some countries, states will have their own laws. And it's very. For this online stuff is really, really complicated. The British guy who's sitting at home making up these scenes and having other people in front of a camera force children to do things that they don't want to do and shouldn't even be thinking of doing. What crime are they committing if they, for example, instruct for a child to be raped? Have we caught up with this in terms of our law?
- [47:47]
F
Do you know, I think that the law is constantly trying to keep up with how fast these crimes are evolving and moving. And so, yeah, one thing we have seen is that there's often a bit of a lag. And so when a man has actually literally asked for a child to be raped for him, sometimes you see really low sentences for that, and that's not okay. But it depends on the court. Sometimes you get a higher sentence for that, and a lot of the time it depends on the judge.
- [48:14]
A
How many people around the world have been convicted and jailed for this stuff?
- [48:20]
F
Well, I think what's actually quite shocking is how few. I mean, there was a piece recently in the New York times talking about US offenders, and they said that something like 0.0001% of crimes of this nature had actually led to a conviction.
- [48:35]
E
And here's the thing. In the Philippines, the Philippine authorities have actually taken tremendous responsibility for this. The President of the Philippines has said, this is a national crisis. We need to address it. And so law enforcement has done a very strong job in trying to bring convictions. IJM has participated in bringing more than 100 convictions in the Philippines for this. However, if it is so easy, if it is so profitable for so many people, law enforcement is going to be overwhelmed. And the answer is the actual devices that are facilitating this, the actual platforms that are facilitating this, this is the only fail safe solution to address it at scale. And so we will keep pursuing the prosecution and the law enforcement efforts, but to ask them to do that out there without the obvious fixes that just decent companies could take to be able to shut this down, that doesn't make sense.
- [49:32]
A
Okay, but when you started the conversation, Gary, and you talked about when pedophiles used to fly off somewhere, I think often they talked about Thailand. Where are the countries where this is most prevalent? Which are the countries that really suffer from this? You mentioned the Philippines several times. Are they. Is that the worst place?
- [49:48]
E
Philippines is ground Zero. Because they have a lot of children in poverty, they use English, a lot of English speakers, and very excellent broadband in the country. And so it's sort of the, a perfect storm there. But there are other places like that. And so the world needs to get equipped for this spreading to more and more places. We've seen this in South Asia, we've seen this in other places in Southeast Asia as well, and then even in Latin America and Africa. So it's wherever there are vulnerable children and lots of vulnerable children. Now the ubiquity of broadband and people's capacity to correspond to each other, you can get over the language barrier now because of AI, be able to do the translation. So just picture in your mind millions upon millions of vulnerable children in an endless market of those who want to purchase this kind of sick thing. And the other thing about it is that it's not that there's a ton of people who have an appetite for this, but they bring so much money to the table that they create a disproportionately massive market.
- [50:53]
A
There's a big market. If you talk about half a million kids in the Philippines.
- [50:57]
F
Well, I mean there's. It is actually kind of shocking that we've seen recent evidence that said that 1 in 13 US men had either live streamed sexually with an under 18 or said that they would, which, I mean, that's sobering, isn't it?
- [51:14]
A
Yeah. Then again, Gary, I don't want to get too political about your country, but if you've got the current president with his record in relation to attitudes to girls and women, and you've had the old Epstein thing and what have you, maybe that is another political challenge that makes your life even more difficult.
- [51:34]
E
Well, there definitely are responsible leaders in the us, in the Congress and even in the administration who want to address these things. But I would just say it's moving slowly and there's going to be no let up in the United States because we are the number one offender around the world buying this. And so it makes sense that we would need to continue that fight. But what's so interesting is how it can be sped up in the United States when other countries see, look, this can be done, it's politically quite doable. And so we've seen Australia moving on a number of these child protection issues and others follow. Others follow. And so this is, I think, an opportunity for the UK to lead in the space.
- [52:16]
F
And like, one thing I think is if you could easily put on a device, a tool that would prevent you from being able to upload a child being sexually violated who's prepubescent. Why would you not do that?
- [52:31]
E
That's who you should have on the podcast after that is the people who don't want to do that, who want to produce a device and they don't want to put something on there that would stop hundreds of thousands of children from being sexually abused.
- [52:45]
A
I guess my final thought on this, a police officer in the Philippines finds that a child has been abused in the way that we've been talking about. What happens then that leads to a British police force being able to find out who has ordered that abuse. Is that an easy process or not?
- [53:07]
E
Well, when there's good coordination, they can share intelligence about that and they can show, share the digital trace back to the one who has purchased it.
- [53:16]
A
Another. They can do that.
- [53:17]
E
They can. And one of the things that's also important is the financial transaction is so seamless on the, on the web now that it, that leaves another way of tracing this. And so, you know, we have all these tremendous capabilities to trace money laundering and so forth. There will also be an opportunity for the financial crimes sector to be able to find, oh, these are suspicious transactions. The AI again, can see that these are transactions that have these indicators that they are suspicious for child abuse transactions. And so there's going to be a lot of very positive work that the financial crime sector can also do.
- [54:02]
F
Can I add on to that? So I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that does happen and it is happening, but it can take a really long time. And so just to put that into context, a survivor who spoke in Parliament very eloquently last year could have heard a pin drop. She, when she was 12 years old. And I'm sure we can all imagine being 12 years old, probably. You were at school. I was at school. You were at school. She's super intelligent. She wanted to go to school. Her parents had a friend who said, I'll take you to school in Manila. So they let her go to school with this guy in Manila. She goes to school. She's delighted. She comes home from school and he says, the way that you're going to pay for this is you're going to do these disgusting acts in front of a webcam for people all around the world to watch live. She's 12 years old. She has no choice. She is in a completely alien city, no way of contacting her parents. So she has to do it. She does this every day after school for five years, years before IJM and police bring her to safety. That's what we want to stop. Imagine if the device that that man in the UK had been using could not receive that and the device that the person in the Philippines was using couldn't create it. She would never have been abused.
- [55:19]
A
Well, listen, good luck with all your work.
- [55:21]
F
Alistair, can I ask you a cheeky question?
- [55:23]
A
Yeah, go on.
- [55:24]
F
If you were trying to make some noise about this and actually get some action, what would you do?
- [55:31]
A
I tried to break down the thing we talked about at the top, the instinctive reaction that people have to say, I don't want to hear this.
- [55:39]
E
Right.
- [55:40]
A
And I think the. The thing I would try to do is to get a brilliant filmmaker with real investigative powers to get right into the guts of this and show how it's done, possibly even along the way, have to do some things that they wouldn't want to do but show how it's done, show how easy it is and then show the real life consequences at their end. And I think the other thing I would do in those countries where you think you can make progress, uk, Australia, I think you're starting in the right places, probably, but then Canada, probably. I don't. You mentioned Asia, whether maybe Japan, South Korea, I don't know. But form an international political alliance, that really gets out. But I think you need a really big media moment. And even though you're on the UK's number one podcast, Gary, it's not necessarily going to be the global media moment you need.
- [56:31]
E
We're counting on it, Alistair. But I think most people can actually think back when they learned of something terrible going on in the world. And I think the odds are very high is because of a movie they saw and even a lot of people learning about sex trafficking. The first thing I was describing, because that's where they saw Liam Neeson and Taken. Right. Or I was the director of the genocide investigation in Rwanda. No one seemed to pay attention to that until Hotel Rwanda, so. And there are some filmmakers and artists who now will just point to the most significant thing they ever did in their life.
- [57:02]
A
Well, that's why I. I mean, I, I was thinking mainly documentary, but you're absolutely right. So that's where I would go. I would try to work on the. You've obviously got to raise the money and that's why you're in places like Davos and all that. I get that. But I think in terms of getting the media and politics more interested, I think it's about. You need a really big breakthrough moment that says this is a massive issue. You people have not been, you've been looking away and you've got to look back in.
- [57:31]
F
Well, if any are listening.
- [57:34]
A
Yeah, if you've got. Either if Steven Spielberg listens or if the great document you must do.
- [57:40]
E
Any self respecting great artist of our era is listening right now.
- [57:45]
A
Gary, thank you for saying so. We should, we should do another, we should do Rwanda another day.
- [57:51]
F
Thanks for having us.
- [57:52]
A
Thank you.
- [57:53]
E
Cheers.
- [57:57]
A
So there you are, Gary Haugen and Molly Hodgson of the International Justice Mission. I hope you found that informative. What do you make of it?
- [58:06]
B
Yeah, I thought it was really important and I'd like to see us maybe occasionally do a little bit more of taking one issue in depth and talking to people. I think it's a good way of doing question time. I mean, of course I'm aware, having said that, we're now going to receive about 10,000 emails from every campaigning organization, NGO in the world. But I did think it was very worthwhile doing and I think it's nice to have an opportunity to do a deep policy dive. So thank you for doing that. It's interesting the different organizations that have been working on this, this is one of the most prominent. But since you mentioned this in the last podcast, I've received emails from many, many different people working from other NGOs and nonprofits working on this. And actually some Americans who've put a great deal of their own money into trying to change the way that tech platforms operate on this. But it's so salient, so central and so much of the heart actually of a lot of politics at the moment, which centers a lot around these issues without doing much on it.
- [59:01]
A
Yeah, I was. One of the most striking things to me talking to Molly was when she said that children everywhere at risk of this, driven in part by poverty. Well, we have a lot of child poverty in the uk. We have child poverty across Europe, we have jobs across the world. So Gary Haugen was making the point that, you know, this is an issue of vulnerable children. And I felt, you know, you and I both follow politics and media very, very closely. I just, I do feel this is something that, because it's so disgusting, people, including politicians, don't really want to address it. And what they're basically saying, and they mentioned Jess Phillips a couple of times when we were speaking offline. They want a politician, they want a government to pick this up and say we are going to make the change necessary.
- [59:46]
B
Yeah. And one of the issues maybe in the background is that because Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk and others have put so much focus on child sex abuse and you've seen it with the Rotherham gangs and have weaponized it so much in terms of anti Muslim sentiment, accusing them of being involved in raping young children. A lot of the mainstream parties hear the word child sex abuse and get worried. Get worried. This is about populism or nationalism, whereas actually what they should be doing is the opposite. They should be saying, we care deeply about this issue. This is the most important issue, and we're going to take the lead on this and we're going to grip this regardless of what race, ethnicity anybody comes from.
- [60:29]
A
Yeah. Anyway, thank you, Gary. Thank you, Molly, for drawing that to our attention. And I hope that some great filmmaker or documentary maker takes up my idea and gets in touch with you. See you soon. See you. Bye. Bye.
- [60:47]
B
This episode was brought to you by Penguin Audiobooks. They're our Audiobook club partners, selecting titles that help us understand modern politics and how power really works.
- [60:58]
A
And one of the titles that we strongly recommend in audio form is the Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman, a previous guest on leading and one of the absolute leading voices on AI.
- [61:12]
B
Yeah, so this is the guy that, with Demis Hassabis, put together this extraordinary British company, which is our great tech success. But in it, Mustafa developed some of the ideas that he discussed with us on the podcast, and, in fact, that we've been getting into a little bit in our AI miniseries. He basically is somebody who is a believer in the power of AI, but also is very serious about how much regulation it needs and how we can't be just naive about just letting it rip. So he's in a very interesting position. He's in an increasingly powerful position at the heart of these companies building it, but he's also gently, subtly and thoughtfully trying to strike the balance between technological innovation, development and safety.
- [61:54]
A
And I think one of the reasons it works really well in audio is that he's got a big argument. And he sets that out at the beginning and just takes you step by step through a series of very complicated issues, but which he explains, I think, really simply. And it doesn't surprise me at all that every time I go through an airport anywhere at the moment, there's his book sitting there. But get it on audio, it's great. You visit penguin.co.uk trip you browse our Audiobook club, we find the link to the coming wave in our bio. Find Penguin Audiobooks now on Spotify.