← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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Welcome to the wash floor. I'm Sarah Adams. A few weeks ago, there is a situation in the port of San Diego where federal agents went onto a cruise ship. They escorted crew members off of it. Handcuffs with thousands of nearby passengers watching. Because it was the time all these ships were disembarking. And it led to first a lot of misinformation and then a lot of questions and then poof, it disappeared from the news. And a lot of people want to know what exactly happened because first the belief was this was an immigration enforcement, which really doesn't make sense because cruise ships really do kind of dot their I's and cross their T's when it comes to the employees on board the ship. But then we found out, oh no, this was actually an investigation into child sexual abuse material that these crew members were sharing who were actually working on these ships. So today we're actually going to go through what exactly happened. It became at least at the front of the news cycle quickly because one of the ships that were boarded belonged to the Disney. But we're going to explain that it's actually a lot bigger than just that ship. And there's a much broader story that needs to be understood here. This operation was coined operational tidal wave and it didn't focus solely on Disney. Federal authorities conducted operations across eight different ships in the port. And again, it was for the CESAM material. And that detail matters when we're talking about this modern day, like child abuse, especially the exploitation in these materials. It's increasingly global. It relies on a lot of sophistication in the technology used and then it's often hidden in environments where people would least suspect it. And that was what was so shocking that it was on these ships. Families go on these for family vacations. When you have the Disney brand involved, it gets a lot of attention. So what exactly happened? According to Federal authorities, between April 23 and April 27, federal agents conducted a series of enforcement actions in the Port of San Diego as the ships arrived. So you had a mix of different law enforcement agencies which kind of led to the public confusion. You had us Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security, and then other federal agents. So authorities boarded the vessels, and then this was occurring while passengers were still disembarking. So as you can imagine, some of these detentions became very visible and very public, and it led travelers to fill in the gaps, make assumptions about what was occurring. In total, Federal agents arrested 20, 28 cruise ship employees across these eight different vessels. And among the ships identified were the Disney Magic Ship, you know, part of the Disney Cruise Line. And then it sounds like there were vessels associated with Holland America, including the Zadam. So this was kind of a large, broad operation. It wasn't just focused on one vessel and one company. So federal authorities said that 27 of the 28 detained individuals were connected to the receipt, the possession, the transportation, the distribution, or the viewing of CESA material. Now, based on all the available reporting, we've been able to look at, one thing we can state right now is there is no evidence that any of this material was actually, like, recorded or made on these eight cruise ships. So I know that was a big public fear, right? Were they doing this to children on the ships? Was there something maybe done in some of the public areas, like the pool, et cetera? So all of this appears to be online material, online content, and there are no charges that would match that type of activity occurring on the ship. So at least a little bit of good news, even though you don't want to be around any of these bad actors, of course, when you're on a family trip. So when we talk about these detained individuals, they were all foreign nationals, right? This is why Border Patrol was there. So we had 26 from the Philippines, one from Portugal, and one from Indonesia. And Disney did put in a comment that they cooperated fully with law enforcement in this investigation, then of course, terminated any employees involved and under suspicion. There is a situation, too, where one passenger said they were speaking with their head waiter less than an hour before this occurred, and then they watched them walked away in handcuffs. Right. So, again, a very kind of jarring situation for the passengers who saw this go down. Let me take a second and talk about something a lot of people put off. And trust me, I understand why. It's life insurance. For me, this hits close to home. I've lost a number of friends overseas, and what stays with me after the fact is what their families have to go through. 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We forget sometimes, especially when we're looking at these digital offenses, that they can happen even in the most highly structured of corporate environments. Right? We're talking about Disney, Disney employees, a Disney vessel. And this is one of the problems when people are doing something online. It kind of blurs this line and it's really complicated to enforce, right? Because you have to think about like detention. There's a lot of foreign nationals on the ship. I just told you, they are from three different countries. There's immigration actions, right? Cause it's not like they're gonna probably come off most of them and stay and do trial in the United States. And then there's this, how are we gonna do this Criminal conviction, right? Is it going to be on US soil or are we going to give the evidence to a foreign government and ask them to charge, you know, their own nationals. So when we talk about those three buckets, they're obviously not all the same thing. So at least in this case, it seems like law enforcement used the best tool they had at the time. So in some cases they just did simple visa revoking and then they put the individual in immigration related status. Okay, so now you don't have immigration approvals. Right. Because your status has been revoked. And so now you're in this situation where it's going to likely lead to some sort of deportation. In other cases, they worked with the countries of origin and decided to immediately kind of deport them before announcing any criminal convictions. So we're kind of then waiting to see what different legal case they're putting together with each government. There is more going on behind the scenes than we know. But we're expecting then criminal charges in a number of these countries, including the Philippines. This is a complicated investigation. Precision matters here. And that's why you get all this misinformation that they took all these poor foreign workers and they, you know, put him in this immigration hole.
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These aren't even American ships. They're sailing on international waters and they are ships that are flagged out of the Bahamas. And the ICE gestapo still entered the ships and kidnapped employees in front of horrified cruise passengers. The cruelty was always the point of the Trump administration. This is fucking psychotic. Any person who cheers this on, I know that you're a bad person. There are no children who watch any of that go down, who come away from that experience thinking that the American government is a good government.
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No, they're coming up with the best solution possible to get them to where they can charge them. And preferably when we can, we do want to charge them in the country, you know, they're from, because then that country houses them, they feed them. You know, it doesn't become a burden on the US Taxpayer dollar. So this is a broad investigation and we're going to try to talk about pieces of it, but we have digital evidence. This multinational jurisdiction, the immigration authority and, and then these ongoing federal operations. Right. This might not be the only individuals involved in this. We're going to just take a minute and talk about how cruise ships operate because it just shows you how difficult this case can be. So we view these and market these as kind of some luxury environment. But behind the scenes, it's like a foreign labor system. There's complex jurisdiction, dictional frameworks. And then as you can imagine, there's Constant cross border movements as the ship relocates. The crew is multinational and the ship will be flagged under different countries. It's usually not the United States. You know that labor system is kind of under like an international precedence and you're dealing with all of these jurisdictions and the employees stay on these cruise ships for long periods of time and, and they go between different ports and different nations. So it's this highly unique operational environment both for employers and for law enforcement agencies, as you can imagine, trying to do an investigation in this environment. So as you can imagine, this whole investigation was likely done off ship, online through digital forensics. And we saw the end of the operation. That gets forgotten sometimes how much time and effort is put into something like this. Now we saw the endpoint of the operation because there's an interesting thing that happens once these cruise ships come into the US it does change kind of the jurisdiction. Even if they're not under a US flag, there are broad authorities who for federal agents and for customs and border to go on the ships, they can actually even review materials like on your phone, they can do searches. And then of course, as we've seen, they can do detentions. So they put in the work, they finished the investigation, they waited for the right time. And with a cruise ship, you know the exact time it comes in, you know exactly where the crew is housed, you know they have a sign barracks. And it makes for, as you can imagine, a lot easier operation because you don't have to find and locate these individuals, you just handle it when they come into port. And at least in this case, it does sound like the cruise lines did assist in this matter as well. So there was no kind of like pushback or difficulty in doing the operation the right way and the safe way. So just understand kind of this maritime arrival into San Diego did give the authorities more leeway in how they could then affect these detentions and can put in some of the rules where they revoke the visas, et cetera. If they had done that in a foreign port, it would change things. And obviously they weren't going to do it at sea. They waited to the right time to really affect this operation. So how do these modern CSAM investigations actually work? Because a lot of people think this is just isolated to the local level. So seeing something like this in multiple countries and very big organizations really throws people off. But this is actually the reality of how this happens. So when we're talking about this modern csam, you know, the investigations are like transnational digital investigations. They have to use and involve international corporations. They have to use different cyber investigative techniques. They have large scale data analysis. This isn't some quick, oh little find the nugget. When we're go, you have to put together a lot of evidence. And this evidence, as you can imagine, isn't that easy to go through. We're talking about the exploitation of children. Just think of the material in front of these investigators. The one good thing is most of these investigations begin with tips. So it does give them a little bit of a leg up. So how it works is there's a lot of technology companies that have a duty to report when they see CSUN material and when they report that it goes to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children. And then depending on the case or how extreme the content is, then NMIC shifts it and sends it off to the right people. Sometimes that's federal agencies in the U.S. sometimes it's agency international partners. Sometimes, you know, it's different regional law enforcement. You know, it's all depending on the severity of the case. And then investigators get to work and there's multiple ways they do that. So one of the main technologies they rely on right now is called file hashing. So how file hashing works is even if you change a file name or you move it between devices and platforms, they can still follow and track it. So they can go through cloud backups, metadata, encrypted messaging platforms, payment trails, use IP analysis, and they can use this kind of data mining to help identify like the main players in this space. Now one of the key things to understand is these networks are completely decentralized. It's similar to two weeks ago when we walked through how to keep your children safe online. Because again, those are decentralized networks. You can't just say, I'm going to focus on keeping them safe from this network. Because obviously there's actors all over trying to get at them. There's not one place that's dangerous. The entire thing is dangerous. Now another interesting thing about these cases is if you do a traditional investigation into like an organized criminal network, all those players know each other. When we're talking about these online networks, they know of each other. You know, they might have monikers they use, but most of these people, as you can imagine, never met one another. They're doing this and sharing this CISA material in encrypted communications channels, on anonymous forums, using peer to peer exchanges. One of the key things is they don't want their identity to be public, not even within their own community. So this is why international coordination becomes so critical? Because you can have 20 people in this community and they're from 20 different countries. And now you have to identify who they are. Even with the cruise ship, you're zooming in and just looking at one ship. But there's thousands of crew members on some of these larger ships. And then even if we're talking Holland America, let's say a couple of their ships are involved, that ups the numbers even more. So you have to identify the correct person using the correct device. And then of course, accessing, sharing, taking advantage of the CSA material. So what the public saw at this event was men walked away in handcuffs. But they don't think through the digital forensic investigation that occurred behind the scenes. I mean, this spanned multiple vessels, multiple nationalities, and then of course, many different jurisdictions. Because now you're involved with the government of the Philippines, the government in Portugal, the government Indonesia. Now naturally, Disney's involvement in this did bring a lot of public attention. And that reaction was of course, predictable. This is a brand that talks about families, children, entertainment, trust. So when you take a company like Disney and you associate it with C sub, obviously that becomes nationally amplified. But again, you know, accuracy matters. This was not a Disney only investigation and federal authorities made that very clear. They said, we looked at multiple ships, but this still hurts Disney's reputation. Of course, as you can imagine, some of these were their employees. And it does bring up questions people should be asking, especially if you're going on any of these ships. It's what do the background checks look like for crew members? What is actually the crew vetting process? What type of digital oversight is this? Because they're doing this on some sort of wifi or broadband provided to them by the company Disney, or is there any kind of monitoring? What's the international hiring system look like? For example, will these people just rotate into other ships? And then what are the onboard security procedures to keep people safe? So there is this kind of uncomfortable reality here. These digital crimes are extraordinarily difficult for employers to kind of detect proactively, even in an environment like this. When Disney controls where you sleep, where you eat, where you work, like I said, they control the Internet service. We're in this interesting piece where there is a corporate responsibility. But how does Disney do this effectively? We have a problem where just any modern employees faces this because, yes, they weren't filming on the ship, but now because it's come out with their name, it affects the brand. This is a high trust environment. When we're talking about Disney and So there is this corporate responsibility to figure out, hey, how do we prevent this from happening again? How do we keep these type of bad actors from being within our crew, you know, and how do we prevent these problems in the future? Because, of course, this isn't an isolated event. You know, it's really great they did this investigation and got 28 people, but heavens knows how many they missed. So at the center of this story today is, of course, these serious allegations involving CSAM materials. And it's important to remember that behind every one of these digital files, even though we're discussing it kind of black and white, is the actual abuse of a child. Right? I mean, we just have to be honest about this is a horrible thing, right? Someone was harmed and then everybody's sharing off of that harm. It's important when we're talking about these issues to remain factual, measured, and to wait until the details of the investigation comes out. Because I can tell you, the day I heard about this story, the first thing I heard is, oh, the horrible border patrol raided a Disney ship and took off employees and is ruining family vacations. That was literally the first news item I heard about it. And we have to be careful about not being first. The most important thing is to be accurate, to explain to people, to answer their questions, to walk through material in the best way, in the most honest way you can. I mean, clickbait is really killing us. And we want honesty and the truth, especially when we're talking about the exploitation of children. These things need to be done right. Actually, we should be applauding this investigation. And that doesn't even seem to have happened. These investigators did a great job going through what sounds like complicated digital content across multiple countries, across multiple ships. And this is this expanded role these individuals are playing. These aren't simple, fast investigations. And the bad actors are also seeing how they're doing this, and they're going to become more sophisticated, it's going to become more international. And unfortunately, like we saw in this case, it's going to become more embedded in the environments you would never expect. Thanks for listening today.