Matt Foosaner Helps Kids Keep CyberSafe
By Megan Catherwood
For Middleburg Life
Matt Foosaner knows about Mission Critical Communications requirements — the rapid
response set-up of specialized equipment, the deployment of unique satellite and on-the-ground infrastructure, and the highly skilled personnel needed in order to transmit and share information during disasters and high level national security events.
He’s spent two decades designing and delivering systems that ensure reliable, secure communication between field units and command centers when crises and high stakes situations occur.
In his last position at Sprint Nextel, where he worked for 15 years, Foosaner created and directed the Emergency Response Team that enabled law enforcement and emergency service providers to communicate with each other during Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, the D.C. Sniper threat and, all told, 27 presidential declared disasters, seven national special security events, 115 field training exercises plus joint terrorism and drug enforcement task force operations.
Outside of his professional life — and complementing his roles as communication industry executive and father to three — the Middleburg resident pursues another vital mission: facilitating the safe use of technology among children.
Since 2005, Foosaner has been involved with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the nation’s clearinghouse on issues related to missing and sexually exploited children. He serves on the organization’s Law Enforcement Committee and Development Committee for the Board of Directors. “I’ve helped make them aware of new technology threats that lie ahead, as well as how to use those developing technologies to their advantage in their investigations,” he said during a recent interview.
Foosaner wants to similarly inform and empower parents. He has created a “Parenting the Digital Child” cyber safety seminar, presented most recently at The Hill School in Middleburg where he and his wife, Terri, enroll their children.
“These are tough discussions for families to have, dealing with parents’
worst fears,” Foosaner said. “But technology is here to stay, and as parents we need to understand it better and learn how to help our kids navigate it.” The statistics he cites can be frightening. The FBI, for example, reports approximately 750,000 sexual predators using the internet to try to make contact with children “all day, every day,” said Foosaner.
He outlines their cyber grooming methods, including the use of “military-grade” anonymizing software technology and popular online gaming networks. To keep
parents from becoming immobilized, he adapts the “Keep Calm and Carry On” slogan into his presentations and provides ample call-to-action tips and resources. He points parents toward NetSmartz (www. netsmartz.org) and the United Kingdom’s edgier Think U Know (www.thinkuknow. org) as top online tools for developing cyber citizenship.
One central theme Foosaner hopes families will absorb: “there can be no expectation of privacy. Parents need to let kids know that until they are 18, mom and dad share all passwords and have complete access to all online activities.”
Installing parenting software helps track internet usage, emails and texting.
“Research shows that 82 per cent of online sex crimes against minors (both boys and girls) begins with predators using a child’s online social networking sites to gain information,” Foosaner said.
Parents understand the repercussions of techchnology and its misuse,” he added, “but they don’t understand the technology itself very well. Kids, on the other hand, know the technology better than their parents, but are not physiologically developed enough to understand the ramifications.”
Parents, he said, are “morally and legally responsible for ensuring a safe environment and can be found civilly liable for actions of their children under the age of 18 (this includes sexting, cyber bullying and distribution of unlawful images). It’s the same as buying your kids a car, a privilege, not a right, for them to use it.”
Foosaner referenced a current case involving a Colorado high school where 115 kids voluntarily exchanged over 400 explicit photos of themselves. Charges could amount to a Class Three felony, whether a student sent a photo, forwarded a photo, or even received and retained such a picture over time.
Now at Time Warner Cable Business Services, where he is the Director of Vertical Programs, Matt Foosaner has, over the course of his career, received national recognition. Awards have come from as high up as the Directors of the FBI and Secret Service, and he’s been named a “Homeland Security Professional to Watch.”
Foosaner is equally effective at mobilizing communication forces on a micro-level — one household at a time — to ensure a different kind of “homeland” security. Sharing what he knows with parents helps keep kids and families safe in the networked age.