HSDF THE PODCAST

Know2Protect in Action: Strengthening Partnerships and Leveraging Technology to Safeguard Children Online - Part 1

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum

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Welcome to “HSDF THE PODCAST,” a collection of policy discussions on government technology and homeland security brought to you by the Homeland Security and Defense Forum

 This eye-opening conversation unveils the alarming reality of online child exploitation and the innovative response being mounted by the Department of Homeland Security. The panel reveals how cyber tips reporting potential exploitation have skyrocketed by 360% in less than a decade, reaching a staggering 36 million reports in 2023 alone. 

 Featuring:

  • Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations
  • Bobbie Stempfley, Vice President and Business Unit Security Officer, Dell Technologies 

This discussion took place at the HSDF’s Symposium Defending the Frontline on June 26th, 2025. 

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And I am excited that we have the opportunity on this program to showcase a very important campaign at DHS called Know to Protect, and if you don't know about it, as you'll learn, this is really an unprecedented effort to help keep children safe online through meaningful collaboration between the private sector and law enforcement enforcement. And joining us for the discussion today are Kate Kennedy, who is the Know to Protect campaign director within Homeland Security Investigations, and Bobby Stempfli, who is a DHS alumna and currently vice president for the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, and we do have a short video for you to tee up this topic video for you to tee up this topic.

Speaker 2:

Predators are targeting a child. They're most likely going to go after the most accessible child that they have to them, so they'll look at their social media. They'll look at their school. They'll look at the pictures they're posting. They will either befriend this child to become part of their friends lists or become part of their contacts and followers. You've got to get involved. You've got to make sure that things are appropriate and that their friends lists are checked. The people they're playing games with are checked.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

Have these conversations so that it is a safe environment, so that if an individual does contact them online, they know that they can talk about what has happened. The Know to Protect campaign will educate and empower children, teens, parents, trusted adults and policymakers to prevent and combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

Speaker 2:

Because of how vast this problem is. It's not one that we can arrest our way out of. We need your help To learn more.

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go to notaprotectgov Great and welcome to Bobbi and Kate.

Bobbie Stempfley, Vice President and Business Unit Security Officer, Dell Technologies:

Thank you so much, Really appreciate it. And wasn't that video something? It's great? I have to say I love theme protect at the front line because the front line, as much as we love to think about the frontline as technology, the frontline is always people right, and so it's so easy to get caught up in the tech people there that aren't quite at the point where their prefrontal cortex is formed sufficient for them to have the kind of judgment we need for today's world. So I'm really looking forward to the discussion. I hope we'll have a couple of minutes for questions at the end and certainly time at the reception as well. So, Kate, would you start us off amazing video, start us off and give us a little bit about the origin story of Know how to.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

Protect? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone, great to be here. Thank you for this opportunity.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

So we began this work about two and a half years ago at the behest of then Secretary Mayorkas. He had done a tour of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children I'll refer to them as NECMEC and afterwards he was blown away by what he saw, and some other senior political advisors to him said we have a campaign to combat human trafficking. Why aren't we doing something to combat what's happening online to our kids? So I was asked to come up to the department. My background is in strategic communications. I like to say I'm a storyteller, I'm in the storytelling business. So so the work began and it really kicked off with, for the first time since the department's inception in 20 2003, they added a new mission pillar it's sixth mission pillar which is combating crimes of exploitation and supporting victims. So that was really our kickoff to this work. And so myself and a team of a tiny team we called ourselves the Tiger Team came together and we spent a significant amount of time in that discovery listening phase so we could stick the landing on this. And we spent the first three months listening, talking to the top NGOs in this space, domestically and internationally. Giants NECMEC, thorn, we Protect, global Alliance, internet Watch Foundation, canadian Center for Child Protection and they're doing amazing work campaigns. They're developing technology and tools to assist law enforcement as they combat this heinous crime type, and the one thing that they can't do is they can't put handcuffs on these perpetrators, and we knew that that's the difference maker. That's why our unique value add in this space to be working alongside these amazing groups. And it was after a listening session with HSI special agents, victim assistants, forensic interview specialists that we heard repeatedly during that session, over and over again, with a desperation in their voices if the public only knew, if they only knew the scale and scope of the threat, just how quickly a kid can be victimized online, it would go. If we could just get this information out to them, it would go so far in preventing the crime from happening in the first place. And wouldn't that be a great goal to mitigate it. And so we knew right after that call well, they just named the campaign no to Protect. It's not enough, for law enforcement is doing incredible work in this space. There's not enough of them at the state, local and federal level.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

In 2014, necmec runs the Cyber Tip Line, which is the nation's clearinghouse for receiving cyber tips. They broke the $1 million mark. You flash forward to 2023, less than a decade later, it's 36 million. So it's a 360% increase in less than a decade. One cyber tip could lead to multiple victims, multiple perpetrators, so we're looking at a tsunami. This threat is a tsunami and there's just not enough of us to investigate and arrest our way out of it. And when there's a cyber tip, there's already a victim.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

And so what if we made an investment in education, prevention and awareness and got out ahead of it? We're on our heels. We're playing defense. We need to make a concerted effort and investment in getting out there proactively and disseminating what our special agents desperately need the public to know. And our forensic interview specialists, our computer forensic analysts, our victim assistance specialists who work this really difficult crime type. And so that's really what led to this work and harnessing the power of HSI in this field. They're the lead investigative arm at the department 2023, they spent 1.2 million agent case hours investigating just child exploitation, second only to narcotics, and our numbers are impressive. But we really, when you look at the number of cyber tips, only made a dent in the crime type.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

So we launched the campaign in April 2024, april 17th exactly. I don't have a tattoo, but if I was to get one, it would be April 17th 2024. Best day of my life. We launched the campaign in Times Square. This is a global epidemic. The UK Telegraph did a report last year. Over 300 million kids will be victimized, experience online child exploitation and abuse. One in eight kids globally will receive, you know, contact, inappropriate images, conversations, unsolicited, and so this is a global epidemic.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

So we decided to launch in what is arguably the capital of the world, new York City, and so we launched on the NASDAQ billboard and then, just through tremendous partnerships, we did a takeover of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor in partnership with Roblox. New York Stock Exchange then kindly donated to us the iconic ABC super sign in Times Square. No to protect. Advertisements ran consistently for a month on that iconic billboard and just story after story of incredible partnerships that have uplifted this campaign and put us where we're at today, which is over 700 million impressions, over 24 signed partners, and we're resigning our partners, which is fantastic, and literally lives are being saved. The bad guys are being caught and put away as a direct result of this campaign, and so that's kind of what drove the concept and why DHS.

Bobbie Stempfley, Vice President and Business Unit Security Officer, Dell Technologies:

Yeah, I love that, and when we talked before, I hadn't appreciated all of the parallelisms that were here. My experience at DHS was in cybersecurity and emergency communications and in one of the QHSRs in 2012, we added cybersecurity to the mission set, and now you've got a sixth one on the mission set, and so just this evolution of recognition of the connection between the physical world and the digital world and what that means to us as humans, to our economy and to our children, is such an important part of all of this. So you mentioned partnerships, right. None of these things happen by the department alone, right? We all know this about the department it doesn't execute any of its missions in isolation. It does it through partnership-related areas. Let's talk a little bit about what kinds of lessons you've learned about partnerships, over putting this together.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

I would say for a campaign, especially a government campaign, they mean everything Design, launches, campaign and here's your teeny tiny budget to do it. And so if you knew what our paid advertising budget was at launch, you would laugh me out of this room. But we use every dollar wisely, doge, very strategically. We're really proud of that. So our partnerships were huge in expanding our footprint and our reach, and so we signed right out of the gate Google, meta, roblox, snap, lamar Advertising, the NFL, the NHL, major League Baseball, major League Soccer, all US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, national Police, athletic League, other youth their connectivity to their fan base or to their customers or to their end users, really made it was the difference maker. We were able to secure over $1.5 million in donated advertising, which has just been huge.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

Yeah, and just a quick little anecdotal story on how important that was. With the Google donation they helped us with. That's our 60 second PSA we have. We launched with the 90 second PSA. We need a little more time to tell the story and so Google helped us with YouTube ads. So we ran that 90 second PSA as a YouTube ad. You know, when you're on YouTube and an ad pops up and you can skip it in five seconds. 50% of YouTube visitors choose that skip button in the first five seconds, and ours was almost the inverse 40% of people chose to watch it all the way through, which 90 seconds is an eternity.

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Yeah, exactly when you're on YouTube and you want to get back to your show on.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

YouTube, so it was just tremendous. We reached 1 million views in one month. Because of that strategic ad buy that we didn't have the money to do, but because of the kindness and graciousness of Google to join us with this campaign, it was a difference maker. Snap is also has been a huge force multiplier for us reaching that critical targeted 13 to 17 age group. We just did a really neat ad campaign in May using SNAP ad credits and the team. We do a monthly metrics report and I was just astounded by these numbers. In May alone, 20,000 teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17 went to notoprotectgov. We have a kids and teens page where we speak directly to kids, teenagers, age-relevant terminology resources specifically for them. So over 20,000 of them visited that page and they spent 10 minutes.

Bobbie Stempfley, Vice President and Business Unit Security Officer, Dell Technologies:

Which I said you mean a minute To get them there in the first place. It's not like the platform Snap gets you to them and then getting them to the content.

Kate Kennedy, DHS Know2Protect Campaign Director, Homeland Security Investigations:

They spent 10 minutes on that page and there were over 300 clicks. We prominently promote how to report this is happening to you or a friend. We link directly to the CyberTip line. There were over 300 clicks just from that group as a result of the Snap ad credits, so it's really been the difference maker.