MSNBC - Transcript

Interview

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Good morning, I'm Mika Brzezinski.

Today, lawmakers are facing new pressure to do something, anything, to protect our children from Internet sex predators after some heart-wrenching testimony from a young victim yesterday, Alicia Kozakiewicz, told a House committee that she was just 13 years old when she was kidnapped by a man she met online. He locked her in a cage in his basement where he tortured her and raped her.

ALICIA KOZAKIEWICZ (sex abuse victim): (From videotape.) The boogeyman is real and he lives on the Web. I know. I met him on the evening of January 1st, 2002. He came for a 13-year-old girl for a sex slave.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Now, 19 years old, that brave young woman said she may never recover from the horror of her experience.

MS. KOZAKIEWICZ: (From videotape.) I cry inside. I mourn for that child that was me; the child that was stolen from me and make no mistake, that child was murdered. I know that some parts of me are there forever. The child I was is still chained in that room, still suffering.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Joining me now, a member of that committee, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clint Van Zandt, MSNBC analyst and former FBI profiler.

Good morning to you both.

MR. VAN ZANDT: Good morning.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Congresswoman, I'll start with you. We saw you in that committee room, obviously, very affected by what that young woman had to say. I guess, first of all, had you ever heard testimony quite like that before?

REP. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I really haven't. Alicia's testimony was just, I mean, moving. It was moving beyond description and because we know that there are hundreds of thousands of potential victims and thousands and thousands of actual victims right now in the United States, it makes it even more urgent that we deal with this really horrible problem where there is --

MS. BRZEZINSKI: I'm wondering, I'm wondering, Congresswoman, what do you think the federal government can do?

REP. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Oh, I can tell you exactly what the federal government can do. We right now know thanks to the work of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces, we know that there are 500,000 individuals trading online child pornographic images, which depict actual sex acts against children on the Internet, and many, many of those, if not most of those, actually engage in the sex acts themselves and we have the ability to increase the funding, massively expand the number of federal investigators because we know where they are and we can give them the resources to go get them.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Clint, let me bring you into this. The FBI is estimating there are 50,000 child predators prowling the Internet, you know, that number could be greater. In terms of advice for parents, I mean, I know that we won't let our daughters be on the computer unless there is an adult around and computers probably shouldn't be in kids' bedrooms.

What do you think about that?

MR. VAN ZANDT: Well, you know, things -- times have changed and computers -- marvelous Internet highway that everybody should have the opportunity to drive, but if you get off in rest stops and other places, you can get in trouble.

As you may know when I was seven years old, I was kidnapped by a child predator and I managed to escape and I think part of my FBI career was spent trying to put these guys behind bars because I knew what had happened to me, but nowadays, it's not the monster that came down the street and grabbed me by the hand, offered to show me new puppies; it's someone who comes in your home. We think our children are safe, but they come right to our child through the Internet.

So we need to know if our children have social networking pages. We need to know who they're having contact with. We need to know what information they're sharing. If they're putting pictures of themselves, if they're sharing personal information, if they've adopted another persona, as a parent and a caregiver, we need to know about that and we need to know who our child's friends, not just down the street, but down the Internet are.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Exactly what they're doing online.

Congresswoman, I mean, in a sense, things have changed in this country. This is, in some ways, letting your children alone on the Internet is like sending them outside alone, perhaps even worse because these people, obviously, mask their identities and use the Internet to create new identities and then reel in your children.

Do you think that members of Congress were hearing this young woman yesterday and got more of a sense as to the scope of this problem?

REP. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I really do. Alicia's testimony made an incredible impact. We have really significant bipartisan support for the Protect Our Children Act of 2007, which I've introduced with Congressman Joe Barton. It would establish a special prosecutor in the Department of Justice, focused directly on going after child sexual predators specifically on the Internet. We need a coordinated effort to go after these predators, and let me just correct you, Mika, it's not 50,000 known predators, it's 500,000, and that's a result of the research of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces, which simply don't have the resources available to go after them, and what's sad that we learned yesterday in the hearing is the Justice Department under the Bush administration has not even asked for increased funding.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. I thought that number was a little low. I agree. It's a huge problem and as a parent myself, I would say --

REP. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Me, too. Got to do something.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Understand the computer. Don't let your kids be the only ones in the house to know how to use the computer and how to navigate it.

Thanks very much to you both.

REP. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Thank you.

MR. VAN ZANDT: Thank you.

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