You want the right to an abortion, the right to die, anything that is good and true and beautiful is in there. Kutcher is the cofounder of an Organization Called thorn defenders of children. He testified before the Senate Foreign relations committee. Ashton it is an honor to be here. As a young man brought up in the Public School system. I pledged my allegiance to that flag every single day, and the honor, maybe one of the greatest honors of my life today, is to be here and leverage the work s that i have done as testimony that may in some way benefit this nation that i love. I would like to start by saying thank you to chairman corker for your leadership in this endeavor and to the senator. Your leadership has been extraordinary. I would like to say thank you to the rest of the committee that has supported this effort. This is a bipartisan effort, and in a country that is riddled with bipartisan separation on so many things, slavery seems to come up as one of these issues. Hat we can all agree upon i applaud you for your agreement, and i believe in you in your leadership and your ability to take us out of it. I am here today to defend the right to pursue happiness. It is a simple notion. The right to pursue happiness is bestowed upon all of us by our constitution. Every citizen of this country has the right to pursue it, and i believe that it is incumbent upon us as citizens of this nation, as americans, to bestow that right upon others, upon each other, and upon the rest of the world, but the right to happiness for so many is stripped away. Isis raped, it is abused, it taken by force, fraud, or coercion. It is sold for the momentary happiness of another. This is about the time when i Start Talking about politics that the internet trolls tell me to stick to my day job, so i would like to talk about my day job. My day job is as the chairman and cofounder of thorn. We build software to fight Human Trafficking and the sexual a Sexual Exploitation of children. That is our core mission. My other day job is that of a father of two. A twomonthold and a twoyearold. It is part of the job i take seriously. I believe it is my effort to ensure a society and government that defends it as well. As part of my antitrafficking work, i have met victims in russia. I have met victims in india. I have met victims that have been trafficked from mexico, new york, new jersey, and all across our country. I have been on fbi raids where i have seen things that no person should ever see. That defends it as well. I have seen video content of a child that is the same age as mine being raped by an american man that was a sex tourist, a sex tourist. This child was so conditioned by her environment she thought she play. Gaging in i have been on the other end of a phone call from my team asking for my help because we have received a call from the department of Homeland Security telling us a sevenyearold girl was being sexually abused and that content was being spread around the dark web, and she had been abused and they watched her for 3 years and could not find the perpetrator. Asking us for help. We were the last line of defense. And his organization was the last line of defense. That is my day job, and im sticking to it. I would like to tell you a story about a 16yearold girl in oakland. We will call her amy. Amy met a man online, started talking to him, and a short while later, they met in person. Within hours, amy was abused, raped, and forced into trafficking. She was sold for sex. This is not an isolated incident. There is not much that is unusual about it. The only unusual thing is that amy was found and returned to her family within three days using the software that we created, a tool called spotlight. In an effort to protect its capacity over time, i will not give much detail about what it does, but it is a tool that can be used by Law Enforcement to prioritize their caseload. It is a neural net. It gets smarter over time, better, more efficient as people use it. And it is working. In six months, with 25 of our users reporting, we have identified over 6000 trafficking victims, 2000 of which are minors. This tool is in the hands of 4000 Law Enforcement officials and 900 agencies, and we are reducing the investigation time by 60 . This tool is effective. Its efficient. Its simple. Its nimble. Its better. Its smarter. There is often a misconception about technology that in some way it is the generator of some evil, that it is creating job displacement, and it enables acts. Ce and malice as an entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist in the Technology Field i see technology is simply , a tool without will. The will is the user of that technology, and i think it is distinctive. An airplane is a piece of technology. Under the right hands, it is used for mass global transit. Under the wrong hands, it can be flown into buildings. Technology can be used to enable slavery, but it can also be used to disable slavery. That is what we are doing. I had a call from the department of Homeland Security about this girl who was being trafficked on the dark web. It is interesting to note that the dark web was created in the mid1990s. Tor, a tool with positive intention for sharing Intelligence Communications anonymously. It has also been used to help people who are being disenfranchised by their governments in political dissent within oppressive regimes. On the other side, it is used for trafficking, for drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and Human Trafficking. It is also the warehouse for some of the most offensive child abuse images in the world. When the department of Homeland Security calls us and asks for our help and if we had a tool, i had to say no. It devastated me. It haunted me. For the next 3 months, i had to go to sleep every night and think about that little girl that was still being abused. The fact that if i do the right if i built the right thing, we could save her. So that is what we did, and now, when i get that phone call, and greg, wherever you are at, the answer will be yes. We have taken these investigation times of dark web material from 3 years to what we believe can be three weeks. The tool iscalled solis. I will not go into much detail about the tool, but it is being used by 40 agencies across the world today in beta, and we believe it will yield extraordinary results. Just like spotlight it gets , smarter and more efficient and more Cost Effective over time. So where do we go for from here . We need money. We need financing in order to build these tools. Technology is expensive to build, but the beauty of technology is once you build the warehouse, it gets more efficient and more costeffective over time. I might be able to present to you a Government Initiative where next year, i come back and ask for less. That seems extraordinary. The technology we are building is efficient. It works. It is nimble, because traffickers change their modus andi, and we can change hours as well. Change ours as well. It is enduring. And it only gets smarter with time. We are collecting data. We understand that if we are delivering value, we can increase our efforts in that area. If we are not delivering value, we shut it down. And it is a quantifiable solution. One of my mentors told me dont go after this issue if you cant come up with a quantifiable solution. We can quantify it and we can make the work youre doing in the initiatives you put forward accountable. My second recommendation, is to continue to foster these private Public Partnerships. Spotlight was only enabled by the mccain institution, and the full support of cindy mccain, and a man that i find to not only be a war hero, but a hero to this issue, john mccain. It was not just created by them. There is extraordinary support from the private sector. The Company Digital reasoning out of tennessee stepped up to the plate and offersed us pro bono work. We had the support of companies that often times war with each other, google to microsoft to some of ourk, and other technology initiatives, including many other private charities. It is vital to our success. These private Public Partnerships are the key. The third thing i would like to highlight is the pipeline. You know, we sit at the intersection of discovery of these victims, but the pipeline in, and the pipeline out are just as vital and just as important in addressing, and addressing them are just as important. I would like to highlight one thing in particular. The foster care system. There are 500,000 kids in foster care today. I was astonished to find out that 70 of the inmates in the prison across the country have touched the foster care system. 80 of the people on death row were at some point in time exposed to the foster care system. 50 of the kids will not graduate high school. 95 of them will not get a college degree. The most staggering statistic i found was foster care children are 4 times more likely to be exposed to sexual abuse. That is a breeding ground for trafficking. I promise you, that is a breeding ground for trafficking. The reason i looked at foster care is it is a microcosm, a sample set that we have pretty extraordinary data around today , even though we cannot seem to fix it. A microcosm for what happens when displacement happens abroad, the unintended consequences of our actions or inactions in the rest of the world. When people are left out, when they are neglected, when they are not supported, and they are not given the love that they need to grow, it becomes an incubator for trafficking. This refugee crisis, if we want to be serious about ending slavery, we cannot ignore it. We cannot ignore our support for this issue in that space, because otherwise we are going to deal with it for years to come. The outbound pipeline. Theres just not enough beds. The bottom line is, once someone is exposed to this level of abuse, it is a Mental Health issue. There is not enough beds, theres not enough support. We have to have the resources on the other side, otherwise the recidivism rates are through the roof. It is astonishing, because what maslow hierarchy of needs are not being met, people, the only source of love they have in their life, that is what they go for. We have to address the pipeline out, and we have to create support systems on the other end. It is not an entitlement. It is a demand to end slavery. My fourth and final recommendationis the bifurcation of sex trafficking and labor trafficking. They are both aberrations, both awful, both slavery, and both punitive, in fact. But the solution sets are highly differentiated. When you look at sex trafficking, a victim is most often present at the incident of commerce. And this provides an opportunity for drastic intervention. Whereas in labor trafficking, the victims are being hidden by the manufacturers and the merchandisers, and it requires an entirely different set of legislation, and proactivity, and enforcement in order to shut it down. There is a lot of rhetoric going on in the world right now about job creation in the United States. If we want to create jobs in the United States, i would ask you to consider eliminating slavery from the pipelines of corporations. Because a lot of that slavery is happening abroad, and if we ask those corporations under extreme pressure that if you do not change it, you are going to be penalized, and if you dont clean up that pipeline, it is going to mean trouble. They are forced to two decisions. They can either clean up the pipeline abroad, or they can move the jobs to the United States of america where they can be regulated and supported. Bringing jobs to america can be the consequence of doing the right thing, or it can be the consequence of doing the wrong thing. But that choice is up to you. It is not lost on me that all of this disruption in our marketplace is going to have economic backlash. That is not lost on me at all. But i ask you, did you believe that Abraham Lincoln had to consider the economic backlash of shutting down the cotton fields in the south when he shut down slavery . Because im sure that wade on that weighed on his mind. Happiness can be given to no man. It must be earned through generosity and through purpose. But the right to pursue it, the right to pursue it is every mans right, and i beg of you that if you give people the right to pursue it, what you may find in return is happiness for yourself. Thank you. Earlier this year, Michael Phelps used his status as the most decorated olympian ever to call for improved antidoping measures in sports. Testifying before the house energy and, sub, commerce subcommittee, he described a system where some athletes are tested repeatedly, and others are never tested. You can watch this entire hearing on our website, www. Cspan. Org. Michael good morning. My name is Michael Phelps. A retired professional swimmer and olympian. I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to appear before you today. A privilege to be here to share my thoughts on the perspective of the issue of clean sport, which is important to so many athletes and to sport in general. I competed internationally for over 15 years and have a tremendous honor to represent the United States in five Olympic Games and six world championships. Without question, many of my proudest moments have been representing my country in international competition. There is no greater feeling than standing on top of the podium, watching the stars and stripes rise as the National Anthem plays. The rio olympics were special to me because it gave me the opportunity to end my career on my terms and do it with my wife, nicole, and son boomer watching. I watched how this affected my teammates and fellow competitors. We all felt frustration. Looking back over my career and knowing how difficult it is to get to the highest levels of sport, i cannot help wonder if the next generation of athletes will be able to do it if there is uncertainty that continues. As a child i found school , difficult. I had adhd, which probably contributed to my restlessness. I will never forget being told by one of my teachers that i would never amount to anything. It was swimming that enabled me to see past those challenges and not be defined by them. My mom for my sisters and me in the pool so we would be water safe. At first, like many children, i was afraid to put my head under the water. By overcoming that fear, i got my first taste of selfconfidence. As it turned out, i was pretty good in the water, and i quickly realized that the harder i work, the quicker i improved. I found a focus and purpose i had never felt before. I would set goals for myself and work like crazy until i accomplished them. Dreams would pop into my head whenever i got into the pool. I would dream about becoming a recordholder, i wanted to be the best. I talked to my coach so we could come up with a plan, not just for what i was doing in the pool, but also how i could better myself away from the pool. I met up my mind to do everything i could to make my dream a reality. In school, i had friends, but it was not that social. I focused on swimming. At times, i was made fun of for what i was doing because it was different. I was in love with challenging myself to become the best athlete that i could be. I felt that every single day was an opportunity for me to do Something Special when i went to the pool. I always felt the kids who worked the hardest got the best results. Thats why i pushed myself as hard as i could. Over a fiveyear period, i trained every single day without a day off. I figured by training on holidays i would be able to get that extra edge. As my hard work and sacrifice began to pay off, my confidence grew. I began to feel that if i could dream something and gave everything i had, anything is possible. The strength of that belief drove me to set goals that others may have thought were unrealistic. That is one amazing thing about competitive sport. It demands you believe in yourself. This is not always easy. There is so many times i could have quit and walked away. Sticking with it requires me to dig deep, especially knowing that after all the work and sacrifice, success might be 100th of a by just 1 second. In those critical moments that you really test your commitment that can ultimately define your career. Youll need to believe that if you push on, you will get the opportunity to measure yourself, your preparation, your desire, your talent, against others who have prepared themselves in the same exact way. Throughout my career, i thought some athletes were cheating, and in some cases, those suspicions were confirmed. Given all the testing we have been through, i had a hard time understanding this. In addition to the test and competitions, i had to notify them as to where i was every day, so they would be able to conduct random testing out of competition. This whole process takes a toll, but it is absolutely worth it to keep the sport clean and fair. I cannot describe how frustrating it is to the other athletes breakthrough performance barriers in unrealistic time frames knowing what i had to do to go through that. I watch how this affected my teammates as well. Even the suspicion of doping is for athletes. To believe in yourself through sport, you need to be able to believe in the system that safeguards clean sport and fair play. All athletes must be held to the same standards, which need to be implemented and enforced with consistency and independence. For years now i worked closely , with kids, most of which are not swimmers, but are eager to sit down and talk with me and , always full of questions. It is when i talk about being a kid like them, and how this all started with a dream, you see their eyes like an up. Their eyes light up. They talk about how i did it and tell them they can do it too, and tell them if they do the work, they can succeed. The power to believe in yourself and inspire others sport depends upon fair play. Now that im retired, im frequently asked if i think anyone will ever win more medals than me in my lifetime. My answer to that question is i hope so. I would like