Writer Interviews
An Interview with Cyber Safety Guy (Dale) on Medium
An engaging and informative writer contributing to Illumination Integrated Publications on Medium
Dear Writers and Readers,
In this post, we share an interview that we conducted with Cyber Safety Guy (Dale), who served 22 years in the Royal Air Force Police. His lovely dog Leffe is part of this engaging story. We hope you will enjoy meeting and exploring the stories of this new writer.
He is relatively a new writer on Medium but not new to writing, considering his informative and engaging stories. He started contributing to Illumination Integrated Publications on Medium.
We hope you will enjoy this engaging interview and follow Dale to benefit from his specialized and valuable content.
Tell us a bit about your background, Dale.
I served 22 years in the Royal Air Force Police, and the last eight years of my career were spent in Cyber security as a Digital Forensics and Incident Response specialist. During that time, I was expected to also investigate criminal and inappropriate web browsing sessions.
Over that period, I analysed in excess of 1 million images with approximately a quarter of those being criminal across all levels of the grading scales.
I had no counseling or therapy support in place and was eventually diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) which resulted in my medical discharge in 2019.
This is why I am now so passionate about educating people on how best to protect children online, and I also write a lot about my experience with C-PTSD and Mental Health in general.
Why did you join Medium?
I used to write my blogs on a self-hosted ghost blog, but it was not reaching many people, and there was a lack of community.
A friend told me about Medium, and I created a profile and have been writing here ever since!
Why did you join ILLUMINATION, and how did you find it so far?
I was intrigued by a few articles I saw that had been posted within Illumination, and once I looked deeper, I could see that there was an actual community within the publication.
Finding a community, I can reach out to was one of my goals in joining Medium, and I am really happy to have found that.
I would like to say thanks to everybody who works so hard to make sure somewhere as this exists.
What are your core values as a writer?
I write from a place that is very seated in my experience and is very emotional for me; it causes me pain to write some of my stories and can be very triggering.
It is for this reason that I write the naked truth about why it is important for parents, teachers, carers, and guardians to do as much as possible to protect children.
I believe it is my responsibility as somebody within the Cybersecurity arena to use my technical knowledge to educate others so that they don’t ignore what they don’t understand and instead are better equipped to deal with those unknowns.
The subject I write about is not seen as sexy by many of the algorithms so I work twice as hard to get my content out there and will always be open to suggestions and also spend time advising on a subject if somebody asks it of me because there is nothing more important to me than protecting children from the horrors that exist in the dark corners of the internet.
What are three books affecting your Life?
I am currently re-reading the Harry Potter books as its a story that relates quite well in a way to what I am trying to do with my writing, Harry is a kid who is constantly in danger, but at times those adults around him don’t seem to realize or are unable to help him.
Don’t feed the monkey mind is a book recommended to me by a psychotherapist during one of our sessions and is based on a CBT approach to handling the cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and worry.
The third book I would say has influenced me a great deal is actually a work-related book, and it is called the Art of Memory Forensics for several reasons, I have a passion for memory forensics as Malware’s job is to hide, and it does this very well, but eventually, it has to run, and it will always run in memory.
Just like humans who commit the evil I have seen, they wear a mask that hides them, but in private, they become the real person to commit their horrors.
Tell us about your hobbies.
I am a keen cyclist as it really helps me with my mental state, and I feel the benefits of that, I also feel the negatives when I miss cycling for even a couple of days.
I paint Warhammer models for the same reason as my cycling, as it allows me to focus on something for a few hours and forget all the terrors that normally torture me.
I also love watching Rugby, Blogging, and spending time with my wife (My Rock) and our French Bulldog, Leffe (My Pebble).
Tell us about your dog and what it means to you.
I was never a pet person growing up and could never understand why people got so upset when they lost a dog. We got Leffe (Named after my favorite Belgian beer) right about the time I was diagnosed with C-PTSD, as we thought he could be a good distraction for me.
Little was I to know how immediate and strong the bond would be. I call my wife ‘My Rock’; therefore, I started to call Leffe ‘My Pebble’He isn’t an official therapy dog, but as far as I am concerned, he is mine.
He will sense if I am being triggered or entering a crisis, and he will just come and sit against me or place a paw on my arm or leg and look at me, this will always anchor me in reality.
He along with my wife, are life savers, and my reason to get up each day just a look at him can make me smile even when I really don’t want to.
Please introduce us to a few of your recent stories.
Sure! Here are some examples.
Please sign the petition! “Publish mandatory curriculum content on online safety for children.” This campaign is one of my biggest focal points at the minute and its success or failure of it will impact me in many different ways for a long time to come.
PTSD — The People That Matter This post is about the real heroes in my life, the people that live around me and deal with my C-PTSD. They see the real me and not the mask I often wear and they are still with me by my side, supporting me.My Top 10 Child Safety Online Tips These are top 10 tips that every person should know to help protect children online.
Online Safety — Communication & How to have ‘The Chat’ One of the toughest chats to have with a kid if you don’t understand technology so here is some guidance on how to handle that conversation and be prepared.
Best parental control apps for Android and iOS Some advice on the array of parental control apps available for both iOS and Android.
Tomorrow will be my 17th wedding anniversary and 19 years since my relationship with Colleen began. When we met, I was a normal (ish)…
How do you connect with your readers?
I try to make the complicated much simpler when it comes to technology, I fully understand that to many people, technology is confusing, and human nature is such that people fear looking silly, so they will avoid that subject.
We live in a world now where kids are much more technically capable than their parents, and this is a worrying trend because kids are not being educated about the dangers that exist in the online world.
When I was growing up, children were fully aware of ‘stranger danger’ because everybody understood that and was comfortable talking about the subject.
In this day and age, stranger, danger still exists, but we have a whole new online stranger danger that a lot of people are not so aware of.
I try to connect with both parents and children, and my main advice is always to have a good level of communication in place to ensure that kids feel comfortable discussing what they are worried about or don’t understand.
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience, Dale. We are grateful for your contributions to this platform, readers, writers, editors, and our publications. We wish you the best in your writing journey.
Dale is not into social media but you can contact him via Illumination Slack Workspace, where writers communicate and share story links safely. Currently, our Slack group has 14,000+ members comprising Medium writers and readers. You can also share your stories in our channels to gain further visibility.
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