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As Domestic Abuse Goes Digital, Shelters Turn To Counter-surveillance With Tor
An anonymous reader writes "Almost every modern abusive relationship has a digital component, from cyberstalking to hacking phones, emails, and social media accounts, but women's shelters increasingly have found themselves on the defensive, ill-equipped to manage and protect their clients from increasingly sophisticated threats. Recently the Tor Project stepped in to help change that. Andrew Lewman, executive director of the project, 'thinks of the digital abuse epidemic like a doctor might consider a biological outbreak. "Step one, do not infect yourself. Step two, do not infect others, especially your co-workers. Step three, help others," he said. In the case of digital infections, like any other, skipping those first two steps can quickly turn caretakers into infected liabilities. For domestic violence prevention organizations that means ensuring their communication lines stay uncompromised. And that means establishing a base level of technology education for staff with generally little to no tech chops who might not understand the gravity of clean communication lines until faced with a situation where their own phone or email gets hacked.'"
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them," and other quasi-religious nonsense which treats the brain as a perfectly rational ideal rather than just another organ subject to external influence.
Sending a nasty email is not domestic abuse.
Stop trivializing the suffering of women that get beaten within a inch of their lives by brutal husbands.
I know somebody in an abusive relationship. Her husband monitors the messages that she sends and receives on her cell phone. He demands to have access to her Facebook and email accounts. She has a second email account that she only accesses it from the public library. I don't really know how Tor will help in an abusive situation. It's not so much that somebody is tapping the lines, but that the abusive party tries to control what they do on the devices that they know about. She can't use her cell phone, or home computer for anything private. Trying to install Tor on the computer would just give the abuser more reason to cause problems.
Really she needs to get out of the relationship, and many of her friends tell her that, but she just won't do it.
why do none of these articles ever address the bunny boilers and child killer women? there are a LOT of them out there... David Letterman had a particularly noxious lady stalker nut after him.
but these articles always just Shit on Men....
She returned to him and its as though technology has somehow exacerbated domestic violence to the point of her present scenario. She gave her attacker passwords, usernames, cellphone access, email access, and a host of other very sensitive information based solely on the pretext that he was 'an undercover FBI agent' and at no time thought to as for some form of confirmation or conclusory evidence to prove this. She never once stopped to wonder why an undercover FBI agent would ever tell anyone about themselves.
Hillariously enough she actually still lives in the same town as her attacker/abuser. from TFA:
"No body is going to believe all of this stuff," Sarah said. "Even now I have a lot of shame. I have a lot of blaming myself."
This is a natural response to realizing you have completely rendered the hard work and assistance of teams of crisis responders and police completely null and void. We all make mistakes, however Sarah seems functionally incapable of the cognitive process by which we learn from those mistakes and grow.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sarah was probably abused as a child - that is all the knows. As an adult, she gravitated to a partner the was like her abuser.
Human beings are not this completely rational animal. As a matter fact, most of our decisions are based on gut feelings (Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow).
And when you mix in physical trauma, people break and do stupid things like run back to their abuser or don't leave. A lot of that is also fear - fear that the abuser will punish them.
Or to put is this way, to expect rational action from someone in this predicament is completely unreasonable.
Dude - if she was cheating on you, man up and leave. You do not have the right to do anything else, and unless you're a sociopath who loves mentally beating down a woman just to feel better about yourself, your story has no relevance here.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?