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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.
Poor Little Women.....
After i moved in my my ex, I soon found out she used to stay up to 1am most nights having cyber sex and all sorts of shit with mutiple guys online.
used to hide what she was typing when I walked past.... I knew something was up.
so I purchased a key logger, got access to all her passwords, and saw all the shit she used to say to guys, photos she would send to them, and telling them she would run off overesas to marry them....
back prior to meeting my current wife on facebook, before it turned to shit....
how did we meet - who has been using FB long enough to remember Social Me?????
anyway - so many women I met on there I have found later they actually had partners they did actually physically meet peeople and cheat on them.....
so boo hoo poor women.....
not saying they any sort of vigilance is correct..... but lets not forget in this day and age, those cunts bring on the shit themselves.... if only you knew half of what they do online......
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.
Speaking of compromise... I remember one time a feel-good article in the newspaper about volunteers helping to build a women's shelter. Moronically, the paper included a picture that included identifying information about the shelter.
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.
The city of Carson, California has just passed a law making it illegal to insult Justin Bieber online.
(No, seriously.)
The average worker in a violence shelter knows how to work the cursor on a computer and push the "send" button, but has a long, long way to go before beginning to understand the issues with Internet security. This problem has no technological solution. You can install the most sophisticated locks on your front door, but it won't protect you if you leave it unlocked, and it won't protect you from having your door smashed down.
There is a solution to this, and it goes "clink" with the closing of a prison cell door.
... but that would be too easy.
Don't tell me: "He was so 'charming' when I met him", which means "I knew he was a violent scumbag and it turned me on because I'm sick", or "I knew he was a violent scumbag but I had been single for all of ten minutes and just HAD to 'get a man' at any cost"...
If most women wanted men who were kind, caring and gentle, then that's exactly what most men would turn into - OVERNIGHT.
seems that the uses of TOR to date have been primarily 'negatively' for hackers, those avoiding the law in a number of ways (including true terrorists) and those who share (e.g. steal) copyrighted materials. 'Positive' use include or those who live in repressive regimes. This adds another positive use. How cool.
"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.'"
Yeah, they must really be idiots considering that it's the holy grail of what can happen. So you've got an angry ex-bf harrassing a woman and stalking her but besides gray area stuff, didn't technically do anything illegal. Oh wait, now he reset your password to your e-mail and accessed it? Go straight to jail. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200 bitch because that's against federal laws. People with assholes exes like this are just waiting for a DUI or weapons violation or recorded threat to put them in jail. Digital crimes go through court like a damn water slide if there's enough evidence. Then tada, no more problem because the asshole is in jail.
If a woman (OR MAN) is in a shelter for the purpose of protecting themselves from physical abuse the original act of which was psychologically scarring then the folks in the shelters need to be teaching those being sheltered some common sense. Stop using socal networking.
I have had multiple female friends and co-workers who have been properly traumatized by stalkers. The absolute first thing I tell them is to close their damn facebook account and wipe themselves off the internet. Social networking is the defacto #1 enabler for stalkers and pedophiles.
TOR is all well and good. But start with common sense and save people from themselves by training people not to use social networking.
In the old days shelters mainly had to worry that some douchebag would publish their address. Or one of the women at the shelter would tell an untrustworthy friend where they were.
Now you have people who nearly post their schedules online in the form of facebook posts, tweets, and foursquare checkins. I would hope the first thing they do is teach people not to enable their perpetrators. Stop using social networking.
He is a man, the ba'al of the woman (master of the woman) in the old testament. Fuck your woman's CUNTRY.
FUCK IT.
In a man's nation the man is the master (ba'al) and he can marry little girls and young females aswell (deuteronomy 22 28-29 in hebrew).
I hope your womans country is destroyed.
Who is WEEEEEEE.
Who the FUCK IS WE you feminist piece of shit.
In a man's nation the man is the master (ba'al) and he can marry little girls and young females aswell (deuteronomy 22 28-29 in hebrew).
I hope your womans country is destroyed.
Who chose that title? It's not just misleading, it's flat out false. They may be using TOR to counter surveillance, but they aren't using it for counter surveillance. Huge difference.
Shelters are not using TOR to spy on the abusers, they're using it to protect themselves & their clients.
Methinks someone doesn't know what 'counter surveillance' is.
bunch of fat assed broken toys with daddy issues, gold digging worn out and loose women trolling the online dating scene hoping you'll love them because they are so gosh darned special.
fuck that.
yeah!
... and not kick her out?
It is not so much about "a nasty email". It is about hacking into computers/phones in order to track someone. To FIND where the shelter is, so the brute can go there and beat her up for running away.
The "nasty email" won't be harsh words, but a virus that log keystrokes and conversations (using the mic). The shelter may order food, through the net or the phone. And the tech-savy brute gets the delivery address. When he knows where it is and who is there, he can stalk and possibly break in.
90% of criminals are men. The criminal women are mostly non-violent, like shoplifting.
Still, there are a few really nasty women around. And they have trouble forming these truely abusive relationships, because the average man is stronger than the average woman. Also, men find it easier to run away.
So for each man-shelter, you might need 10-50 woman-shelters. Which is why the talk always is about abused women. The abused men exists, but there are so few.
Letterman is a special case - because he's a celebrity.