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.'"

Comments

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Wycliffe]

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.

Psychological abuse is the first step. Why do you think a woman continues to stay with a man who beats her?
And who said that their only concern is psychological abuse? They also need to make sure there isn't a way that
the abuser can't track and/or figure out where the victim is going to be in real life.

I know somebody like this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I know somebody like this

[HBI]

If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.

If you're keeping secrets, you're not all in, and bad things will come eventually. If you think that not being able to keep secrets constitutes abuse, I think you have a problematic definition.

Re:I know somebody like this

[Mr D from 63]

Exactly. My wife is free to read my email any time she wants, and vice versa. Can't imagine needing to hide anything.

I've also learned there are two sides to every story. Be very careful judging if you've only heard one.

Re:I know somebody like this

[Jason Levine]

If someone is actively hiding something from their spouse because they think their spouse will react negatively to it, then there's a problem with the relationship. However, this doesn't mean that the spouse has a right to see EVERYTHING that person says/does. In the parent's comment, they related the tale of a husband who monitored every cell phone message, Facebook post, and e-mail message his wife made/received. That's not normal behavior. I don't monitor my wife's messages. In fact, I'm not even on Facebook and she is. She could easily be saying nasty things about me there without me knowing. However, I don't demand to see/approve everything she says because I respect her. She's not "property" for me to "manage", she's my spouse and my equal in our relationship.

And lest anything think it only works one way, there are plenty of women who are as controlling as the example above. Either way, if you are demanding to see everything your spouse writes/says, there's a problem in the relationship.

Re:I know somebody like this

[khellendros1984]

It seems like you have cause and effect backwards, here. Having privacy, even within a married couple, is healthy. There needs to be trust that your spouse isn't going to purposefully do something to harm the relationship. For instance, my wife texts and calls friends, and I generally don't know the content of those conversations. My wife telling me if I ask is trust, and it's healthy. If I demanded access to her E-mail, phone history, etc, that's not healthy, and it wouldn't be her fault if she wanted to maintain a corner of privacy in her life. You can't blame my jealousy and irrationality on her actions.

If I'm being abusive, then I'm not going to want her to find outside help, and I'm not going to want her to talk to her friends about her problems. I'll want to control every aspect of her life. That's the situation we're looking at, not an otherwise-stable relationship with communications issues.

Re:I know somebody like this

[UnknowingFool]

Having privacy is not always about keeping secrets. It's about having your own life. I don't tell everything about my life because I'm not someone who needs to talk about me all the time. Also, frankly,it is because most of I do for work is boring, and she doesn't really want to hear about it. If she asks about the work conversation I had with a female coworker over lunch, I'll tell her but there's really nothing to tell, and I don't want to feel compelled to discuss/report everything.

Also privacy is not always about you. Confidential conversations I had with friends do not always need to be shared. If one of my friends them is going through a possible divorce with his/her spouse, should I just go home and start blabbing about it to my SO?

Re:I know somebody like this

[Phreakiture]

Putting the TOR Browser Bundle on a thumb drive or a CD might be a usable solution. Take the flash/CD out when you're done using it and it leaves nothing on the computer, assuming there is no keystroke logger.

If there is concern that there might be a keystroke logger, then TAILS is the way to go. Boot from the removable media, and remove the media when you are done. Just make sure it's not found.

Re:I know somebody like this

[Charliemopps]

If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.

If you're keeping secrets, you're not all in, and bad things will come eventually. If you think that not being able to keep secrets constitutes abuse, I think you have a problematic definition.

As I'm very good at this sort of thing because I work in the industry and nothing goes in and out of our network without me knowing about it, it's come up. I explained to her that she would have to trust me that I would never read her mail (which I dont), and I would have to trust her that all of her secret emails involved surprise birthday parties or generalize complaints about me to her sisters (which I could understand). If she did feel the need to be sending the kinds of emails that if I read them we'd have a real problem, just divorce me instead. It will make the emails a lot easier, and I can hit on all her friends.

Re:I know somebody like this

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife knows my email password. She has full file permissions on my porn folder. I even have location sharing enabled on my phone.

But I will never share my Spotify playlists, lest she find out my hidden love of One Direction and Rebecca Black.

Re:I know somebody like this

[bitt3n]

Exactly. My wife is free to read my email any time she wants, and vice versa. Can't imagine needing to hide anything. I've also learned there are two sides to every story. Be very careful judging if you've only heard one.

the other side of the story: "my husband thinks he has access to all my email."

Re:I know somebody like this

[bitt3n]

finally some common sense! what my wife confides in her girlfriends during their weekly book club sessions is none of my beeswax. If they're meeting at our house that week, I make a point of scheduling some time at the driving range and let them have their fun. likewise, she has sense enough not to ask what exactly I'm doing hanging out at the local highway rest stop between the hours of 2 and 4 am every Saturday night.

Re:I know somebody like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats under marriage's definition of "we stop being two entities and begin being two less-than-entities".

I've been happily married for 15 years, and me and the wife have zero access to each others private space. Yes that include our communications and a lot more. Do we have things to hide? The answer ALSO belongs to private space.

But insecure feebles will always need to supervise each other while masking all that behind the "trust" motto. In the end, that's the same mentality of global surveillance at the cell/family scale. Same formula huh?

"If you have nothing to hide..."

women are stalkers too

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:women are stalkers too

[Mashiki]

Because there aren't shelters filled with abused men and their children they took with them when they escaped the abusive relationship (that I'm aware of). I'm sure that won't stop your miserable whining, though.

Fun fact: That's because there are very few shelters for men.

We've got a couple here in Canada, and they're heavily used. The abuse industry, and I will call it that for good reason has done quite a bit of work pushing the "only men can be abuses" belief. And have pushed it so hard that it's skewed court and family court against men. It of course also doesn't help that there's a huge social stigma on the "the wife/gf/so/etc" beat up the guy. With the "why didn't you stand up for yourself, etc.," bit. Police don't care one way or the other in the case of a domestic here, and try to find the primary person who instigated it. But if the women is the one, there really isn't anywhere for the guy to go.

But let's move onto the homosexual side. Depending on what study you want to cite, the abuse rates between both same sex couples hit as high as 70%, for the women again there's a place they can go to. For the men, not so.

Re:women are stalkers too

[SourceFrog]

Look at actual statistics and you'll discover that contrary to what the mainstream media is spoon-feeding you, women abuse men equally often. Open your eyes. Men often experience it worse, not just because of the stigma, but because there are no "men's shelters" to run to, and because society's view is "it's always the man's fault". Leaving isn't always easy when there are kids involved. Often these men end their suffering other ways like committing suicide. Stop perpetuating the common myth, and let's start caring equally for all victims of abuse.

Re:women are stalkers too

[SourceFrog]

Some fun facts and figures:
* "A University of Florida study recently found women are more likely than men to "stalk, attack and abuse" their partners"
* "A University of Washington study recently found women were nearly twice as likely as men to perpetrate domestic violence in the past year"
* "Virtually all sociological data shows women initiate domestic violence as often as men, that women use weapons more than men, and that 38% of injured victims are men. California State University Professor Martin Fiebert summarizes almost 200 of these studies"
* "A recent study in the Journal of Family Violence found many male callers to a national hotline experienced high rates of severe violence from female partners"
* "California State University surveyed 1,000 college women: 30% admitted they assaulted a male partner"
* "A University of Pennsylvania emergency room report found 13% of men reported being assaulted by a female partner in the previous 12 months, of which 50% were choked, kicked, bitten, punched, or had an object thrown at them, 37% involved a weapon, and 14% required medical attention"
* "Contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men"

http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/abusiverelationships/a/male_abuse.htm

Conclusion: Anyone who says men should stop "whining" about abuse is a dick and should STFU, and it's time we start taking this serious problem seriously.

Re:women are stalkers too

[Elky Elk]

The women that founded women's refuge in the UK was demonised and started receiving death threats for suggesting that much domestic violence was reciprocal and that some women sought out abusive relationships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

they are psychologically imbalanced and believe it's better to be with a man who beats them than alone. and I've been the son of an abuse victim and unfortunately seem to find myself with friends that fall into that category consistently enough to tell you that's why.

this ha more to do about the abused.

[nimbius]

I expect to get modded down for blaming the victim, but ill say it anyways. From everything in TFA crisis teams and even the local police department went to great lengths to ensure Sarah could be evacuated from the immediate viscinity of her threat. Instead of complying with the restraining order and severing all communication with her abuser, she allowed herself to become compromised once again by responding to an email from him.
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.

Re:this ha more to do about the abused.

[Mashiki]

Not surprising. That's a standard abuse pattern, and it's built on the belief that "x person has changed' and "they can change them, so they go back." I've done the whole support bit before, and the cycle is so cyclical that it's scary. The victim is responsible, the problem of course is that the victim is self conditioning themselves and the abuser is reinforcing it. You can bet that following up you'll see one of the following if they went back you'd see a standard following of control from restricting movements, to controlling who she could or couldn't see.

But you're right, she doesn't have the cognitive process to learn from the mistakes and grow. She's empathizing with her abuser, and trying to change them...because they believe they can change them. Because the abuser is telling them so.

Re:Poor Women.....

[Jeremy Erwin]

see, this is exactly the sort of thing that we want to avoid. Being in a relationship with someone does not give you license to intrude upon her privacy.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:in b4 idiots

[Penguinisto]

I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them,".

It's a hard line to draw without sufficient and legally-clear context; for example, consider a facebook/twitter/whatever post addressed to someone, stating "You look lovely today", posted without any further context from someone you know. To an ordinary non-abused person, and many abused persons, this statement is nothing more than a pleasantry. To someone hiding in a battered women's shelter, this could be a direct threat.

You see, abusers are (often) smart enough to not use words that any jury member would immediately recognize as a threatening/abusive gesture.

On the other hand, minus a no-contact restraining order, how do you legally tell the difference in a way that is meaningful? After all, if I said that to some random stranger, and they decide to scream for a cop to lock my ass up... err, what standing is there to do so? Maybe the person in question was raped a day ago and the rapist whispered those words - but I had no clue as to that having ever happened. Saying it may well have hurt the person due to PTSD, but even if I didn't know, there's a legal concept where ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if there were a law that could get me arrested for mental assault (for lack of a better term)...

I guess what I'm getting at is that you have to be damned careful as to where and how much you get the law involved with such things. It's likely much better for all involved that a simple no-contact restraining order draw the line instead, so that only those who the order is leveled against are, well, restrained, and the rest of us can go about our day.

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Penguinisto]

Sending a nasty email is not domestic abuse.

My wife had to put up with an asshole ex-husband who thought the same thing during the early stages of our relationship. He loved to call her up once in a great while and screw with her head - usually after she'd gotten over the last time he called and once he figured out her new phone number. It wasn't until I called him up one day and said two things that he shut up and went away, never to pester her again.

Her personality brightened up a whole hell of a lot more after that, and we've been extremely happy about things ever since.

(...those two things? The first was a recitation of his home address and the hours he was usually home. I'll plead the fifth before I tell you the second one.)

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen more to it than that. There's also cultural, societal, and religious pressures. In my pre-cana, what I lovingly refer to as the Catholic marriage stress-test, the topic of divorce came up with the arch-dioces present. The guy just stood there straight-faced and started in on how "you should stay with your spouse and work things out." This is the same group that was preaching about having sex on specific days of the woman's.. ahem... schedule as a replacement for any birth control, but that's another topic. Point being the church, at least locally and a few others I've heard of, admonishes divorcees and really puts on the pressure to stick with the first marriage. Even to the point when one spouse fears for their own life the church insisted on fighting them. Yes, I do have experience to back that up.

I'd consider a cultural/societal pressure to be if it's something you were raised in or around. I've known many girls that are in abusive relationships not only because of the fear of being single, but because they are following in their parents footsteps. Mom may have been emotionally or physically abused, the kid thinks it's normal and seeks it out themselves. I've also seen instances where mom was abused and the daughter turns the tides and starts being the overbearing, abusive girlfriend. I've also seen instances where the parents pressure their kids to work it out, despite the black eyes and bruises. Others where they stick through it because the little kids need both daddy and mommy, so I'll endure for x more years.

It takes an incredibly strong will to break that cycle. I'd liken it almost to an addiction in that there is some sort of emotional need that must be overcome in order to break free and move on. While no abuse is acceptable in my opinion, I really dislike seeing/hearing about it when little kids are involved.

Re:Poor Women.....

[Penguinisto]

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.

Re:Teaching physics to 3rd graders...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen things swing both ways, where abuse is claimed (to the point of one party in a relationship injuring themselves.)

A person who I worked with has dealt with that. From what I gather, after his messy divorce that he "lost", the other party scoring the house, kids, and both alimony and child support. Now, he is in a nasty cycle:

1: He is unemployed.
2: Ex hauls him into court demanding child support payments.
3: He is unemployed, no money to pay.
4: Judge tosses him in the county cooler for six months for failure to pay with a yet another fine.
5: He gets released, goes back to a friend's house, starts looking for a job... back to step #1.

This has been going on for three years now, usually 1-2 weeks after release before the local finest come and haul him back in front of the judge for another half-year in the pokey.

Re:Teaching physics to 3rd graders...

[MozeeToby]

I'm beginning to suspect you haven't read the article... I know, I know... but still.

"Since then, the two groups have been working to develop a resource that will provide staff and advocates with the base level of technological know-how required to address casework with a digital abuse component."

"The Tor Browser Bundle is free software that works like most ordinary browsers but comes configured to make it harder for individuals to be tracked, obscuring or deleting things like a browser’s history, location, and IP address from both the website the user is browsing as well as erasing traces from the computer the browser is hosted on."

It's not about facebook, it's about secure communications between an abuse victim and their caseworker or even the police. It's about teaching them how to make travel arrangements without the confirmation emails spelling out where they're going and when. It's about teaching them what's possible if someone has unlimited access to your phone.

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

You've clearly never been in a abusive situation. It's not so easy as "only stupid people get abused and don't do anything about it". Often they feel confined, and like they have no options; the person that they love (because usually that's how relationships like this start) is reinforcing that while simultaneously eroding self-confidence to keep them from leaving.

Saying they're stupid for not leaving abusive situations is ignorant. Futhermore, it's offensive to everyone who's been abused.

Re:in b4 idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

This ridiculous stereotype that women are abused and men are abusers must stop. It is completely untrue, and simply presented to an accepting society who believe that women are weak and gentle creatures.

Speaking as someone whose first serious partner was an abusive woman - one who knew how to play the people around her - it took me years to gather the strength to get away from her.

She once threw one of her soft toys at me, aiming to hit me with it. When I threw it back, she ran from the room screaming (so she could be heard by others) that I'd promised to never hit her.

She would regularly punch me - just out of the blue - and call it "a love tap." She raped me hundreds of times - six times in a night, once. She was reading daddy-daughter incest porn. If I didn't want sex on a particular morning, she'd accuse me of being gay, or just keep going anyway.

Once upon a time, I commented that a friend of mine had bought her partner a nice watch. My ex- started screaming incoherently at me, then lowered her voice saying that it clearly meant I was in love with this friend, then raised her voice and started shrieking other crap at me. Of course, everyone around came running to her aid, not bothering to work out what was going on.

When I was studying from 8am until 5pm, and then working from 6pm until 9pm, she started demanding that I stop having lunch every day so I could buy her roses.

She then stole $1400 from my bank account.

She later stole my $2000 computer, CD player, a bed, and other assorted items, then sent me the bill for the computer.

That particular group of friends now believe that I used to smack her around a bit, and wouldn't even meet her halfway.

According to the local rape crisis group if those acts were committed against a woman, that is abuse.

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Mom may have been emotionally or physically abused, the kid thinks it's normal and seeks it out themselves. I've also seen instances where mom was abused...

First, quit repeating the bullshit that women are the injured party. It is 50/50 not 100/0.

Second, my mother used to attack my father, then beat herself up and ring the police, pretending that he had attacked her.

This went on weekly for about four years, until he left her. Then she proceeded to invite him around, beat herself up, and ring the police.

I REMEMBER THIS OCCURRING.

She got into relationships and used that guy as a weapon against my father, including persuading one to attack him (skinny unskilled fuck vs a guy trained in combatu jiu jutsu who would get into pub fights every day - hence why the cops would believe her every time).

She's also threatened to stab me with a knife after throwing dinner plates at me, she used to regularly assault my brother and I with electrical cables, vacuum cleaner attachments, anything she could get a good swing with.

She still does it, too. After fleecing her mother for more than $15k, she fleeced my father (her ex-) for more than $3k, and now that she's employed refuses to pay it back because it's not her job to support him.

Women are just as capable of being abusers as men. Sadly, it's unknowledgable fools such as yourself who reinforce this idiotic - and readily exploitable - ideal that women are weak, frail creatures who need protecting from the big bullying men.

I've another post much nearer the top detailing my own experiences with an abusive woman (who stole significant amounts of money from me). Go read it.

Re:Digital Domestic Abuse

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Psychological abuse is the first step. Why do you think a woman continues to stay with a man who beats her?
And who said that their only concern is psychological abuse? They also need to make sure there isn't a way that
the abuser can't track and/or figure out where the victim is going to be in real life.

She stays with a man who beats her because she knows herself. She knows that any man who spends a great deal of time with her is inevitably going to beat her just like the last one, she either cannot or does not wish to change her behavior, and she doesn't want to be alone.

If you date a woman whose boyfriend used to beat her, she will mould you into a man who beats her. It's not diplomatic to say it, but it's true, and the more men become aware that it's true, the less domestic violence we will have.

I've dated a woman like that. I've never hit a woman in my entire life, but she brought me so close it scared me. I'd offer to part ways amicably, and she'd cling and insist that she wanted to invest the time and energy to make things good. But that only lasted till I stopped talking about parting ways, then she'd violate my trust again. When it all finally came crashing down, she told me that she'd done it because she loved me but felt our relationship was unhealthy, and didn't have the strength to break things off, so she set out to hurt me as badly as she possibly could, so I would never forgive her.

I found out later that every single serious relationship she had ever been in had ended with her being assaulted and her partner being charged. I was the only one in her entire life that had the strength to pull back and walk away from the situation. And it was unbelievably hard. I really loved her, wanted her to be my wife. And she knew me so well, she knew exactly the precise way to cause me the maximum pain, her execution was flawless, and she'd convinced herself that it needed to be done, so she had no remorse whatsoever.

When you meet a woman who tells you a sympathetic story about how her ex used to abuse her, stay the fuck away from her.