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Title: Doxcare Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 26, 2020 Language: en Topics: how to, technology, care Source: Retrieved on 29th October 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment
This step-by-step guide explains how to protect yourself from online
stalkers, why it is important, and what to do if you are targeted for
“doxxing”—the publishing of your private information. In a era of
universal surveillance, when livestreamers broadcast every major
demonstration while fascists, FBI agents, and police officers comb
through social media posts to gather intelligence with which to harass
activists, there has never been a better time to take steps to secure
your privacy. Here’s how.
I have been active in my community for years. Not long ago, far-right
trolls found social media accounts of my friends, family, and workplace.
They stalked me and used the photos they found of me and my family
members to assemble timelines of my life and to map my social networks.
Because of my anti-racist beliefs, they used the information they
gathered to threaten me, my family, and my friends. In every harassing
email and social media comment, they characterize the projects I
participate in as “terrorist groups,” describing me as a “leader” and
member of an imaginary “shadowy mob of violent leftists” that they want
to “do something serious about.” Whether these conclusions are just
shoddy investigative work or intentionally dishonest misrepresentations,
their behavior should be concerning to anyone who believes in standing
up against oppression.
I deactivated my social media when I learned that this was underway—not
because I am ashamed of being associated with the struggle for a freer
world, but because I want to protect my friends and social networks.
Anyone who knows me knows it is no secret that I oppose all forms of
bigotry and oppression. They did not target me specifically for anything
in particular I have done, but because they are opposed to all
anti-racist, feminist, and queer activism and they think that they can
isolate and intimidate us one by one. This is why we need to stand by
each other.
I want you to know about this in case you ever find yourself in the same
situation. You are not alone. I hope this encourages you to think
seriously about your personal online security and the security of your
family members and friends.
Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, publicly chatted with
alt-right trolls who doxxed anti-racists. The stalking campaign against
me shows that they are willing to manufacture falsehoods to put people
in those crosshairs. The only way to protect ourselves is to keep
showing up for each other. We must not let them intimidate us.
Doxxing means publishing a person’s private information with the
intention of exposing and intimidating them. This can result in
physical, emotional, and economic harm to the target. It is intended to
dissuade the target from action and to shame them for their ideas and
values. It is important to take security seriously before you are
doxxed—before you even have reason to fear that you could be doxxed.
Often a doxxer will wait until they have gathered a lot of information
before releasing it. It is possible that you are already being stalked
and will not find out until it is too late.
Whether you are a well-known public activist or hardly involved at all,
you should protect your social networks and other spheres of your
life—even if you don’t think you are doing anything that would warrant
attention. Maintaining good practices protects your friends, family, and
community. It is common for people to be included in right-wing
conspiracy theories about “Antifa members” solely because they are queer
or trans, “look like a leftist,” play in bands, attend an event, or hang
out in radical spaces. The information does not have to be correct or
justified for someone to target you. All a harasser needs is one piece
of information to begin to seek more details online.
Being aware of what information trails you leave online can protect you
from law enforcement as well as stalkers. Now that state-imposed
surveillance is increasingly sophisticated and livestreaming has become
normal at protests, just wearing a mask is often not enough. In June
2020 in Philadelphia, investigators identified a woman starting with
nothing more than a blurry photo of her. They followed a trail of
breadcrumbs including an Etsy purchase, twitter accounts, and her
professional work page. Customs and Border Protection have started to
trawl public social media. Securing your online presence can make you
feel more secure taking action offline.
There’s no better time to start than now. After you have been doxxed,
you may not be able to eliminate the information that is out there even
if you try to get it taken down.
There are many different ways to approach this. Obviously, the best way
to ensure that no one can find any information about you is to have
nothing available—but some people can’t eliminate their online presence,
whether because of work, family, or other responsibilities. In some
cases, there are strategic reasons to maintain some sort of online
persona; for example, having a longstanding, believable but innocuous
social media account may be helpful for non-citizens crossing the US
border. Thankfully, there are ways to firewall distinct spheres of your
life, curate a public profile if you need one, and adopt practices that
can help you and your friends to feel empowered to continue taking
action in your community. This process can be tedious. It will take time
and energy. I recommend doing it together with friends, roommates, or
family members to help through some of the difficult or boring aspects.
If you cannot completely delete yourself from the internet, you can
still preserve relative privacy by maintaining distinct spheres[1] of
online activity and cleaning up forgotten or infrequently used accounts.
You likely have more than one online presence. This could include social
networks, message boards, job sites, email accounts—anything you need to
log into. Often in doxxing, information is triangulated from many
different sources. One way to reduce the amount of information available
to doxxers is to partition these spheres so they are not connected to
each other. This is a highly individualized process; take some time to
consider the following questions and map out your own online spheres.
Do you spend your time on r/politics or the wall of a Facebook
acquaintance debating? Do you frequently like or repost statuses from
radical Instagram or Twitter accounts? Do you have images or personal
information on job boards? Do you buy things on Etsy or eBay? Do any of
your friends post pictures of you on their Instagram accounts? Do you
have to promote yourself online for the line of work you are in? Do you
connect with your co-workers, family members, and activist friends using
the same account? Do you use parts of your real name or birthday for
usernames or emails?
Each of these may not be a problem in and of itself, but together they
can create links between different spheres of your life.
Ask yourself:
cross over into distinct spheres of your life?Take a moment to think
about the way in which all of these spheres overlap offline.
an infoshop?
given profile?
Here are a few examples of how your online presence can overlap across
different sites:
Relatives
relatives? If a stranger had information on just one person in this
network, what could they discover about the others?
Politics
which platforms?
Friends and Community
what ways do your online communities reflect your IRL communities?
Hobbies
them? Are you a part of any internet communities dedicated to those
hobbies?
Legal
tied to? Do any of your accounts include this information? Do any other
sites (probably without your permission)?
Career
account? Would there be a problem if your politics overlapped with your
career? Or is your career in some way tied to your political identity?
Take time to consider where you overlap, what your online goals are, and
where you can separate these spheres.
Let’s talk about how to discover what information is available about
you, how to identify and eliminate trails, and what online resources
exist to remove them.
Begin with what is publicly available. Google yourself and make a list
of all of your social media accounts. Delete old accounts for things you
no longer use. This is also a good time to download a password manager
like 1Password or LastPass to assist you in managing unique usernames,
emails, and passwords.
Find out what information people can find out about you simply using a
search engine. Search for yourself on DuckDuckGo and Google. Try doing
this search in incognito mode. Try different versions of your name, with
and with out your middle name and in quotation marks. You could set
Google Alerts to send you emails when your name is published on the
internet. This will give you a sense of how much data about you is
available online to people who are not in your network.
After this initial search, have a look at all of the data broker sites
that profit on trading in personal data. I also encourage you to remove
your closest family members at the same time. This process can be
arduous; these sites try to make it as difficult as possible to delete
information about yourself. There are some things you can’t remove
yourself from—for example, if you recently registered to vote and still
live at that address. (This is another reason some people choose not to
vote.)
The most trafficked host sites includee: Been-verified, CheckPeople,
Instant Checkmate, Intelius, PeekYou, PeopleFinders, PeopleSmart, Pipl,
PrivateEye, PublicRecords360, Radaris, Spokeo, USA People Search,
TruthFinder.com, Nuwber, OneRep, and FamilyTreeNow. I recommend starting
with these by searching each one on this website, which has a guide for
opting out of virtually every data broker. If you have more money than
time, you can pay for a service called Just Delete Me to have your
information removed, but I usually only recommend this service if you
have already been doxxed.
When you search yourself in a online search engine, you may also find
old accounts. It can be good to do a reverse search using all of the old
user names and screen names you can remember. Accounts you have not used
in a long time can make you vulnerable because if they are using an
older password, they can try that account’s technical support to get
more data about you that they can try to use for other accounts.
Download any material of sentimental value to you and permanently close
all the accounts you no longer use. These can be full of clues about
your life.
First, go to namechk.com, which searches over hundreds of platforms for
specific usernames, and search all the possible usernames and emails you
have used. This will tell you what platforms have accounts using that
handle.
Second, go to backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme and type in the website
domain. This website archives a huge array of existing websites,
categorizes how easy or difficult they make it to delete an account, and
provides the link to the “delete profile” page for each respective site.
Haveibeenpwned.com will help you find out if there are any data breaches
involving any accounts you hold. If there are, take immediate action to
change passwords.
The easiest way for someone to find more information about you is to
search your name, aliases, and usernames. To keep your spheres of
internet activity separate, always use a new username when you create an
account. If you have a professional website for work and must use you
legal name, make sure the email you use for that account is used solely
for that purpose. You may have to have a handful of email accounts and
usernames. I have one for all of my medical and governmental accounts,
one for my online shopping, one for my political life, and one for my
social media, another for dating sites, and so on. I use aliases and
false information for all the websites that represent me or display
photos of me.
A password manager is a great help for this, as it will store logins for
all of your accounts. I recommend LastPass, which you can download for
your phone and web browser. It might be tempting to leave yourself
permanently signed in, but always make sure to sign out when you are
done using it. First, so you don’t forget the master password—and also
to ensure that even if someone manages to gain access to your phone or
computer, they can’t access all your personal data. Take this time to
create new emails and change usernames for all of the accounts you
aren’t going to delete. You can easily create new emails using
Protonmail. Both 1Password and LastPass can help generate random string
passwords, which are the most secure.
Once you have eliminated all your loose ends, take a look at what you
chose to retain and what can be found there. If you keep any social
media accounts, go through your profile and note what people can find
out about you. You can choose from a range of strategies regarding how
to approach this, depending on how cautious you want to be and how
certain are that it is possible to keep your different spheres of
internet activity distinct.
Some of your options include:
tattoos, and anything else that includes unnecessary identifying
information—especially your public profile picture.
inaccurate birthday or no birthday at all, choose random answers for
your hometown, schools you have attended, and other information.
social media settings to private and you feel confident about your
followers list, there may be less reason to hide your face. I still
recommend keeping details about your location and intimate personal life
offline. Remember, you are only as safe as the most open person in your
life. If you choose to be more public, keep your friends and family
separate, do not post pictures of them or their personal information
without their informed consent, and remember that social connections are
visible through social networking and data collection websites.
The Coach from Crash Override Network is a helpful step-by-step guide
that links you directly to the privacy settings page for many commonly
used social networks. Click “Let’s Get Started” and “Strengthen the
security of my online accounts so people can’t break into them as
easily,” and follow their guides for all the top social media companies.
This guide can also help with other aspects of online security, so after
you’ve done that, I recommend finishing the Coach helper and checking
out what other resources they offer.
When you think you are done, have a friend try to create a profile based
on what information they can find about you while pretending to be a
“doxxer” to see if anything you didn’t think of slipped through the
cracks. It may be important to periodically check in on what can be
found by searching your name every few months.
We do not recommend approaching the police when you are doxxed (or
ever). The police may use the information you give them about the
harassers, but they will also use the information they get about you and
other individuals and groups you may have been publicly associated with.
Once that is on file, it’s permanently in their hands, and there’s no
guarantee they won’t use it to target you or others with state
repression.
If you chose to involve the police, please be transparent and do not ask
any radical groups to support you. Be sure to inform any groups that you
are connected with of your decision. Usually, the police will do nothing
or make the situation much worse. The idea of thiis guide is to provide
you with alternatives based in community support and empowerment.
Short answer: Do not immediately react publicly. Take time to secure
yourself and alert your networks privately before reacting publicly.
Your first impulse may be to alert as many people as you can immediately
with a public announcement or to shut everything down. Going public in
this way can provide you with immediate support if you have a
sympathetic audience, but it carries the risk of increased aggression
from harassers. There are good arguments for being cautious with
information at the beginning. The most important thing to do first is to
take steps to protect yourself and your networks against further harm.
Immediate announcements can complicate your security efforts. Whether or
not the information posted about you is accurate, no one is likely to
use it to cause you any serious harm without first confirming at least
some of it. Posting on a social media account confirming your doxx
immediately confirms that the information about you is accurate; it also
indicates that you have seen where it was posted and suggests that you
are terrified. This furthers the goals of your harassers. They want to
intimidate and isolate you. Do not confirm or deny any of the
information they have dug up about you, regardless of whether it is
false or embarrassing. They are seeking a reaction. If you let them know
that what they have posted is incorrect, they may conclude that they are
on the right track and they just need to keep digging. Sometimes, one of
the most effective initial public responses is no response at all—don’t
make any major changes to your posting habits or show any fear. This can
send the message that your doxxer missed the mark, and that the attack
was a failure.
After you have had time to process your feelings and secure your
position, it may be strategic to go public and perhaps to band together
with other people who are in a similar situation. You may be able to
leverage the public outrage over white supremacists to create a campaign
to dissuade further doxxing—for example, make a funding drive with
pledges to give money for every harassing email you or others in your
community receive! Since your harassers want to isolate you, public
support like this may dissuade further intimidation. Try to be creative,
resilient, and strategic. Be careful not to endanger anyone else in this
process.
When making public statements, if you posture or brag about your
abilities, your ability to employ violence, weapons with which you can
defend yourself, or overstate your ferociousness, you may bite off more
than you can chew. It is generally not a good idea to misrepresent
yourself. Talking directly or indirectly to the harassers does not
usually improve matters. I recommend making a positive statement
asserting your ethics and beliefs, describing how your identity or your
ideals have made you a target but maintaining that while these campaigns
of harassment are intended to make you cower, you will not do so,
because you have no reason to hide your politics. Avoid talking about
specific actions or groups, whether or not you are involved with them.
provocations. This is crucial to identifying the patterns of the
attacks. It can be useful to compare these with other organizers in
order to identify larger patterns so as to identify your opponents and
their organizations.
privately. Task a few friends that you trust with your personal
information to help report social media and blog posts that doxx you,
identifying them as harassment. Do so repeatedly. Some platforms lack
policies that will protect you, even if these posts include accurate
personal information, even if they put you in danger. Sometimes, doxxers
will use your photos and information to make imposter accounts. It is
usually easier to report these as fakes; try to do so quickly in order
to prevent them from obtaining more information from your networks by
posing as you. You, your family, and your employer may begin to receive
threatening or harassing phone calls. Let them know what is happening as
quickly as you can and instruct them not to engage with the harassers.
have not done the preventative care section, begin that process.
Download a password manager like 1Password or LastPass and change all of
your passwords immediately. You can also pay for a service called Delete
Me that will take much of your online footprint off of snoop sites that
harvest and display personal information. This service will take care of
the information aggregated by the data brokers but not any social media,
web accounts, news articles, or arrest records you may have, those will
have to be handled on your own. It is important to balance the
hemorrhage of information, while also not alerting your harassers that
the dox was effective or on target. Try to shore up your social media
accounts by making friends lists and information private in order to
protect your networks until you are sure that they don’t offer
vulnerable personal information to those willing to dig for it. How you
react publicly is a very delicate situation and should be handled
carefully throughout this process.
them know what is going on; doxxing can be traumatic and you need to
prioritize your mental and physical health so that you can work through
these attacks. These conversations can be difficult—especially if they
do not understand the nuances of this political moment, if it’s the
first time they are hearing about a particular flavor of hate group, or
if your relationships are strained due to political or personal
differences. If you don’t feel up to it, you could ask a friend who has
a good understanding of the situation to have the more difficult
conversations for you.
If your home address is included in the doxx, find somewhere new you can
stay if you are able. If you can’t leave your home, invite friends or a
local security group to stay with you. Make a “go bag” with everything
you will need if you have to pack up and go with little notice.
If you don’t feel you are at any great risk, especially if your doxx is
comprised of freely-available information or is just sent directly to
you in an effort to unnerve you, you may feel fine dismissing it as a
cheap intimidation tactic, blocking and reporting the harasser, and
moving on. It may just be a matter of someone trying to get a rise out
of you. However, if your doxx includes sensitive personal information,
especially details that are not easy to obtain with simple detective
work, or it appears in a public forum where people distribute
information in hopes that others will act on it, you may want to take
further precautions. This is especially true if you are already part of
a targeted group or demographic.
When you learn that you have been doxxed, it’s important to establish
which information could translate into credible threats. Often, doxxing
is a precursor to more intrusive offline harassment, or is connected
with threats to act on the information. This could be anything from
threatening phone calls to family or workplaces to pointed death threats
or a SWAT call.
It is sometimes difficult to determine what makes a threat “credible.”
The most common tactic of ordinary doxxers is to send creepy or
intimidating messages wherever they think they can reach you—social
media, email, and to family members, and the like. They will often imply
that they have more information than they really do; it’s common for
them to say that they have provided this information to local law
enforcement. Their goal is to intimidate you out of acting; often,
whatever information they post publically is all that they have.
Your employer may receive calls demanding that they fire you. Thus far,
it is rare that the targets of doxxing have been physically attacked,
but it has happened, and it is possible that those who doxx you may make
efforts to get your information into the hands of people who are not
acting rationally or ethically. It is important to be cautious, but
don’t panic or immerse yourself in anxiety.
Ask yourself:
address? Do they know places you hang out? Who you are friends with?
information about you?
community or just online trolls on a decentralized forum? Do you have
reason to believe law enforcement will be interested in this
information? Is the information being shared from local right-wing news
sources, putting your face in front of a multitude of hostile strangers
who now have your information?
arrested?
Here are some things you can do in response to the dangers that can
arise from being doxxed:
a local community defense group.
comrades, roommates, family.
information about you may be of interest to state actors.
identify the doxxers, if the latter are posting from fake account.
This conversation can be very difficult, especially if your relationship
with your family is strained. Have a cool-headed friend on call to help
mediate or support you afterwards if necessary.
Think about how often you are willing to be vulnerable with your family
and how much opportunity you will have in the future to follow up on the
conversation. If it’s necessary to speak to family members but you feel
like you will only get one chance, you can rehearse with a friend and
prepare for their reactions. If you have an ongoing, conversational,
trusting relationship, you can explain the situation to them in a series
of smaller conversations, instead of one long sit-down. Evaluate how
much time and how much attention you will have.
It has always helped me to frame this as “having a stalker” to people
who I do not want to have a political conversation with—that may suffice
to explain the severity of the situation and why you need privacy. But
it can be worth the effort to be honest about what’s going on. This can
help build stronger relationships and demystify this common occurrence,
while encouraging others who may not have considered that it could
happen to them or someone they know to take online privacy seriously.
Most people will respond with fear and sympathy, though sometimes they
will suggest or even insist that you call the police.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach. In my case, I had to compel my
conservative mother to promise that she would not involve the police. I
did so by appealing to my right to personal safety and my autonomy as
the victim in the situation, asking her to respect my wishes and
reminding her that the police can do very little to respond to targeted
harassment like this—and all that calling them would do would be to open
me up to their scrutiny, since I was being accused of criminal activity.
Such conversations can be very difficult, but they are often necessary.
Remind your friends and family not to react or respond to any phone
calls, emails, or social media requests.
Things to remember when talking to your friends and family:
life. Do not let them succeed at doing this. Tell your family that the
best way to support you is to refuse to give in to their tactics.
you are being targeted for no reason. This will not serve you if reasons
emerge—and it will only delegitimize and further endanger those who
can’t distance themselves from anarchist politics.
politics you adhere to or your perceived irresponsibility for getting
yourself “into this situation.” Fighting for a better world involves
challenges. If anything, it is to your credit that you have provoked
this response by your efforts.
protect themselves. Send them this article or a list of resources; offer
to help them lock down their social media if they are not tech savvy.
perhaps the neighbors will receive messages about you. Prepare them for
worst-case scenario, but emphasize that it is unlikely.
Take a deep breath. Do not blame yourself. Emotionally this can be
deeply disturbing and disruptive, adding a layer of acute stress to your
life. There may be people out there who know what you look like and you
will have no idea who they are. Sometimes information from doxxes
becomes a permanent part of the internet if you name is googled; this
can affect your job prospects. Sometimes nothing comes from the
attention—but there is always the possibility that someone will try to
pick up where the last doxxer left off.
Until you are sure that your time in the spotlight is over, you may have
to alter some aspects of your life. Ask yourself, “What kind of life do
I want to live? How can I manage my anxiety? Are there ways I can
embrace being a more public figure? How can I feel secure in taking
risks and being active again?” Especially as political tensions
intensify, it may be important to take more extreme safety measures.
Here are some of the measures you might choose to employ:
images the way you need them to. This can create some awkward
conversations, especially at family events or in professional
situations. Be aware of who appears in photos with you; inform them that
appearing in a photo with you may attract unwanted attention. It can be
helpful to rehearse the conversations you may need to have.
this makes your address publicly available. Try to hold on to your old
driver’s license or ID and receive mail at a post office box. Consider
when to use a real address and when to use a fake one or omit your
address altogether when you sign up for things online or in person.
over and over.
groups, places, or individuals could be implicated by being seen or
photographed in your vicinity.
training, but should include defensive and disarming training.
security.
affinity. You may be surprised at how much empathy they express.
No matter how hard the people targeting you try make you feel isolated,
you are not in this alone. As a community, we must protect each other
and our online networks from harassment, imprisonment, political
violence, and intimidation. Together, we can do this.
[1] The concept of spheres was developed by the Smiling Faces
Collective.