Documenting digital rights violations

As we see different digital attacks happening, we need to document these for very different reasons and purposes:

Empowerment and regaining agency during and after attacks

Preparing for future threats and attacks (risk assessment and security planning) Seeking the support of a trusted party to help you

Reporting to Social Media Platforms and Other Technical Teams

For Legal Cases or seeking protection from law enforcement agencies For Forensic Reports

Be aware that documenting online violence against you or others can be emotionally draining and in extreme cases (re-)traumatizing. Avoid to do the documentation alone, have a supportive team or community to navigate the emotional toll of the documentation process. If you prepare to document online violence, which happened or is happening against yourself, you might want to decide, that another trusted or professional person could do these tasks to reduce the emotional burdon.

Steps to Take for Documentation

Document as much as possible, including your interactions with the attacker(s), and the emotional, and physical impacts of those interactions. This "digital log" could be a text document or a spreadsheet as well as a separate (online) calendar - to keep the timeline. For your own purposes, you could also keep a journal on paper.

Each record of a digital incident should include time and date you received attacks, links and email addresses (or other identifying information) from the attackers, names of users or people involved, and the type of attack. See this evidence chart example from Acoso.online.

You should also keep a folder where you save screenshots of messages and images sent by an aggressor or impact of a digital attack. Do an online search with the brand, model, and operating system of your device and "how to screenshot" (for example, "Samsung Galaxy S21 Android how to screenshot"). To save specific images, press and hold on the image on a mobile device, or right-click on the image on a computer (control-click on Mac, use the menu key on Windows). This should let you use the option to "save image as".

When taking screenshots, you might want to make sure to also capture the clock and date of your device, and at the same time not to include into your screenshots sensitive information, that might be risky to be seen and documented (eg. other screens of apps with personal messages or alike).

If you are documenting websites or information in the browser, try to mkae sure the address (URL) of the page, in the top bar of your screen, is visible in your screenshots. Addresses help verify where the harassment or attack occurred, and help technical and legal professionals locate it more easily. Documenting emails: Each email has a "header" that contains more information about who sent the message and how (like the addresses and postmark on a paper letter). Saving this information can help those trying to help you. Here are some instructions on viewing and saving email headers.

If there is a video, you need to save it as evidence, have an external drive (which may be called a hard drive, USB drive, or thumb drive) available to save the video to. You may need to use the "save as" instructions above, make a video screen capture, or use a browser plugin like Video DownloadHelper to save video.

Take precautions regarding where and how you save this information. It is safer to save backups to your local device (not online/"the cloud"), and protected them with encryption and in hidden folders or drive partitions if you can. You don't want to risk losing these records or, worse yet, having them exposed.

When Documenting Attacks That Target You Because of Your Gender or Sexuality (Gender-Based Violence Online or GBVO)

Seek the support of a trusted party to help you. Documenting harassment can trigger traumatic memories. Having someone else do the work of saving evidence can lessen the trauma. So try to
 

have someone who can ensure you are fed, get enough sleep, listen to your concerns, and otherwise feel safe. Here are some more tips on how to enlist your friends or family to help you. Even if you have already deleted the evidence of harassment, that does not mean it did not happen to you.

It can be helpful to write down a timeline of all the events in sequencial order. Just capture everything you can, including both technical information and your emotions. This allows you to make a clearer picture for yourself of aggressors' actions and behavior patterns, your risks, the technical implications, and people involved. Make a decision about what you will record and how, and then draw up a strategy about how you will face this process.

When Asking For Help at School or Work, or From Your Human Resources Team

Keep in mind that to ask for help in an institution, you do not need to share intimate materials if you do not want to.

Here are some more tips on talking to your employer about the harassment you are facing. And here are some guidelines for employers about harassment, from the journalist protection organization PEN America, to share with your employer.

When Documenting and Reporting to Social Media Platforms and Other Technical Teams

You can look for links to the reporting pages for many well-known social media platforms on Security in a Box and Acoso.online.

Platforms, Internet Service Providers, and other technology companies will be most able to help if you can provide the links/addresses, screenshots, images, and other evidence you gathered in your digital log, so have that ready to share.

When Documenting for Legal Cases

Consider whether you want to file a legal case. Will that put you at any additional risk? Can you afford the time and effort it will take?

Research legal processes regarding digital threats in your country and region to guide you through the required steps for building exhibits for trial.

If you decide to file a legal case, you may want to ask platforms or Internet Service Providers to save information about the harassment for you. This may only be possible for a short time (weeks or a month) after the harassment takes place. See Without My Consent's information on filing a litigation hold request for more information on how to do this.

When Documenting for Forensic Reports

For more targeted threats, like spyware on your devices or malicious emails directed specifically at you, it may help your case to gather deeper technical evidence:

This might include log files from your phone or computer, EXIF tags on images that might give information about where and when a photo was taken,

File attachments on malicious messages could also be valuable evidence. DO NOT click or open these, under any circumstances. A trusted technical advisor should be able to help you safely contain these attachments and send them to people who can analyze them.

If you can, downloading or backing up complete web pages can also be useful to those trying to help you. If the page where the harassment occurred is public (in other words, you don't have to log in to see it), one step you can take is to enter the page address into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to save it, and return to the saved page on that date later.

Further reading

Chayn.co: Collecting Evidence - How To Build A Domestic Abuse Case Without A Lawyer | https://chayn.gitbook.io/how-to-build-a-domestic-abuse-case-without-a-lawye/english/collecting- evidence#documenting-abuse
 

PEN America - Documenting Online Harassment | https://onlineharassmentfieldmanual.pen.org/documenting-online-harassment/