3 ms·
Capture the Flag Competition Aims to Trace Missing Persons
- chrisseaton 7y agoI always wonder - how do organisations that help to find missing people handle the fact that some of the people may not want to be found? How do they avoid, for example, inadvertently helping an abusive partner find their victim who has run away to safety? Imagine having escaped and then seeing your photo on Twitter! By the time you ask them to stop it could be too late and people around you could have realised your past.
- mikece 7y agoIf it’s like most OSINT exercises, participants find clues to find a person but the actual contacting is done by law enforcement for this very reason. A child or spouse might have fled because of abuse: contacting them to say they have been found and can go home — or worse, giving location info to the abusing party — could end in tragedy. By handing off to law enforcement and letting them take it from there it allows for such situations to be handled confidentially as well as allowing the authority of the state possibly begin the process of justice.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI don't see how that works when police forces literally Tweet photos of missing people though. Could easily blow their cover in their new location?
- ISL 7y agoI imagine that there is human judgement applied to the decision to make missing-person photos and information public. Police departments see the impacts of abuse more than almost anyone except those being abused -- they're going to, in general, be very sensitive to enabling an abuser.
- jacobush 7y agoYeah, that sounds reassuring but do you have any basis for this? (More than it should work like this, but I'm jaded.)
- lazyasciiart 7y agoWhy do you imagine that? My impression is that police officers are more likely than the average person to be abusive themselves, and that police departments are still fairly unsympathetic to domestic abuse victims.
- joshschreuder 7y agoRelated: https://www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObject/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObject/ https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse SFW but fair warning to not think too hard about the origins of these photos or the horrors they may have contained.