“This violence is intersectional and may be accompanied by other forms of violence. A person can be physically followed, stalked, or spied on for subsequent threats. It all comes together. A holistic vision is needed to approach this work and undertake a risk assessment that tries to detect digital signals or others,” Marla from InterSecLab remarked at the Feminist Learning Circle: "Stalkerware and targeted digital surveillance: What it is and what strategies can we use to look out for one another collectively." Marla is a Brazilian researcher specialised in cybersecurity and founder/director of InterSecLab, a transfeminist digital forensics laboratory for civil society focused on Latin America.
In this forum, organised by Take Back the Tech!, in which around 30 activists took part, we learned concepts related to stalkerware, often referred to as “cyberstalking” or “stalker virus”. As we saw, attacks of this kind are characterised by the diversity of forms they may take (in different apps and devices, through human intervention, or by installing code on our phones) and how hard it can be to identify it, which often occurs when the problem is already among us.
These observations were shared by Marla, who coordinated the laboratory for threats MariaLab and worked as a cybersecurity analyst in partnership with Access Now and CitizenLab on incident response projects to support civil society in Brazil. She also took part in the Amnesty International Security Lab Digital Forensics Fellowship: “What I want to say is that sometimes we fail to see the digital traces of this kind of violence because this kind of tools are engineered to evade all forms of detection. But at times in everyday interactions a former partner may mention something they had no other means of knowing, contact you at inappropriate times, or approach you directly and in person aided by information they have obtained by means of digital surveillance.”
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Illustration: Laura Mercedes Ibáñez López