11 (and well‑resourced) technology support. If an organisation chooses to work with a company like Palantir, it is reasonable to assume that US Intelligence agencies have access to whatever data is being collected. In some contexts, using technology to document human rights violations was identified as a potential risk: Wendy Betts, director of eyeWitness to Atrocities, said: “In some places, even owning a smartphone that can film is problematic.” Video was identified as especially problematic within Zimbabwe. One Zimbabwean activist said: “Zimbabwe is a country that has a higher level of paranoia and pointing your phone at a group of people like you’re taking video can be seen as an aggressive act”. For more on the security practices of human rights defenders, please refer to research conducted by Becky Kazansky for Tactical Technology Collective on digital security in human rights.3 PRIORITIES Many tools developers we spoke to recognised a lack of uptake in their tools among human rights defenders, with some realising that this was a clash of priorities. For example, though Patrick Ball spent a long time trying to encourage uptake of Martus, he realised that ultimately many of his efforts were unsuccessful because at the time, “people wanted to get their data together, rather than it necessarily being secure.” When it came to using tools, priorities identified by potential users focused around the usability and accessibility of the tool. Having tools in local languages made a big difference to this, and being able to ask for and receive help in languages other than English helped people to feel comfortable with new tools. FINDING INFORMATION Knowing where to start when an organisation or an individual has decided they need a technology tool to perform a certain function for them, was raised multiple times as the very first barrier. For those who don’t speak English, this becomes even harder, as very little documentation or description is available in, for 3 https://tacticaltech.org/projects/security-context example, Arabic. Key issues that were raised along these lines here centred around not knowing who to ask, or what standards are already in place; for example, what categories to use when digitising information, or building a database of violations. Others mentioned using Google searches to find out what has already been done in the field they were looking into; but in some cases, this has proven to be unreliable, with people often unsure how up to date or reliable the information was. In some cases, documentation stops getting updated but without any visual ‘flags’ to the untrained eye. Others identified that talking to some technology providers yielded biased information. Mike Romig, who supports human rights organisations working in Egypt, said: “when you speak to one provider, they will generally recommend that you use their solution, and not necessarily what the organisation needs.” CHOOSING A TOOL Though this isn’t specific to human rights defenders, choosing tools seems to happen in a relatively ad hoc way.4 Indira Cornelio, from Mexico, said that sometimes a tool will get adopted simply because a director hears about it and pushes for it within the organisation, rather than because it is necessarily the best-suited tool, and others mentioned a tendency within organisations or communities to use the most popular tool rather than the most appropriate one. For newcomers to the field, there seem to be few visible differences between tools with similar aims; for example, Martus was compared to OpenEvsys and Casebox, with non-expert interviewees unable to distinguish what differentiated the various tools. Some organisations are also looking outside of tools labelled explicitly as being “for” human rights purposes, to find tools that they can repurpose for their needs, such as IMB’s I2 or Sentinel Visualizer. 4 See the Engine Room’s Tools Selection research, published in 2016.