18 Barriers to tools use Despite an initial attraction to technology tools as potential solutions to problems faced by human rights defenders, the outcomes that we heard definitely aren’t all rosy: almost of all the intermediaries we spoke to had numerous examples of serious problems that HRDs they worked with had faced due to their choice, or use, of technology tools in their human rights documentation work. It is also worth noting that the majority of tools mentioned are primarily available in English, with limited functionality in other language scripts, even major world languages like the Arabic script, or Cyrillic. Naturally, this limits their usefulness for those who do not work primarily in the Latin script. Overall, there seemed to be a growing cynicism around tools, especially by people who had tried using a certain tool and found it to be unsuitable, and by those who were working in very different contexts to the one in which the tool was developed. Reconciling those very different realities will be crucial to providing useful tools in the future. Below is a non-exhaustive selection of the most commonly mentioned problems. DIGITAL SECURITY Valeria Umaña, who works with groups in Nicaragua, said that for the people she works with, “the more technology they have, the more danger they can be in”. She gave the example of one member of their community wanting to share a video documenting a violation, who had heard that he could send the video through Facebook; but instead of sending it to the intended recipient, he found another page with a similar name, and sent it to them instead by mistake. We also heard that conflicting or confusing advice between those who are deep into the digital security world, and perhaps removed from the realities of human rights defenders work, has sometimes put people and their information in danger. For instance, one interviewee highlighted a case of an NGO they work with who was encouraged to change to a free software operating system, which then wasn’t interoperable with their printer - so in order to print documents they started to put documents on USB sticks and print them out at local internet cafes. Before too long, they realised that the USB sticks had been misplaced, which resulted in a worse security breach than was initially anticipated. Being realistic about the overall security situation of the people using the tools is key to coming up with an actionable plan for dealing with threats and risk, and this requires a solid knowledge of context in addition to understanding of digital security. DATA STORAGE Storing data can be expensive, especially in the case of high-resolution images, or video, as Friedhelm Weinberg of HURIDOCS identified: storing lots of data, cataloguing it and making it searchable over a long (perhaps indefinite) period of time, is an ongoing problem. Though a number of tech tools make it easier for video to be captured or found, a few interviewees identified that the issue of storage was still a growing problem for them, both in terms of prohibitively high costs, but also a technical solution that can be easily accessible by anyone within the organisation - and ideally, with offline access, too.