
Capture the Flag Competition Aims to Trace Missing Persons - wglb
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/competition-aims-to-trace-missing/
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chrisseaton
I 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.

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mikece
If 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.

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chrisseaton
I 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?

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ISL
I 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.

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lazyasciiart
Why 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.

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joshschreuder
Related:

[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.

