West County Labs

You have a new best friend.

West County Labs helps public interest organizations establish their own holistic safety programs, combining operational risk management, digital security, and psychosocial wellness support. Working with human rights researchers, journalists, academics, activists, and targeted individuals, we research, plan, and train to build long-term resilience against threats ranging from cyberattacks to burn-out.

Based outside of Santa Rosa in California's Sonoma County, we provide in-person support throughout Northern California and remote consultations to clients across the United States.

Recent Work

A Short Introduction to Holistic Security

This post is a slightly edited version of my short talk given to the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz human rights investigation labs: https://rca.ucsc.edu/news-events/Past Events/holistic-digital-security-webinar.html I want to simply share what the concept of holistic security is and how it is important

Taking control of your Twitter past: Deleting all your Tweets

A common tactic of online harassers is dredging up and sharing their targets’ old social media posts. By taking posts from years ago and removing any connection with their original context, trolls will take a victim’s inside jokes, sarcastic comments, and at-times problematic content from years past to convince

Are you on a troll's Twitter List? How to check and remove yourself.

Do you ever wonder why sometimes it seems like trolls are so quick to reply to your tweets? There are many reasons for this, but one tactic to know is that trolls frequently use lists to consolidate victims for targeted harassment. Trolls may have you on several lists! How do

Twitter is not an airport: Don’t announce your departure — for your own good.

In recent weeks, several celebrities have deactivated their accounts citing harassment. These high profile deactivations are usually followed by follower or media commentary discussing the departure on public sources. On Thursday, Chrissy Teigen became the latest and most famous of these departures: This notice may as well say “Hi, there’