This is a tricky problem. I would guess that some traditional
spam-rejection mechanisms might be applicable, but there are grey areas:
Rejection of mails from anonymous origins may help, but on one hand there
are some (sent via hacked ordinary mailboxes) which can't technically be
distinguished from non-anonymous communication, and on the other hand
people who are under threat of harassment might want to use anonymizing
services themselves to communicate.
Content filtering requires training samples, and there is probably not
enough data to train a Bayesian filter as in SpamAssassin or more modern
sentiment analysis neural networks. The false positive and false negative
rates might be unacceptably high, requiring manual checks.
In addition, these tools are not helping in identifying perpetrators. I
would suspect that they will in most cases use techniques which make them
untraceable. Given that trust in LEAs is damaged after the many racist
police incidents in the USA or the recent hatemail incidents based on
information retrieved through police computer systems in Germany, I would
also suspect that some victims would be reluctant to hope that police
authorities will track down perpetrators.
Some groups on both ends of the political spectrum therefore prefer to
track down and attack peeceived "enemies" themselves. This is obviously not
a solution, even when it's well-intentioned.
Cheers,
Hans-Martin
Am 15. Juli 2020 10:40:05 vorm. schrieb Paul Ebersman via mailop
<mailop@mailop.org>:
We have all sorts of tools for detecting, filtering, documenting spam
and processes for trying to get spammers off the net (and occasionally
even prosecuted).
But in these tense times, lots of PoC/non-white/non-cis get hate emails,
death threats, etc.
Is there software out there like spamassassin et al for detecting these
kinds of threats? Does anyone have pointers on web pages/instructions
for how to configure common mail readers/services so users can
self-filter?
Finally, I know that there are avenues for tracking illegal activity and
ways to work with FBI, Interpol, etc. Any of these teams specialize in
or at least familiar with how to prosecute hate crimes perpetrated via
email threats?
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