Beyond the Blackout: Documenting Atrocities in Tigray’s Forgotten War

Adapting to a Low-Tech, High-Risk Environment

This project underscored the necessity of adapting security protocols to the realities of the operating environment. The team learned that an emphasis on offline-first solutions was more effective than complex digital tools that could fail due to infrastructure limitations. This reliance on physical transport, robust hardware, and user-friendly encryption was successful for nearly every aspect of the workflow, with the notable exception of timestamping, which remained a challenge due to the severe connectivity issues.

The Importance of Trust in Community-Based Archiving

Trust was the cornerstone of this initiative. In a conflict affecting a tight-knit community like Tigray, every decision—from selecting tools to identifying data sources and training local journalists—was made collectively. Nothing proceeded without the full consensus of community members.

This collaborative structure was possible because the initiative grew from years of voluntary work and credibility earned through lived experience. With fewer than six million people and minimal degrees of separation between families, everyone in Tigray is traceable within the social and political landscape. This closeness fostered trust but introduced risks absent with outside actors. Local sharing carries cultural and social sensitivities, such as the fear of bringing shame to families of survivors, particularly in cases of sexual violence. It also risks being misinterpreted: grassroots evidence collection can be viewed as operating outside official channels, raising suspicion that shared data might be commodified or used for personal gain.

In this environment, consensus-based decision-making and trust as the organizing principle were essential and enabled the work.

This collaborative approach was critical for the project’s success and the ethical stewardship of highly sensitive data. The project demonstrated that technology is merely a facilitator; the real work lies in building human networks of trust. Interestingly, diaspora and foreign entities were often trusted more than local journalists, as they were perceived to have greater influence in justice and accountability processes.

A Need for Accessible and Resilient Tools

The challenges faced in Tigray highlight a broader need for cheap, accessible, and open-source tools designed for evidence preservation in resource-constrained environments. The success of this project relied on commercially available, consumer-grade products that were simple to use. 

The project’s most significant technical challenge was balancing security best practices with the reality of the operating environment. While tools like VeraCrypt (for creating hidden, encrypted volumes) and TailsOS (for anonymous browsing) were considered, they were ultimately rejected. In a high-stress conflict zone with non-technical users, compounded by the fact that the local team’s second language was English, the complexity of these tools was deemed a liability; a single mistake in their use could lead to the permanent loss of critical data.

This led to a crucial and deliberate compromise. The team encountered errors when using OpenPGP to encrypt large individual files and folders, which would have provided the most granular, asset-level security. Instead of risking data corruption or overwhelming users with complex command-line workarounds, the team opted for simpler, device-level encryption using the native and user-friendly FileVault on the MacBooks. While technically less secure than encrypting each file individually, this approach provided robust, reliable protection for the entire dataset and, most importantly, minimized the risk of human error, which was identified as the greatest threat to the data.

Finally, the initial assumption that large, terabyte-sized drives would be optimal for storage provisioning proved incorrect. We initially provisioned drives ranging from 1TB to 4TB. However, optimal utilization dictated that drives with significantly smaller storage capacities, approximating 128GB, would have been more effective for field distribution. The rationale was twofold: the collected data was highly distributed, and local journalists required dedicated copies. Provisioning 1TB+ units resulted in low storage utilization and substantial empty space. The team ultimately accepted the compromise of larger drives, as deploying the necessary volume of 128GB units would have substantially increased the logistical burden and operational risk associated with transporting a higher equipment count.

User Experience as a Security Imperative

The project revealed that in a high-stakes field environment, user experience is a critical component of security. We initially considered deploying gold-standard security tools like TailsOS for anonymity and VeraCrypt for creating hidden encrypted containers – see point above.

However, in practice with non-technical journalists operating under extreme stress, these tools proved to be a liability.  A complex interface with multiple steps increased the likelihood of a user making a mistake that could either fail to protect the data or, worse, lead to its permanent loss, or trigger unnecessary operational redundancy, increasing costs and harming team moraleWe learned that the greatest immediate risk was not a sophisticated adversary cracking our encryption, but a well-meaning user accidentally locking themselves out of a hidden volume forever.

As a result, we actively chose simpler, more intuitive tools. Showing a journalist how to enable the native FileVault encryption on their MacBook – a one-time, set-and-forget process – was infinitely more effective and secure in practice than training them on a complex, multi-step process they would have to remember under duress. This experience demonstrated that the most secure tool is often the one that a user can reliably operate correctly every single time. Crucially, the tools had to be zero-cost solutions. Given that the operating environment in Tigray is largely cash-based and lacks widespread digital payment infrastructure, any solution requiring a subscription or online purchase was deemed inherently sub-optimal.

The Human Cost and Cognitive Burden

Beyond the technical and logistical complexities, the project illuminated the human toll of evidence preservation in conflict settings. Civil society actors bore a dual burden: conducting high-risk documentation under constant security threats while also carrying the weight of their own trauma as survivors or witnesses and engaging directly with other survivors of violence. This required navigating a delicate balance between the imperative to document and the ethical obligation to center survivor dignity and sensitivity. High-stress conditions, fractured infrastructure, and perpetual risk of exposure compounded the psychological strain. In this context, user error and burnout were not incidental operational risks but outcomes of the challenging environment itself.

For future efforts, two areas for improvement stand out. First, dedicated Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) resources should be integrated into operational design to address the cumulative psychological burden on frontline teams. Second, establishing core staffing structures with individuals more operationally removed from the conflict can help sustain continuity, reduce direct exposure of local actors, and ensure the work is not solely borne by those most at risk.

Recognizing psychosocial resilience as inseparable from technical security is central to the integrity and sustainability of evidence preservation in conflict environments. The most important insight was that resilience and trust proved as critical to data integrity as any protocol or hardware. Technical safeguards alone could not succeed without deliberate attention to human and psychosocial dimensions.