There were tons of family and friends separated from one another in the Katrina aftermath. Ton fo people who needed to and wated to be found and were found via official and ad hoc databases.
But what about those that didn’t want to be found?
Speaking on a panel at the 16th annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference here, Southworth told of a woman who’d been living in a domestic violence safe house in New Orleans. The woman evacuated the city in her car until she ran out of gas in a small town in northern Louisiana.
There she was taken in by a local domestic violence shelter, but every day she would go to the town center and hide behind a tree to see who was getting off buses bringing evacuees to the town. She and others like her feared their abusers might end up in the same place.
To keep abusers from finding them, victims of domestic violence often go to elaborate lengths to keep even the most basic contact information out of databases associated with voting records, supermarket club cards and change-of-address forms.
Those fleeing Katrina, however, faced a more pressing conundrum due to mandatory forms at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Red Cross centers.
Southworth attributes the lack of anonymous assistance from federal and state government agencies to overblown worries that “everyone is out to get two free turkeys instead of one.”
(via wired)
