Gisela Pérez de Acha
ABOUT
Gisela Pérez de Acha is a journalist focused on digital forensics and investigative reporting. She is a trained human rights lawyer with master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley where she now teaches cybersecurity for upcoming journalists. Gisela is also a reporter on the extremism beat at the Investigative Reporting Program and part of an Emmy award-winning team at the New York Times for her collaboration on the story about The Siege of Culiacán. In addition, Gisela is an open source researcher at the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and a trainer at Amnesty International's Digital Verification Corps, a network of more than 100 volunteers at six global universities who fact-check social media posts regarding war crimes and grave human rights violations across the world. She has specialized in Internet studies and the politics of Latin America for over a decade. Born and raised in Mexico, Gisela speaks fluent Spanish, English, French and Portuguese.
WRITING
 Frontline | American Insurrection |  El País | “Sentí más odio que nada”: la historia de un militar de Estados Unidos que quiso iniciar una guerra civil |  ProPublica | “I Felt Hate More Than Anything”: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War |
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 Storymap | Human Rights Crisis in Chile: An OSINT Inquiry. |  Washington Post | ‘Control Z’: la serie de Netflix muestra los fallos de la seguridad digital (y los clichés) |  Medium | How polyamory’s core tenets can help us navigate moving forward post-pandemic |
 New York Times | The Plan to Rescue El Chapo’s Son: Chaos, Guns and Fear |  Aristegui Noticias | Faltan pruebas y subestiman número de contagios de Covid-19 en México |  Aristegui Noticias | Los "narcobloqueos" en Culiacán |
 Medium | White Mexican director wins an Oscar for Roma … Mexican feminists debate. |  Amnesty International | Using Digital Verification Before Deployment into the Field: The Advantages from Libya |  Mission Local | Sexual harassment, bounced checks, unpaid bills: Former employees level bevy of allegations against owner of shuttered Mission de Flores |
 Medium | My brother came to visit me this Día de Muertos |  Vice | Mexico Hacking and Spying on Its Citizens Is a 'Human Rights Crisis' |  Vice | La Muerte de Charlie Hebdo |
 Vice | Protestas en Buenos Aires por la Muerte de Nisman |
TV & VIDEO
ACADEMIA
INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE: Online freedom of association and internet infrastructure
2018
A socio-technical investigation on the relationship between the Internet architecture and the human right to freedom of association
BOOK: How the Internet Really Works in Mexico (Spanish)
2016
A deep dive into the legal and technical ramifications of online human rights in Mexico
RESEARCH PAPER: Digital Gender Gap in Mexico.
2018
A substantive analysis on women's practices around technology in Mexico.
UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery to Find Mass Graves in Mexico.
Algorithmic Burying: the role of Facebook and Archiving Human Rights Abuses in Syria. The White Helmets Facebook page and challenge that human rights researchers face when trying to retrieve past content.