Gisela Pérez de Acha
ABOUT
Gisela Pérez de Acha reports on extremism and other topics for the Investigative Reporting Program with a focus on digital forensics and network analysis. She is also a human rights lawyer, an open source researcher at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, and a trainer at Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps, a global network of volunteers who fact-check social media posts about war crimes and human rights violations. Gisela is part of an Emmy award-winning team at the New York Times for her collaboration on the story about The Siege of Culiacán and a digital safety trainer with PEN America. Born and raised in Mexico, Gisela speaks fluent Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. She has a master’s degree from Berkeley Journalism, where she now teaches cybersecurity and open-source investigations for upcoming journalists.
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.