Protecting Staff in Turbulent Times: How Campaign for Southern Equality Approaches Digital Safety as Organizational Resilience
CSE's preparedness and resilience lead explains how Kanary helps advocacy organizations protect its people from doxxing, harassment, and targeted online attacks.
Syd Williams-Black, Preparedness & Resilience, Campaign for Southern Equality
When Syd Williams-Black joined Campaign for Southern Equity (CSE) as the Special Assistant forPreparedness & Resilience, that role hadn't existed before. As a LGBTQ organization in the South, since had been attuned to safety and security issues since launching in 2011; the organization had developed internal systems and resources in response to threats and had experienced periods of threats occurring frequently and periods with very few threats.
However, in 2022 there was a marked increase in anti-LGBTQ attacks across both physical and digital spheres. This marked a new period.
In previous years, the organization hadn't needed someone to sit at the intersection of physical safety, staff wellbeing, and digital privacy. But with an increasingly hostile digital environment, overlapping with new administrative rulings, activists are facing a new type and volume of personal threats.
CSE has been building a more equal South for LGBTQ+ people since 2011, growing from marriage equality advocacy into a broad portfolio of direct services, litigation, grantmaking, and organizing. Today, programs like the Trans Youth Emergency Project help families access gender-affirming care despite state bans. That visibility comes with risk, and protecting the people doing that work has become as operationally important as the work itself.
Syd brings a background in executive operations, organizational preparedness, and project management, and as a Black transgender man, a personal stake in the communities CSE serves. In this Q&A, Syd talks about why digital safety has to be part of every advocacy organization's resilience strategy, the particular challenge of protecting staff who want to be found online for some things but not others, and what it took to get their distributed team enrolled and protected.
Why CSE turned to Kanary
What circumstances led you to consider a solution like Kanary?
Over the past year, we've seen a significant increase in online harassment directed at LGBTQ+ organizations, particularly those supporting transgender people. As our preparedness and resilience work expanded, we recognized that protecting staff and organizational information had become just as important as protecting our physical spaces.
We wanted to better understand our digital footprint, reduce publicly available personal information, and help staff mitigate risks associated with doxxing, harassment, and targeted online attacks. We also needed something that could scale across our team without adding hours of manual work to people's already full plates.
What were your main considerations when evaluating vendors?
Effectiveness, ease of use, transparency, and trust. Customer support, ongoing monitoring, and the ability to show measurable progress were also important factors.
“We wanted a platform that could continuously identify and remove exposed personal information rather than requiring staff to submit manual removal requests over and over. We also wanted a vendor that understood the unique risks facing nonprofits, advocacy organizations, and LGBTQ+ communities, specifically.”
What made Kanary stand out?
Kanary stood out because it's proactive rather than just informational. A lot of tools will show you where your data exists but leave the removal work to you. Kanary's continuous monitoring and automated removal process significantly reduced the burden on our staff.
The platform was also straightforward to implement and easy for employees to understand. For an organization with limited capacity, having a solution that largely works in the background while still giving us visibility into what Kanary finds and removes made a meaningful difference.
What Kanary looks like in practice
What do your colleagues say about using Kanary?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, largely because the experience is hands-off. Team members appreciate getting updates that show progress without having to navigate dozens of data broker websites themselves.
For many of our staff, especially those in highly visible advocacy roles, simply knowing that someone actively monitors and removes their personal information has helped reduce anxiety around online harassment. People can't always articulate what's weighing on them until something lifts it.
One situation I can speak to involves a team member who also has an acting career. When they went through the Kanary process, they were struck by how much information was out there, but they didn't want everything removed. They're still actively working in film and want to be findable for that. So we had to work through what they wanted to protect, what they needed to keep visible, and where the line was. It was a real reminder that privacy isn't one-size-fits-all. You can't just scrub someone's footprint without understanding what that footprint means to them.
Kanary stats:
300+ risks confirmed and removals facilitated across 38 distinct data broker sites
175+ exposures removed from search engines like Google and Bing
Started monitoring X for doxxing attacks in Q2 2026, initial monitoring gives staff peace of mind and a fall back to help report issues when things escalate
How does CSE think about digital safety alongside physical safety?
They're completely interconnected. We do de-escalation training, run through emergency scenarios, and make sure everybody on the team knows the safety protocols before any event. When you're publicizing events, sharing the address, the date, the time, you're accepting that you don't fully control who shows up or what they know about your staff. That's always a risk we're managing.
Kanary fits into that broader picture. If someone wants to find out where a staff member lives, making that harder is part of the same work as making sure we have a safety team at the door.
CSE also seems to invest significantly in staff wellbeing. Can you speak to that?
We can't serve our community if we aren't also healthy. We have a healing and resilience function in-house, and that shows up in a lot of ways. Sometimes it's a staff meeting to talk about grief or anxiety, sometimes it's just giving people a day off. This work is heavy. People on our team face real threats, and the emotional weight of that is real. We take mental and physical health seriously because failing to do that shows up in the work and in the people.
The evolving digital threat landscape
How has the current environment shaped the way you think about digital risk?
The internet has given people a way to attack without facing responsibility for it. People can comment anonymously, they can be whoever they want to be, and even when they're not anonymous, the distance of a screen gives them a sense of insulation. That has changed the calculus for organizations like ours.
"Digital security should be part of your overall organizational safety strategy, not siloed as an IT issue. Physical safety, cybersecurity, employee privacy, communications, incident response: these are all interconnected pieces of resilience."
What's particularly challenging is that our events are public. We publicize them because we want people to come. But that means anyone who has made a threatening comment online also has our location and timing. We track what we can, but you can never fully know who's paying attention or what they plan to do with that information. Reducing how much personal information exists about our staff online is one of the few levers we actually control.
What's your advice to other advocacy organizations facing similar threats?
Start with a conversation with your team. Most people don't know what they don't know.
“A lot of our staff hadn't heard of doxxing before we started this work, and many didn't realize how much their personal lives and their professional roles intertwine online in ways that create risk. Before you can help people, you have to understand where they are and what they actually need.”
It’s important not to wait until something happens to start building protections. The earlier you understand and manage your digital footprint and develop response plans, the better you'll position yourself if you become a target.
Would you recommend Kanary to other organizations?
Absolutely. Organizations working in advocacy, healthcare, journalism, education, or any field where staff may face targeted harassment should seriously consider tools like Kanary. No single product eliminates every risk, but Kanary has become an important part of our broader preparedness strategy. It reduces exposure, saves staff time, and gives us greater confidence that we're taking real, proactive steps to protect the people doing this work.
Campaign for Southern Equality is working to build a South where LGBTQ+ people are equal in every sphere of life, through direct services, litigation, grantmaking, organizing, and advocacy. Learn more at southernequality.org.
