Yesterday I was invited to speak on Know Your Rights, in the activist parlance known as KYR. I am a seasoned IT professional focusing on Governance Risk & Compliance with a strong Cybersecurity bent. I use the word “seasoned”, because things did get a bit spicy yesterday.

My fellow speaker immigrant rights attorney Caroline Shoenberger was speaking on the rights people have under the law. My presentation focused on the mental health of children as it relates to immigration and resources available to them.

This is a topic that has been in the news recently and has divided people in our country. It has divided families. So needless to say, this is a white-hot issue at the moment. Well, as luck would have it, during Caroline’s presentation, she started to witness a barrage of shared screen requests. Caroline may have thought someone wanted to access the Zoom presentation or inadvertently clicked OK. Either way, we had front row seats to a Zoombombing incident. This “troll” for lack of a better term, began to type out racist words into the presentation. Poor Caroline did not understand what was going on, as she began to wrestle to get control of the mouse. All the while she was giving her presentation (Caroline, as smart as she is, printed out her presentation) moved to her paper copy. The person helping Caroline stopped sharing the screen only to see that the troll had another trick up his sleeve. He created around a dozen of profiles within Zoom and began showing filthy images of Nazis and pornography and playing loud metal music. As you figured out by now, the virtual part of the presentation was over, and we closed the Zoom session.

You may ask, why are you telling me this semi-entertaining story? There are several lessons we can take away. Of course, there are the technical lessons that we need to ensure that participants register for attendance of Zoom events. But there are more important lessons, such as the hatred that we are experiencing in our country. This was a presentation on Knowing Your Rights. There is nothing illegal or unproper about people that are here in our country knowing their rights that they can and cannot exercise. It is important to know the rights we have to protect us. So, when someone is disturbing a presentation that is giving information on your rights; this is obviously someone who wants to deny your right to know and in turn deny you your rights. Tell me, is there anything more unamerican than that?

As a postscript, the incident has been reported to authorities. I do not believe that we will ever find out who this troll is. I am sure that they used a VPN to hide where they were doing their attack from and since we did not require registration, we cannot chase down their email.

Yet we can be more respectable to each other. Violence in any form should be condemned as a form of intimidation. Make no mistake, this was a demonstration of violence. If you cannot justify your position, maybe your position needs to be reevaluated and not result in violent behavior.