In addition to the mixed-gender pseudonyms, I think all the "Stories" have Applebaum's picture, rather than the person named. Which makes it hella confusing.
I'm not entirely sure I believe there's more than one person responsible for any of the content on the website.
I just wish there was something more to this here. While I can't speak for either side, I always struggle with this type of accusation as anyone can say anything. Consensual and didn't like something after can lead to false allegations. The flip side is these action(s) did happen and that's horrible. for me, I always feel this shouldn't be public at all because a false allegation does similar damage reputationally that a real one does. For this reason, if the victim goes to social media I no longer believe them since the risk of damage to good people outweighs the crime to my moral stance. I respect that others may not agree with this though.
Vulgar as the attack site is, I am really getting quite tired of the go-to "she lies" stuff we see all over the Internet. Proper etiquette should be to not comment at all on such situations if you "side" with either party, but particularly the accused. At least until whatever investigations there are have concluded. I get so sick of how every tech site has dozens of comments when things like this happen, all of them stating that the victims are liars, or strongly insinuating it. How often do we find out that multiple parties accusing a single person of sexual assault were wrong?
Let's be fair here, defending the accused inherently means you're calling the victim(s) liars, especially this early in the event cycle. You're immediately assuming the accusers are lying for personal gain. You're being biased.
When it's a simple "he said, she said," fine, argue over character if you must. When it's just two parties involved, it can be quite messy and hard to untangle. But when we have these cases where multiple people are accusing the same person of the same thing, just keep your damn trap shut. It's disgusting how our society treats this type of thing as a subject for public debate. This is between the folks involved and the respective legal agencies involved, and nothing is helped by people subtley saying "stupid ladies, they lie about man."
Bringing this kind of accusation public takes courage. I don't see anyone leaping to defend Nest's CEO for his alleged instances of abuse. No one on HN has commented that people accusing Tony of being a jerk are just character assassins. I'd imagine plenty of people have axes to grind against Tony and Jake both, but when someone comes forward to make an accusation against the CEO, no one even argues against it. The ladies (and some men) however, are expected to provide evidence, pictures, videos, statements, DNA tests, rape kits, etc.
You can defend Jake and think whatever you want, but let's refrain from insinuating that multiple parties are lying about a single party. If this were a consensus algorithm, Jake's data would be overwritten, folks. Cosby's the same way: do you really think 40+ women are just lying to get attention?
That all said, yes the site with the stories is ham-fisted. That doesn't make every accusation everywhere false. It just means some people are very upset at Jake.
> when someone comes forward to make an accusation against the CEO, no one even argues against it. The ladies (and some men) however, are expected to provide evidence, pictures, videos, statements, DNA tests, rape kits, etc.
While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I think it's very important to consider the social and legal repercussions of the accusations when taking into account the level of proof required. Being an asshole in general with regard to business is not the same as sexual harassment, much less sexual assault. One can get you labelled as someone bad to work for, but in general many might not care because they are focused on results, while the other can get you ostracized from friends and family or convicted of a felony, depending on circumstance. Regardless of guilt. The burden of proof should, necessarily, be higher when the punishment is so much greater.
This doesn't excuse the behavior of publicly stating guilt or that one party is lying without evidence. That's horrible behavior and happens on both sides.
> This doesn't excuse the behavior of publicly stating guilt or that one party is lying without evidence. That's horrible behavior and happens on both sides.
Agreed. It just gets my dander up that people will resort to conspiracy theories before giving an entire group of women the benefit of the doubt.
> It just means some people are very upset at Jake.
"just"? Sorry no, but even that doesn't excuse this kind of stuff and more:
> Jake enjoys manipulating people through his built-up social capital, influence, and power, in order to get what he wants.
> If you spurn Jake or attempt to stand up to him, he'll go after the people you care about the most next, doing whatever he can to humiliate and harm them.
> Jake is known to do whatever it takes to get others to do all the work, but have his name listed first on the paper "because the names should be alphabetically sorted." He's also quite happy to do the same with code, projects, articles, whatever he can to increase his level of power and influence.
> It is these people, not people like Jacob, that should be the leaders of our community.
This does seem to be about "a kind of person" rather than deeds. Check out the suggested tweet via icon at the bottom, too, huh. And this tweet makes no sense to me either:
> Tor had the chance to nip this in the bud back when Jake was just a plagiarist. They ignored it, and he graduated to sexual assault.
Unless there is more about that plagiarism claim than what is on that mailing list, and unless it's about more than that document, that'd be kind of rich anyway. But even more importantly, nip what in the bud, exactly? If he's such a rapist sociopath, how would kicking him off TOR have helped anyone? As another tweet goes
> You don't just kick sociopaths down the road and play like you've done the necessary. That's extending their social license to operate.
Instead you do what, exactly? I guess actually diagnosing someone a sociopath before calling them that isn't what one does. I guess it just means he has no rights and must be destroyed. This is actually nastier than anything I read in the allegiations so far.
> How often do we find out that multiple parties accusing a single person of sexual assault were wrong?
Two friends and anonymous accounts, unless I'm mistaken? And what are the accusations exactly - groping a drunk sleeping person, then stopping when they say so? That's it? I'm not saying that's okay, hell no, but it's also not my business, and certainly not enough to treat him like some monster unfit to breathe. It's like saying Appelbaum beats his child, sure, that's horrible, but that just means I wouldn't want to be his friend, doesn't take anything away from his work.
How often do you find victims of abuse forming a "collective" complete with a twitter account named TimeToDieJake dedicated to smearing the supposed perpetrator, but not so much to proving their allegiations? Is this really the kind of precedent you want to let slip by? Is that how you want to dilute the words "rapist" and "sociopath"? To be fired at will, without due process or evidence?
> If this were a consensus algorithm, Jake's data would be overwritten, folks.
For me it doesn't even pass the smell test yet. There is way too much glee and self-righteousness, and saying multiple unknown people can't lie, and to compare this with Cosby, doesn't cut it either. Bring the evidence to the police. If you don't have evidence, well, I for one will pay further attention to this, I expect a whole lot of wheat and chaff to separate, one way or the other.
> This is between the folks involved and the respective legal agencies involved, and nothing is helped by people subtley saying "stupid ladies, they lie about man."
They made a website dedicated solely to assassinating his character, but nobody say anything? This ship has sailed. There are allegiations of assault, and there is this assault on Appelbaum which is already taking place. That's the one assault I can see with my own eyes, right now.
Also, nothing is helped by you putting up a straw man about sexism.
or, "people with secrets to keep and who enjoy socially frowned upon entertainments are attracted to privacy, anonymity, and encryption projects", ya know, scratch the itch, right.
I was working at one time on a really interesting p2p project but at a certain time it just seemed to me that we were building a "nefarious purposes" anonymous distributed database that didn't really have a strong other reason to exist. It didn't become less technically interesting but I started scrutinizing both my coworkers' zeal and personal quirks for evidence of untoward motivation. I left the project for other reasons and the project fizzled for other other reasons.
Powerful men do tend to have trouble keeping their pants zipped when they should. We have had enough scandals in politics/business to confirm that. Berlusconi, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Clinton, Petraeus and many more in the last two decades.
When there are accusations - I generally give the benefit of doubt to the accused. But if the chain of women claiming trouble approaches a miliCosby - then it is time to retract said benefit.
First Assange, now Appelbaum. What's next? Snowden being accused of sexual mistreatment, too? Whatever they're accusing him of may have very well happened, but it's just a little strange how this keeps happening to the government's "enemies".
What's happening is that you pay disproportionate attention to accusations against "the government's enemies", and not much attention at all to accusations of people in the government. Here, you have a story about someone removing themselves from a private project over accusations. Nowhere in your comment do you, for instance, acknowledge Denny Hastert being sentenced to 15 months in prison.
Also: of the people who do serious work on counter-censorship, anonymity, privacy, and the like, the overwhelming majority have had no accusations made at all. For that matter, despite a long prison sentence, neither has Chelsea Manning.
How many of those people left the country permanently because of constant harassment by government agents? How many lost their girlfriend when she got freaked out because a guy with night vision goggles was spying into their apartment in the middle of the night? You're writing this off like it's a simple statistical unlikelyhood without making any consideration into specifically what has happened to Appelbaum before.
I'm not even defending him, I just think you're doing a crap job of dismissing the concern.
I was talking about Jacob Appelbaum, are you just being curt hoping nobody notices you're not being honest, or did you really not tell from the context of my comment? "One" would be relevant if we were talking about the same person, which we are.
While this is an extremely well known charachter attack vector most publicly probably used on Julian Assange, as noted by tptacek this just means there will be more scrutiny of the accusation. I am not familiar with his exact contributions to Tor, but I would suspect that they aren't extremely dangerous to U.S. interests nor is he well known enough outside the security community to have his charachter asassinated in a fabricated potentially damaging (to the agency) way.
I will assume he is innocent until proven guilty & it is possible or even probable he is innocent. However, given the degree this happens at companies it is totally possible this is simply a regular ambiguous he said she said which has happened in Gamergate, Tinder Github ect. Not that I mean to trivialize it, just to point out there is a large precedent for such things to occur naturally & given he worked with wikileaks it would probably be a dumb way to go about dissuading him, although it can't be ruled out until more info surfaces.
I agree with most of your points but one stands out. Tor is absolutely perceived as a threat to US national and general security. The silk road takedown put it vividly on radar.
The goal of an operation like this would be to replace the non compliant actor with a compliant actor. In this case, remove the guy and replace him with someone willing to insert code to compromise the codebase.
We don't know if that's what happened/is happening here, but we don't know it's not either. And I personally don't subscribe to the stupidity/malice law that's regularly thrown around here on HN.
One of the accusers (Andrea Shepard) is a current and veteran employee and developer of the Tor project itself. Another (Meredith Patterson) has been working in the open source crypto field for decades. To believe in the conspiracy of this being motivated by anti-Tor forces, you would have to widen the conspiracy to believe that Tor already has been compromised from the inside by its own employees for many years.
You're basically saying that there's no evidence that it's a coordinated campaign (really, the fact that it was talked about on Twitter isn't evidence of anything at all), and that lack of evidence is why it has to be a coordinated campaign. Which is a logical fallacy at best.
EDIT: that wasn't quite what I meant. There's some evidence that somebody is coordinating it. There's no evidence that it's a hostile government. The evidence suggests that the coordinator is somebody who feels that they were sexually harassed.
I said there are hints of evidence of a coordinated campaign. Which there are. This could be from the number of people involved, or a guiding hand. I placed no stake in the ground on either possibility.
Your personal attack at calling it a logical fallacy is noted.
You might not have been arguing that it was related to the government, but the two posts you were replying to sure did, so I assumed you were as well, apparently incorrectly.
If there's anything else I've misinterpreted, you're going to have to spell it out.
All? female Tor devs univocally talk about rape/sexual misconduct while not all mentioning him personally it seems quite clear that these claims are not understood as an external smear campaign but a long lasting issue within Tor and no one that is knowing him is stepping up to defend him. At least on Twitter. Tor acknowledges that there are rumours and that the issue is investigated. I'm kind of shocked about the methods (character assassination website, @TimeToDieJake Twitter account) but who am I to judge. This looks like it's serious or should at least taken seriously. Difficult to judge as an outsider through.
All of these vigillante justice style attacks are an affront to true justice which should have been to speak to his superiors and to the police. Once all the data has been collected and a jury has made a choice, then we can make terrible websites about him.
He's been treated as guilty before given a chance to be proven as such.
Ordinarily, you would find agreement with me. But it's instructive to note that both Andrea and Meredith have been firmly opposed to social justice mobs on every other issue prior to this. I would consider their claims with some additional weight, in light of this.
Their firm opposition of others' justice mobs and then their uptake of one for their own purposes is a hypocrisy and IMO a little more repugnant than at least a consistent moral stance.
People saying why they think he is guilty isn't the same as being treated as guilty.
In this case, the people did talk to his superiors, and they appear to have done as little as legally possible about it until there were public statements.
There are libel laws. And he may even find a friendly billionaire to bankroll his lawsuit.
But here is the thing - it is the public that is guilty of treating him like guilty. There is nothing wrong with airing accusations. But the proper reaction is to not take a side - to say - lets the court figure it out. But we as a society are unable to do so.
We don't want justice - we want to have it our way. Preferably now.
I hate this argument and it illicits an emotional response, I will try and be measured in my response, usually this argument takes the form of "innocent until proven guilty".
I have sat as a member of the jury on a case in which a man was accused of sexually abusing a child many, many times. I sat in that jury, I listened to the evidence and I determined beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was guilty. He is a rapist. As a member of the jury, that is my determination, I stand by that decision to this day.
I was unfortunate enough to sit on a jury with a majority of jurors that made the determination that he was not guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and unfortunately that caused a mistrial, and unfortunately the prosecution decided not to pursue a retrial. The accused, the rapist, walked free from court.
Your argument is that I cannot stand by my determination, that I must sit here and tell you that he is not a rapist, that he did not abuse that child again and again and again, because I was unfortunate enough to sit in a room with people who don't understand sexual abuse.
People walk free from court, either by way of a mistrial or because the jury deliver a not guilty verdict, all the time, and these results are frequently delivered not because the person is innocent but because of errors made by the jury, the prosecution or by the police. Some people don't even make it to court because prosecutors can make decisions that aren't aligned with justice or fairness but with their own self interest.
As a private citizen you have every right to use your knowledge and understanding of a case to make a determination about the accused and you have every right to let that determination influence your actions. I will never allow the man I judged to be a rapist go near my children.
It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict.
The bystander is forced to take sides.
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator.
All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing.
He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak
no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander
to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action,
engagement and remembering...
edit: I would also like to add that courts do not deal in proof, they deal in evidence. A guilty verdict delivered if Jacob Applebaum faces criminal charges does not prove he is guilty of what he has been accused, a not guilty verdict delivered if Jacob Applebaum faces criminal charges does not he is innocent of what he has been accused. The justice system does not deal in absolutes, it doesn't deal in proof.
There is a difference in our timelines and thus your long story does not exactly apply. The key is that you're saying something to the effect of "Why should I keep quiet?" (_after_ the trial). I am saying we should not be slandering this guy until after a trial. AFAIK the only evidence at this point is TOR saying they have heard rumors and the slander website. That is not justice, its closer to a lynch mob or witch hunt thus far.
I fully agree with you that a not guilty verdict is not identical to innocence. But its the current system we've (as a society) have agreed upon for deciding what is actionable or not. The makers of this website have taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and "executioner" (actor of justice).
I think my comment may have been unclear, I apologise, the point I'm trying to make is that how we determine things as individuals and how the legal system determines things is very different, and individuals should not be admonished for the decisions they make based on the evidence available to them. The legal system works in a very specific way, a way that can often be at odds with how an individual thinks, and a way that can be counter productive for making an individual decision.
The case I sat on had a piece of evidence that could not be admitted initially because of a legal technicality, the defendant made a mistake during his testimony and much to the defence's chagrin he revealed something that allowed the prosecution to present the evidence which otherwise would never have been heard by the jury. An article written about the case I sat on would have mentioned that piece of evidence -- even if it hadn't been delivered in court, it was public knowledge -- and a person reading that article would know more than I might have known had the defendant not made that mistake. The evidence heard by a jury is not more true or more meaningful than evidence heard by those outside of the process, it is evidence that fits within the legal parameters, evidence that the lawyers determine furthers their cause, it's evidence that has a material impact on the legal outcome.
The information available to the public about a case before a trial has taken place can be more informative than the information available to the jury during the trial, there are many cases where jurors have been contacted after a high profile trial to talk about the case and revealed the decisions they made would have been very different had they seen information now available to the public. Some cases may never make it to court, victims of sexual assault are often told that their case won't be pursued because the prosecution doesn't believe they have a strong chance of winning, does this mean that the victims and people knowledgable about the cases should never be permitted to air their opinions, the opinions they built on the evidence, because it never made it to court? That doesn't seem reasonable, to suggest that the gate keeper of whether or not an opinion is allowed is an opaque unsupervised legal process.
Every day individuals make decisions about people based on the information available to them and nobody bats an eye. When I witness caring and compassionate behaviour I choose to pursue friendship, when I see disrespectful behaviour I choose to minimise interactions, this is normal human behaviour that we all engage in every day, in personal and professional contexts. When people I trust inform me that someone behaves inappropriately, I choose to minimise interactions with that person, this is normal, it's accepted, everybody does it, so why does this suddenly become inappropriate to engage in this normal behaviour when the person is involved in sexual assault? Why are we suddenly worried about slander and libel and letting the legal system run its course when someone is accused of rape but the same isn't applied to claims about being inconsiderate, or theft. A credible claim is made about a party guest stealing jewellery, they aren't invited to parties any more, a credible claim is made about sexual assault, "whoa whoa whoa, let's not start a lynch mob here, let's leave it to the legal process".
The legal system exists to deal with law not personal opinion, it doesn't exist to determine how individuals can or should feel.
You're correct that a "not guilty" verdict isn't the same thing as saying the person is innocent.
But saying that "a guilty verdict ... does not prove he is guilty of what he has been accused" is splitting hairs. At least in the US, the legal term is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". Which is a proof, but isn't an absolute.
What I found strange is I can't google for any details on this, there's just Tor's statement. No one publically speaking about it, or Google censorship?
Also, you were downvoted but you shouldn't have been -- you raise IMO a valid concern. Pro-state bots?
Re-read The Tor Project's statement before you start throwing out wild conspiracy theories, seriously. As they say
"We have been working with a legal firm that specializes in employment issues including sexual misconduct. They are advising us on how to handle this, and we intend to follow their advice."
And a big part of that legal advice (any competent attorney's advice) for something of this nature will boil down to "Please oh please shut up until it's all over and done with, and think carefully about saying anything even then." The accusations at least are extremely serious, criminal felony serious, and at that point publicly speaking much about it except maybe when thorough vetted by a lawyer is usually going to be an exceptionally poor idea, and that's true regardless of the truth of the accusations or defense (assuming that is even clear cut or uniform). They owe an acknowledgement to their community and team, and a clear statement of principles, which they've done with their public statement.
But anything much more then that at this point is effectively certain to be at best partially correct, at worst outright mistaken, with endless potential for legally shooting themselves in the gut and/or, ignoring law entirely, burning bridges and hurting important team members down the road. The wheels will and should turn consistently, but with deliberation and care as well. It's always possible to say more later, and should there be a criminal and/or civil trial then of course much would come out there, but what one says cannot be unsaid, so when in doubt silence is best. That's true in general, let alone with a sensitive, targeted and specialized project like Tor.
"Google censorship" is a pretty powerful claim to make for someone who's research into Appelbaum was tricked by an obvious parody article, which you just on this thread presented as fact.
It's fine that you're not up to date on who Jacob Appelbaum is, how the Tor community works, or what its origins are. But you should be careful about being strident about topics you're unfamiliar with.
I just read your comment again, and you're lying. "Tricked by an obvious parody article." That's compatible with "stupid" but not with "uninformed". You were also being a smartass about it, which is rude.