Today we get this account, from one of Applebaum's supposed "victims" and, surprise surprise, her tale is pretty innocent and de-spun and totally oppositely aligned from the anti-Applebaum portayals we heard initially.
I bet more of the anti-Applebaum tales will start to get debunked. It sounded way too fishy and too much like a coordinated smear. Even the symmetry with how Assange (another big Wikileaks guy) was smeared by his Swedish sex thing seemed like a suspicious coincidence.
There may or may not be some kernal of truth in those anti-Applebaum statements. But there also smells like a lot of poorly disguised bullshit spin wrapped around it.
Keep in mind this space involves the NSA, Wikileaks, state actors, billion dollar budgets, multi-billion dollar empires at stake. False flag ops, bribery and propaganda are a real thing that govs do. Established historical reality.
Also... Rape is a real thing, and when it happens, thats bad. Lying and spinning and smearing are also real things that happen. So much of the skepticism we sometimes see about the former, unfortunately, is because of the latter. Truth is sometimes murky and often nuanced, or he-said/she-said.
Or do you want to argue that the NSA doesn't care about the person that revealed a catalog of their tools to the public?
Regardless of whether the allegations are true, false, or a mixture of both, the Tor community needs to find better ways of handling situations like this in the future to better protect both victims of abuse, and victims of false accusations, to make sure people in that community feel safe and can focus on their work.
http://www.dw.com/en/snowden-ally-appelbaum-claims-his-berli...
And other similar and very recent account of the US gov harassing Tor developers:
This. Thank you for stating it. The attackers should accept blame for making life harder for real victims.
I'm just glad I wasn't demonized by the PC/SJW folks and downvoted into negative oblivion (because that is a real thing they do, as well, I've observed, when it comes to the topic of "rape".)
Your comment makes me think I may take the risk of trying to write a longer post somewhere on this theme. Anonymously, of course, for my own safety. :-)
That's what upset me the most. We saw accusations of abusive behaviour used to justify abusive behaviour. And we saw accusations of abusive behaviour used to slip in claims about plagiarism without even attempting to back those up. Regardless of the plausibility of the accusations against Appelbaum, since two wrongs don't make a right, that (and the unwillingness or inability to address it) made the assumption of good faith impossible. And that's not even mentioning the "totally unrelated" Twitter account.
The whole "conspiracy" stuff is a red herring to me. That is, people can speculate about that until the cows come home -- but not to dismiss the obvious, the whole campaign as well as the shaming people who spoke out against the process, and the attempt to excuse bypassing the legal system with how bad it is, then being so much worse. The list of WTFs is long.
https://twitter.com/Shidash/status/741259721756319744
Does that say it all, yet? How far does it have to go?
It was really fun getting ignored and downvoted or mocked by a throwaway just for actually asking hard questions and not just patting some "respected whoevers" on the back, by the way.
The difference between peer pressure and peer review is that with peer review, the more peers you have, the more eyes on the problem you have. With peer pressure, you still only have one set of eyes, but more peers make it squint harder, until it's completely shut. And this was a great demonstration of that, of the total absence of that free thinking hacker spirit that's so easy to print on the label of a tin, but so hard to keep alive in one.
No hard feelings, but know this: seeing someone with a torch and pitchfork, or seeing someone close their curtains as if they haven't seen anything when a lynch mob is out and about, is not really better than seeing someone be abusive to a person, sexually or otherwise. Until you see that person repent and make fantastic changes, it changes something irrevocably. You cannot unsee it. Same goes for "communities".
And that's indeed a very good parallel with what happened to Assange. The issue was never about rape, but that's basically how the story was being told in the media and what most people got out of it.
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
"Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable."
Maybe the other recent negative stories about Appelbaum are true. Or maybe they are created by GCHQ. Prior to the above being made publicly known, I would have just assumed the former. But now, how can we be sure?
People who have been raped don't go to police because the world is full of stupid cunts who do stupid shit like putting the word "rape" in quotes to try to deny that rape happens as often as it does; and then spread lies and fud about what rape victims should have done while being raped ("Why didn't you fight back?"); or what rape victims should have done after they had been raped ("Why didn't they go to the police?"). Those people will also say that any rape accusation that doesn't result in a conviction is a false allegation, and that the rape didn't happen, and that the victim lied about it.
Yeah... From what I've seen, the confirmed first-person stories suggest that Appelbaum is probably a huge asshole, but the worst stuff is contained in anonymous accounts filtered through a handful of people, at least one of whom has a weird axe to grind about "plagiarism".
Something feels very off about the whole coordinated effort. This is not a normal way to accuse someone of terrible criminal behavior, by mixing those stories in with mere jerkitude.
[0] https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/
[1] https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446500891860992 / https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446782505779200 / etc. (argh twitter)
The "murder, rape, and jaywalking" language used by the original complainants really raised red flags for me, as well. The fact that all of the accusers mention plagiarism, of all things, suggests they have an axe to grind and see this as a legitimate move in that fight.
But, since these are Tor people, shouldn't statements be digitally signed?
Does a confirmation tweet from anything less than a celebrity mean anything?
In any case, basically you'd be saying that Twitter and/or her Twitter acount is compromised, as a few others are interacting with that account, and have been following her since well before the tweet (I personally know many of the people in the conversation around Jill's tweet). In the unlikely event this is true, I think we'll find out soon enough. edit: I personally am a Bitcoin dev who uses PGP regularly, and in a similar situation even I can see myself being lazy and not signing my statement.
tl;dr: I'd be happy to bet a beer that the Tweet is authentic. :)
This article was
119 points @ 3 hours
Current front page contains (sampled):
38 points @ 2 hours
87 points @ 4 hours
59 points @ 3 hours
26 points @ 2 hours
110 points @ 6 hours
35 points @ 7 hours
Or am I just not seeing it?
Disgusting.
Reputation and reputation destruction is a dynamic system that will find equilibrium in a place different from where we are right now.
Also, for sale: one slightly used pitchfork.
You are projecting. The evil you're looking for, it's in you.
Thank you, Jill, for your statement and I'd like to offer you my sincerest apologies on behalf of all of civilized society.
now, guess what the tor project lacks.
as you're probably thinking right now "but how in the f..." simple, OSS has had to deal with toxic enviroments and individuals. one of the cornerstones is, listen, corroborate, recommend, act.
the infosec community as a whole lack formal mature organisations to deal with these kinds of situations.
what we're still lacking in the witness accounts are timeframes, we have something of a picture from very vague details from leaked emails, these can be regarding pretty much anything, aside from one which is about _unspecified_ misconduct at a conference.
the sad thing here is that people can change, victims with trauma live with the trauma, so listen, validate, no-shame or pre-judgement.
but the infosec scene isnt a special snowflake exempt from the social contract of society, we all co-sign it by living in a nationstate, so we need to uphold it because the alternative is chaos.
if there is a legitimate grievance, report it, go through the system. hell, even brokep says as much, and he trusts the system on this, even though the process he has been forced to endure.
1) The statement is pushed via the same odd channel as Appelbaum's message.
2) The person exists for one year as a retweet twitter account. From a privacy perspective this person does not seem to "exist" on the internet for long.
3) The name sounds like a combination of a German name and an American(?) surname, the legend is also that she resides in the Netherlands. Is this person for real? It was used as a token persona by an apparently base- and meaningless Der Spiegel article, an interview of few youngsters including Jill (20) who - apparently without training as a DaF teacher - carried out German language courses in Costa Rica, returned and lived with her parents. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelwissen/d-79922555.html
If this person really is who they say they are, I'd have to agree that it's more than a little chauvinistic to speak on her behalf as the Gizmodo story did.
