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Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum
- biafra 10y ago@jillbaeh confirming authorship: https://twitter.com/jillbaeh/status/741023991041646592 https://twitter.com/jillbaeh/status/741023991041646592
- daveloyall 10y agoThank you! But, since these are Tor people, shouldn't statements be digitally signed? Does a confirmation tweet from anything less than a celebrity mean anything?
- petertodd 10y agoNot everyone involved in Tor and the surrounding community is a cryptographer who uses PGP regularly, or even at all; AFAIK Jill Baeh is not. 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. :)
- daveloyall 10y agoOK. I won't take that bet, because you're probably right. :) I'd still like a more general solution to determining the authenticity of statements on the internet. In practice, people use Twitter for that. Seems weak. But, I don't use twitter, so I'm disregarding the community trust aspect that you described. Maybe it deserves more respect that I'm giving it, but we do have PKI available...
- tremon 10y agoWonder about their motive to speak on my behalf without my consent. Thank you, Jill, for your statement and I'd like to offer you my sincerest apologies on behalf of all of civilized society.
- TillE 10y ago"Wonder about the witnesses in all these stories, who coincidentally always seem to consist of the same set of people." 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.
- rhblake 10y agoI think the first-person stories of @hypatiadotca [0] and @violetblue [1] suggest more than that. [0] https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/ https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/ [1] https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446500891860992 https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446500891860992 / https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446782505779200 https://twitter.com/violetblue/status/740446782505779200 / etc. (argh twitter)
- andy_ppp 10y agoI think these people would be wise to go to the police rather than writing blog posts/twitter comments that imply vague wrong doing without any clear crimes involved.
- prutschman 10y agoIf no clear crime was committed, why on earth would going to the police have done any good?
- middleclick 10y agoI feel for the victims not going to the police, but then my question is what is the alternative?
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- SNvD7vEJ 10y agoMedia & mob justice at it's finest, requiring people to prove their innocence instead of the other way around. Disgusting.
- partisan 10y agoHe was already hanged by the mob. What good does it do now to try and restore his reputation? Also, for sale: one slightly used pitchfork.
- golemotron 10y agoWhat most people don't see yet is that when enough of these counter-examples to allegations of abuse surface, people won't believe the allegations any more. Reputation and reputation destruction is a dynamic system that will find equilibrium in a place different from where we are right now.
- syngrog66 10y agoWhen I read all the complainers stories my initial reaction was I noticed a fairly consistent style of "spinning" each account in a way to smear Applebaum. They each seemed designed to imply he did evil things, without truly saying it. 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tremon 10y agoRape is a real thing, and when it happens, that's 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. This. Thank you for stating it. The attackers should accept blame for making life harder for real victims.
- syngrog66 10y agoyou're welcome! 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. :-)
- draw_down 10y agoWell, that's certainly not what I was expecting. 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.
- peterkelly 10y ago"How covert agents infiltrate the internet to manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations" https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ 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?
- draw_down 10y agoSure, it was wrong of the people involved to jump to conclusions about Applebaum... but for us, let's go hog wild and assume this was a campaign coordinated by national security agencies!
- andy_ppp 10y agoI think the "god you must be mad spy agencies wouldn't do that" argument went out the window a long time ago.
- syngrog66 10y agoalso suspicious that none of the complainers went to law enforcement. you know, the way we as a society determime whether a true crime happened or not. innocent til proven guilty, trial, judge, etc. instead they took it to the public and smeared a man's name, directly. that itself is suspicous, as well as unethical.
- DanBC 10y ago> also suspicious that none of the complainers went to law enforcement. 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.
- microtherion 10y agoIt's so nice to see that Appelbaum's defenders have finally found a woman they believe.
- PavlovsCat 10y agoDefenders? More like, "it's lame to see the attackers still haven't found a way to explain themselves in a credible manner, and are still excusing it with the same smear." You are projecting. The evil you're looking for, it's in you.
- xcasex 10y agothe infosec scene is in a place the OSS scene was in ˜13-14 years ago, before the formal introduction of the gnome foundation, kde reorg. guess what both of those projects have? outreach programmes and ombudsmän. 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.
- CoffeeDregs 10y agoI'm confused. This was on the front page a moment ago. Now it is not. 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?
- scott_s 10y agoStories that get flagged by users will drop in their rankings; this story was probably flagged by users.
- jordibc 10y agoAny idea of why it has been flagged? Were the ones that spread suspicion about Appelbaum flagged too? It looks to me as this would be quite relevant news.
- Sacho 10y agoThere was some talk about them not being appropriate for HN, because it was all hearsay within a fairly tightly-knit group. However, none of them were flagged, as far as I know. I don't know what flagging means on HN - this post is marked as flagged and I had to search for it to find it(I was planning on posting the same thing).
- scott_s 10y agoI have not flagged it, so I am speculating. But users flagging stories is the most common reason stories with a lot of points leave the front page. These types of stories tend to get user flags for two reasons: they are more voyeaurism than news, and the actual discussions often become flame wars. Also note that I am not a mod, I've just been here for a while.
- MollyR 10y agoWow. just wow. I feel ashamed for making up my mind too quickly.
- tmpanon1234act 10y agoWhat's especially shameful about all of this is that a ton of smart people rushed to condemn Applebaum before we had a complete accounting. If this many intelligent people can prematurely convict someone in the court of public opinion, what hope is there for the rest of society?
- atzpawn 10y agoWho is "Jill Bähring"? 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 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelwissen/d-79922555.html