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When 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

When 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.

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tremon 10y ago
Rape 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 ago
  you'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. :-)
  - pstuart 10y ago
    I upvoted your parent comment because it was a worthy contribution to the dialog. I don't consider myself PC (in the now pejorative sense), but when you put quotes around the word rape it can be construed to be discounting it.
    - syngrog66 10y ago
      my intent in saying "rape" was as a wildcard to bundle actual rape, plus false rape, plus all the shades of gray and slippery slope thinking involved between those two poles. Also, considering my OC explicitly said that I think rape is a real thing, and bad, I think its clear I do not discount it. I'm anti-rape. I'm also pro-truth and anti-smearing. Its the nuance in how we as a society handle these stances together that I observe is sometimes lost on certain people.
rhblake 10y ago
Re: NSA, state actors, billion dollar budgets... I think you're giving Appelbaum way too much credit here. While he's been splendid at marketing himself, consider that he might not actually be that important to the causes he's been championing. As others have pointed out: if said state actors wanted to hurt Tor and related projects, he'd be pretty far down the list of targets.
- petertodd 10y ago
  Creating drama in a community is harmful to the community as a whole by discouraging outsiders from joining, and encouraging people to leave. Those are all plausible goals of an attack regardless of the direct importance of Jacob Appelbaum himself. 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.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  Did you forget that Appelbaum was involved in the release of the NSA ANT catalog[1], or his involvement with Laura Poitras and the Snowden documents? Never mind his involvement with Tor (which has been a recent target of various state actors). I'm sure many intelligence community want Appelbaum only slightly less than they want Snowden. 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    agreed. I forgot to mention Tor and Snowden explicitly in my OC but agreed that these facts are all relevant to how we need to interpret events in this space. because it gives even more motive for certain actors to smear Applebaum.
  - rhblake 10y ago
    No, I didn't forget that he was one of three people involved in writing stories about the NSA ANT catalog, nor that he worked with Poitras (after she, Greenwald and MacAskill had done the most important part). I also did not forget that while he's been good at marketing Tor -- I've seen him at CCC in Berlin/Hamburg a bunch of times 2009-2015, he's become a good speaker -- he's never been important from a tech/operations point of view, from what I understand. So, yeah, I maintain that there are plenty of juicier targets that Jacob Appelbaum. I'm also sure that he'd like you to think otherwise.
mtgx 10y ago
Kind of how I felt about it from the beginning. All of the stories seemed to be mostly about him being kind of a jerk to women or maybe in general (which may be quite true), but were painted in a way to sound like he almost raped someone. 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.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
> Rape is a real thing, and when it happens, thats bad. Lying and spinning and smearing are also real things that happen. 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 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".

deleted 10y ago

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tremon 10y ago

Rape 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 ago
you'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. :-)
- pstuart 10y ago
  I upvoted your parent comment because it was a worthy contribution to the dialog. I don't consider myself PC (in the now pejorative sense), but when you put quotes around the word rape it can be construed to be discounting it.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    my intent in saying "rape" was as a wildcard to bundle actual rape, plus false rape, plus all the shades of gray and slippery slope thinking involved between those two poles. Also, considering my OC explicitly said that I think rape is a real thing, and bad, I think its clear I do not discount it. I'm anti-rape. I'm also pro-truth and anti-smearing. Its the nuance in how we as a society handle these stances together that I observe is sometimes lost on certain people.

rhblake 10y ago

Re: NSA, state actors, billion dollar budgets... I think you're giving Appelbaum way too much credit here. While he's been splendid at marketing himself, consider that he might not actually be that important to the causes he's been championing. As others have pointed out: if said state actors wanted to hurt Tor and related projects, he'd be pretty far down the list of targets.

petertodd 10y ago
Creating drama in a community is harmful to the community as a whole by discouraging outsiders from joining, and encouraging people to leave. Those are all plausible goals of an attack regardless of the direct importance of Jacob Appelbaum himself. 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.
pdkl95 10y ago
Did you forget that Appelbaum was involved in the release of the NSA ANT catalog[1], or his involvement with Laura Poitras and the Snowden documents? Never mind his involvement with Tor (which has been a recent target of various state actors). I'm sure many intelligence community want Appelbaum only slightly less than they want Snowden. 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog
- syngrog66 10y ago
  agreed. I forgot to mention Tor and Snowden explicitly in my OC but agreed that these facts are all relevant to how we need to interpret events in this space. because it gives even more motive for certain actors to smear Applebaum.
- rhblake 10y ago
  No, I didn't forget that he was one of three people involved in writing stories about the NSA ANT catalog, nor that he worked with Poitras (after she, Greenwald and MacAskill had done the most important part). I also did not forget that while he's been good at marketing Tor -- I've seen him at CCC in Berlin/Hamburg a bunch of times 2009-2015, he's become a good speaker -- he's never been important from a tech/operations point of view, from what I understand. So, yeah, I maintain that there are plenty of juicier targets that Jacob Appelbaum. I'm also sure that he'd like you to think otherwise.

mtgx 10y ago

Kind of how I felt about it from the beginning. All of the stories seemed to be mostly about him being kind of a jerk to women or maybe in general (which may be quite true), but were painted in a way to sound like he almost raped someone. 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.

PavlovsCat 10y ago

> Rape is a real thing, and when it happens, thats bad. Lying and spinning and smearing are also real things that happen. 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 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".