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>This sort of thing really merits a judicial investigation The victims involved in this have specifically asked this to not happen. I'm sure you can understan

>This sort of thing really merits a judicial investigation The victims involved in this have specifically asked this to not happen. I'm sure you can understand why the members of a community like this would have personal or political reasons to avoid a judicial investigation.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I don't buy that. This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again? I think you have to be held accountable, legally, if you want to bring forward acusations that can do that.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  My answer to this is very simple: It is a property of a state of law that no one is to be considered guilty unless it can be proved by a court. In this sense Jacob Appelbaum is to be considered innocent.
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    That's not true under Napoleonic code.
  - jethro_tell 10y ago
    Legally, he is considered innocent. No charges have been brought forward, and no legal investigation is under way. It is the right of most organizations in most states/countries to exclude people of their choosing. They have verified a couple complaints and decided he was enough like a person they wanted to exclude. Which it sounds like he was doing from his side as well. So I'd say that legally, he is being considered innocent. This is like 'I can say whatever I want without the consequences of my peers because of the first amendment.' The right to free speech and the right to be innocent until proven guilty apply to a citizens relationship with the government.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    Good. So, he can't be arrested for rape and does not get a criminal record as a sex offender. All he's got is a bad reputation and a lost job.
- avs733 10y ago
  >This sort of event It wasn't the event that made him look bad, it was his actions. Don't be passive about this.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > It wasn't the event that made him look bad, it was his actions. It was what somebody else claimed his actions were.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    you're not a judge or a jury. stop acting like one.
    - avs733 10y ago
      Its not about whether or not he did it, it is simply about the fact that what we as a group are talking about is the actions (or at least accused actions) of a person. "This sort of event" is an incredibly passive expression of what he is accused of doing. Such language is incredibly common [0] in rape and sexual assault cases, because it removes actors from the conversation. You can say "The actions that Appelbaum people have accused him of" and be much more actively voiced while also respecting your wish to present him as simply the accused. [0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf Quoting: "The language of headlines that participants generated for their reports also reflected judgments of assailant and victim responsibility. Implications for the non-reactive assessment of responsibility attributions and directions for future research are discussed."
      - metaphorm 10y ago
        you're making a semantics of language argument? really? you said "it was his actions". this asserts that you know, positively, what his actions were. do you really? I said you should not act like you are the judge or jury because I find it highly unlikely that you really know the facts of the case. I don't think anyone really knows the facts of the case, and we never will, because there won't be a fair trial.
- guelo 10y ago
  You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works. If Applebaum wants to sue people for slander or whatever the system is available to him.
  - GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
    >You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works. "The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be confronted with the witnesses against him. ... The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause
    - VonGuard 10y ago
      Yes, and this is all in Germany.
    - loeg 10y ago
      This is not criminal prosecution.
    - andrewfong 10y ago
      Per its own text, the Confrontation Clause only applies to "criminal prosecutions", not to "stuff people say that doesn't make its way to a courtroom".
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  Then he is free to sue the accusers for libel.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    It doesn't apply in this case, but what should someone do if they lack the financial resources to sue for libel after someone has ruined their life by creating a popular opinion that they are irredeemably guilty? One thing I've never understood is why people believe legal recourse should be considered recourse at all. It's only recourse if you happen to have the money to pay for it. In my case, I have a family member who has been dealing with a very expensive civil parenting time and custody issue, involving some severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges against the other party. The state I'm in has routinely ignored those pending charges, even ignored impassioned testimony and warnings from mental health professionals whose medical records were required for the case, all saying that the other party is a serious danger to children and, at minimum, must be strictly supervised. The state has tried time and again to quickly wrap up some cookie-cutter 6-month supervision program and get it back to full, unsupervised parenting time. Literally the only reason why we've been able to protect my family member is that we've spent an absolute fortune (an amount of money that has me personally teetering on financial ruin at this point) to have a very expensive lawyer dive deeply into every single thing we can argue to prolong the supervision. And this is all happening while there is a separate criminal case pending against this other party! You'd think the civil parenting time case's judge might take notice of that and perhaps think it prudent to see if this person will be convicted, as many mental health professionals' testimonies seem to confirm. But no, instead they just look up some parenting time guidelines in a three-ring binder, bang the gavel, and try to get you out the door as fast as possible -- truly no concern whatsoever for the well-being of the child or the grave danger of the circumstance. In the case I'm describing, we're talking about something that is practically black and white, obviously based on dangerous criminal charges with a huge mountain of evidence against them. And the justice system still requires you to spend huge amounts of your own money just to get even the barest minimum of justice, in this case protecting a child. I'd also like to add that the magic suggestion of having the judge award legal fees is also unrealistic, and one reason is that you often cannot stay solvent long enough for the magic future legal fee award to come back to you and fix things. In the current circumstance I'm in, we've had our time wasted by the opposing counsel, we've had to repeatedly file motions to get the court to force the other party to comply with things like interrogatories, yet it is the court's job to ensure compliance, not ours, but we paid for it anyway. The judge has completely dismissed all requests for court fees. In fact, one of the issues of this case is that the other party is somewhere around $4000 in arrears in child support payments, and the judge hasn't even ordered the other party to pay that back or anything. The other party's driver's license was suspended for a time (but the person drove around town, we even saw them, regardless), but no other penalty. And they successfully applied for a hardship license that removed the court order against them -- still without ever paying the back-owed child support. My mother works as a courtroom clerk and in her experience, this is how it goes 99% of the time. Lawyers just take money from you for an indeterminate amount of time while the court sits on its ass, regardless of how lopsidedly obvious the case is, and regardless of how much obvious danger there is. For people less fortunate than us, who couldn't have afforded the legal fees this long, their child would have simply been given over into regular, unsupervised parenting time with an obvious, alarmingly dangerous person, and no one in the legal system would have given two shits about it. If you have a spare $100k lying around, you might be able to protect your kid for a time. Otherwise, no one cares and your kid can just stay with the dangerous person. End of story. I can only imagine that if you want to sue for slander or libel or something, even if it's absolutely black and white that you were falsely depicted and had your reputation ruined, it's going to cost you personally an unbelievable amount of money. It's not really justice. It's pay-per-justice, or something.
- iaw 10y ago
  There are a body of accusers who don't want to be targeted or draw out a process. In some circumstances it sounds like Jacob walked a fine line in terms of what is lawful making successful prosecution unlikely. There should be an unbiased mediation system available to resolve this, but the judicial system is not that. This is a shift in society as we begin to care more about these types of allegations. Just as these things were often unfairly ignored before they may now be addressed in ways that are potentially unfair to the alleged perpetrator. It's an evolution of our society away from bias towards the agenda of dominant men. Like it or not, this is the direction we're heading.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again? Occam's razor, and straightforward root cause analysis -- via the weight of numerous (largely very credible) statements from multiple witnesses -- suggest that he ultimately ruined his own life by choosing to engage in a persistent pattern of aggressive and uncivil behavior towards others in his community. Not that it was ruined "because of" the statements the Tor project made about his case.
- mjg59 10y ago
  Thought experiment: Someone is accused of behaving improperly in a way that does not reach the bar of criminality, but is unprofessional enough to justify Tor firing them. Should Tor be able to warn others about their unprofessional behaviour?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    I wouldn't put it past Tor to fire him even if it was just because of the controversey around his digital lynching, regardless of the truth. Even so, sometimes people make mistakes. Maybe he just pissed people off enough make someone want to falsely acuse him. Yeah, these are big maybes, but the point is that there's not certainty. It's the court's job to establish certainty and the acusers have expicitly asked for that not to happen. Does that justify preventing him from ever being able to fix his mistakes and move on? Or does it lead to a downward spiral where his life is permenantly destroyed because of this and things only get worse?
    - mjg59 10y ago
      That's not the situation I posited. I expressly said that in this hypothetical scenario, the behaviour did not reach the level of criminality, and so there's no way for a court to find the individual guilty. In that scenario, should Tor be allowed to say why they fired them?
      - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
        No, I'd say not. If they aren't willing to uphold their claims in court then they shouldn't be permitted to levy reputation destroying allegations.
        mjg59 10y ago
        How do you uphold a claim in court when there's no criminal activity involved? Are you seriously arguing that companies should not be permitted to say "We fired this person because they never showed up to work"?
pdkl95 10y ago
Avoiding interaction with the state is understandable. However, the state is not the only option. Various types of arbitration could be used, for example. These may not have the power to enforce criminal punishments like the state, but as you said, they already dismissed that option.
- VonGuard 10y ago
  What, like an independent third party? Cause that's what they did.
  - Natsu 10y ago
    There was also this, which didn't get very widely reported: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sop8ps http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sop8ps I don't know what the truth is here, but I can't trust anyone who won't make the investigation public by that very fact. And just for the record, I have been severely sexually harassed, enough that the person responsible was fired. So it's not like I can't sympathize with victims of harassment. Yes, it really is uncomfortable facing them, but it's also the right thing to do. EDIT: Not clear why this is so controversial, but that doesn't beget trust, either. But it's true and I'll stand by it.
  - robryk 10y ago
    Is it still an independent third party if they chose her and are paying her? This is normally enough to say that she has a conflict of interest.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Normally an independent investigator is paid regardless of their findings, and future business with other clients is dependent on maintaining a reputation for impartiality.
metaphorm 10y ago
try to take a more balanced view. just as we should not automatically assume that a person making an allegation is not telling the truth, we should also not automatically assume that the person being accused is guilty of the allegations. by requesting NOT to have a judicial investigation the accusers are effectively saying "we are content to allow for trial by torch-wielding-mob in the court of public opinion and reputation" instead of allowing for a trial by an institution established specifically for impartiality and upholding the rights of both the accusers and the accused.
- geofft 10y ago
  There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization. What you are arguing is that, in the absence of a trial by a government, people have the active right to participate in an organization that doesn't want them. That goes against every bit of the ethos of a project like Tor. (And if you won't believe any other argument, keep in mind that it's not fair to him: why would the state be inclined to treat him fairly, for everything he's done to oppose the state?) https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization. I think you may have missed what the front-page of HN looked like when this was first happening. I won't bother re-quoting/linking things beyond previous discussions (since those contain the information) but your comment is entirely out-of-sync with what was happening. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845338 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901
fdsaaf 10y ago
> The victims These accusers only become "victims" after an impartial jury of Appelbaum's peers weighs the evidence and pronounces him guilty.
- Tomte 10y ago
  Wrong. Not every judicial system uses juries. "Victim" is not a predominantly judicial term, unlike "defendant" or "felon", so the everyday meaning of someone who suffered something applies. That's a factual thing, not procedural as you claim above.
  - fdsaaf 10y ago
    The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. I'm making a procedural objection, yes, and I'm doing it because accusations are too important to be left to innuendo.
    - Tomte 10y ago
      No, we usually don't. The vast majority of accusations in our lives have no place in court. Only the very gravest ones find their way there. And we're under no obligation to refrain from drawing our own conclusions.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. No, its how the justice system determines whether fact claims are adequately supported to apply legal sanctions. Individuals are free to determine and speak on their conclusions as to the truth of fact claims independent of judicial conclusions; this is a fairly fundamental freedom (reflected in the first amendment) and essential to the marketplace of ideas.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  This is clearly false. If someone steals my wallet, I'm the victim of pickpocketing even if the perpetrator is never identified, let alone convicted.
zaccus 10y ago
I heard he raped or sexually assaulted someone. Someone wrote "a rapist lives here" outside his window. If he did rape someone, no due process means we're treating rape as a mere HR issue, and he's free to go rape more people. If he did not rape someone, then at least some of the allegations being thrown around are false. No due process means that someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume all of it is false.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Why would anyone at Tor Project care what "someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume"? Impune rapists are not their responsibility; your complaints would be better addressed to police and prosecutors. If, against all odds, Appelbaum isn't actually an actual rapist, he is certainly still an asshole, and there's nothing wrong with giving assholes the boot.
  - zaccus 10y ago
    I have no idea why they would care what someone unconnected would think. But the way this has been publicised sure makes it seem like they care, so here we are discussing it. What do you mean "against all odds"? Unless you're connected with this personally, all you have to go on is their internal investigation, which did not mention rape. So apparently no one is even claiming that anymore. Again, they can either turn this over to the police, or I'm going to assume it's all made up and I'm not going to care. Not that my opinion is worth any more than yours, which is to say it doesn't matter at all.
- jimrandomh 10y ago
  The Tor project blog post notes that they "hired a professional investigator". This is significant because PIs are a licensed profession with the training and trust required to bring evidence of criminal activity before a court of law. That would be a separate process from the HR investigation, and would almost certainly not be discussed publicly while it was still in progress.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I don't buy that. This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again? I think you have to be held accountable, legally, if you want to bring forward acusations that can do that.

wolfgke 10y ago
My answer to this is very simple: It is a property of a state of law that no one is to be considered guilty unless it can be proved by a court. In this sense Jacob Appelbaum is to be considered innocent.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  That's not true under Napoleonic code.
- jethro_tell 10y ago
  Legally, he is considered innocent. No charges have been brought forward, and no legal investigation is under way. It is the right of most organizations in most states/countries to exclude people of their choosing. They have verified a couple complaints and decided he was enough like a person they wanted to exclude. Which it sounds like he was doing from his side as well. So I'd say that legally, he is being considered innocent. This is like 'I can say whatever I want without the consequences of my peers because of the first amendment.' The right to free speech and the right to be innocent until proven guilty apply to a citizens relationship with the government.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Good. So, he can't be arrested for rape and does not get a criminal record as a sex offender. All he's got is a bad reputation and a lost job.
avs733 10y ago
>This sort of event It wasn't the event that made him look bad, it was his actions. Don't be passive about this.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > It wasn't the event that made him look bad, it was his actions. It was what somebody else claimed his actions were.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  you're not a judge or a jury. stop acting like one.
  - avs733 10y ago
    Its not about whether or not he did it, it is simply about the fact that what we as a group are talking about is the actions (or at least accused actions) of a person. "This sort of event" is an incredibly passive expression of what he is accused of doing. Such language is incredibly common [0] in rape and sexual assault cases, because it removes actors from the conversation. You can say "The actions that Appelbaum people have accused him of" and be much more actively voiced while also respecting your wish to present him as simply the accused. [0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf Quoting: "The language of headlines that participants generated for their reports also reflected judgments of assailant and victim responsibility. Implications for the non-reactive assessment of responsibility attributions and directions for future research are discussed."
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      you're making a semantics of language argument? really? you said "it was his actions". this asserts that you know, positively, what his actions were. do you really? I said you should not act like you are the judge or jury because I find it highly unlikely that you really know the facts of the case. I don't think anyone really knows the facts of the case, and we never will, because there won't be a fair trial.
guelo 10y ago
You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works. If Applebaum wants to sue people for slander or whatever the system is available to him.
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  >You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works. "The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be confronted with the witnesses against him. ... The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause
  - VonGuard 10y ago
    Yes, and this is all in Germany.
  - loeg 10y ago
    This is not criminal prosecution.
  - andrewfong 10y ago
    Per its own text, the Confrontation Clause only applies to "criminal prosecutions", not to "stuff people say that doesn't make its way to a courtroom".
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Then he is free to sue the accusers for libel.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  It doesn't apply in this case, but what should someone do if they lack the financial resources to sue for libel after someone has ruined their life by creating a popular opinion that they are irredeemably guilty? One thing I've never understood is why people believe legal recourse should be considered recourse at all. It's only recourse if you happen to have the money to pay for it. In my case, I have a family member who has been dealing with a very expensive civil parenting time and custody issue, involving some severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges against the other party. The state I'm in has routinely ignored those pending charges, even ignored impassioned testimony and warnings from mental health professionals whose medical records were required for the case, all saying that the other party is a serious danger to children and, at minimum, must be strictly supervised. The state has tried time and again to quickly wrap up some cookie-cutter 6-month supervision program and get it back to full, unsupervised parenting time. Literally the only reason why we've been able to protect my family member is that we've spent an absolute fortune (an amount of money that has me personally teetering on financial ruin at this point) to have a very expensive lawyer dive deeply into every single thing we can argue to prolong the supervision. And this is all happening while there is a separate criminal case pending against this other party! You'd think the civil parenting time case's judge might take notice of that and perhaps think it prudent to see if this person will be convicted, as many mental health professionals' testimonies seem to confirm. But no, instead they just look up some parenting time guidelines in a three-ring binder, bang the gavel, and try to get you out the door as fast as possible -- truly no concern whatsoever for the well-being of the child or the grave danger of the circumstance. In the case I'm describing, we're talking about something that is practically black and white, obviously based on dangerous criminal charges with a huge mountain of evidence against them. And the justice system still requires you to spend huge amounts of your own money just to get even the barest minimum of justice, in this case protecting a child. I'd also like to add that the magic suggestion of having the judge award legal fees is also unrealistic, and one reason is that you often cannot stay solvent long enough for the magic future legal fee award to come back to you and fix things. In the current circumstance I'm in, we've had our time wasted by the opposing counsel, we've had to repeatedly file motions to get the court to force the other party to comply with things like interrogatories, yet it is the court's job to ensure compliance, not ours, but we paid for it anyway. The judge has completely dismissed all requests for court fees. In fact, one of the issues of this case is that the other party is somewhere around $4000 in arrears in child support payments, and the judge hasn't even ordered the other party to pay that back or anything. The other party's driver's license was suspended for a time (but the person drove around town, we even saw them, regardless), but no other penalty. And they successfully applied for a hardship license that removed the court order against them -- still without ever paying the back-owed child support. My mother works as a courtroom clerk and in her experience, this is how it goes 99% of the time. Lawyers just take money from you for an indeterminate amount of time while the court sits on its ass, regardless of how lopsidedly obvious the case is, and regardless of how much obvious danger there is. For people less fortunate than us, who couldn't have afforded the legal fees this long, their child would have simply been given over into regular, unsupervised parenting time with an obvious, alarmingly dangerous person, and no one in the legal system would have given two shits about it. If you have a spare $100k lying around, you might be able to protect your kid for a time. Otherwise, no one cares and your kid can just stay with the dangerous person. End of story. I can only imagine that if you want to sue for slander or libel or something, even if it's absolutely black and white that you were falsely depicted and had your reputation ruined, it's going to cost you personally an unbelievable amount of money. It's not really justice. It's pay-per-justice, or something.
iaw 10y ago
There are a body of accusers who don't want to be targeted or draw out a process. In some circumstances it sounds like Jacob walked a fine line in terms of what is lawful making successful prosecution unlikely. There should be an unbiased mediation system available to resolve this, but the judicial system is not that. This is a shift in society as we begin to care more about these types of allegations. Just as these things were often unfairly ignored before they may now be addressed in ways that are potentially unfair to the alleged perpetrator. It's an evolution of our society away from bias towards the agenda of dominant men. Like it or not, this is the direction we're heading.
kafkaesq 10y ago
This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again? Occam's razor, and straightforward root cause analysis -- via the weight of numerous (largely very credible) statements from multiple witnesses -- suggest that he ultimately ruined his own life by choosing to engage in a persistent pattern of aggressive and uncivil behavior towards others in his community. Not that it was ruined "because of" the statements the Tor project made about his case.
mjg59 10y ago
Thought experiment: Someone is accused of behaving improperly in a way that does not reach the bar of criminality, but is unprofessional enough to justify Tor firing them. Should Tor be able to warn others about their unprofessional behaviour?
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  I wouldn't put it past Tor to fire him even if it was just because of the controversey around his digital lynching, regardless of the truth. Even so, sometimes people make mistakes. Maybe he just pissed people off enough make someone want to falsely acuse him. Yeah, these are big maybes, but the point is that there's not certainty. It's the court's job to establish certainty and the acusers have expicitly asked for that not to happen. Does that justify preventing him from ever being able to fix his mistakes and move on? Or does it lead to a downward spiral where his life is permenantly destroyed because of this and things only get worse?
  - mjg59 10y ago
    That's not the situation I posited. I expressly said that in this hypothetical scenario, the behaviour did not reach the level of criminality, and so there's no way for a court to find the individual guilty. In that scenario, should Tor be allowed to say why they fired them?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      No, I'd say not. If they aren't willing to uphold their claims in court then they shouldn't be permitted to levy reputation destroying allegations.
      - mjg59 10y ago
        How do you uphold a claim in court when there's no criminal activity involved? Are you seriously arguing that companies should not be permitted to say "We fired this person because they never showed up to work"?

pdkl95 10y ago

Avoiding interaction with the state is understandable. However, the state is not the only option. Various types of arbitration could be used, for example. These may not have the power to enforce criminal punishments like the state, but as you said, they already dismissed that option.

VonGuard 10y ago
What, like an independent third party? Cause that's what they did.
- Natsu 10y ago
  There was also this, which didn't get very widely reported: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sop8ps http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sop8ps I don't know what the truth is here, but I can't trust anyone who won't make the investigation public by that very fact. And just for the record, I have been severely sexually harassed, enough that the person responsible was fired. So it's not like I can't sympathize with victims of harassment. Yes, it really is uncomfortable facing them, but it's also the right thing to do. EDIT: Not clear why this is so controversial, but that doesn't beget trust, either. But it's true and I'll stand by it.
- robryk 10y ago
  Is it still an independent third party if they chose her and are paying her? This is normally enough to say that she has a conflict of interest.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Normally an independent investigator is paid regardless of their findings, and future business with other clients is dependent on maintaining a reputation for impartiality.

metaphorm 10y ago

try to take a more balanced view. just as we should not automatically assume that a person making an allegation is not telling the truth, we should also not automatically assume that the person being accused is guilty of the allegations. by requesting NOT to have a judicial investigation the accusers are effectively saying "we are content to allow for trial by torch-wielding-mob in the court of public opinion and reputation" instead of allowing for a trial by an institution established specifically for impartiality and upholding the rights of both the accusers and the accused.

geofft 10y ago
There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization. What you are arguing is that, in the absence of a trial by a government, people have the active right to participate in an organization that doesn't want them. That goes against every bit of the ethos of a project like Tor. (And if you won't believe any other argument, keep in mind that it's not fair to him: why would the state be inclined to treat him fairly, for everything he's done to oppose the state?) https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  > There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization. I think you may have missed what the front-page of HN looked like when this was first happening. I won't bother re-quoting/linking things beyond previous discussions (since those contain the information) but your comment is entirely out-of-sync with what was happening. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845338 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901

fdsaaf 10y ago

> The victims These accusers only become "victims" after an impartial jury of Appelbaum's peers weighs the evidence and pronounces him guilty.

Tomte 10y ago
Wrong. Not every judicial system uses juries. "Victim" is not a predominantly judicial term, unlike "defendant" or "felon", so the everyday meaning of someone who suffered something applies. That's a factual thing, not procedural as you claim above.
- fdsaaf 10y ago
  The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. I'm making a procedural objection, yes, and I'm doing it because accusations are too important to be left to innuendo.
  - Tomte 10y ago
    No, we usually don't. The vast majority of accusations in our lives have no place in court. Only the very gravest ones find their way there. And we're under no obligation to refrain from drawing our own conclusions.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. No, its how the justice system determines whether fact claims are adequately supported to apply legal sanctions. Individuals are free to determine and speak on their conclusions as to the truth of fact claims independent of judicial conclusions; this is a fairly fundamental freedom (reflected in the first amendment) and essential to the marketplace of ideas.
tedunangst 10y ago
This is clearly false. If someone steals my wallet, I'm the victim of pickpocketing even if the perpetrator is never identified, let alone convicted.

zaccus 10y ago

I heard he raped or sexually assaulted someone. Someone wrote "a rapist lives here" outside his window. If he did rape someone, no due process means we're treating rape as a mere HR issue, and he's free to go rape more people. If he did not rape someone, then at least some of the allegations being thrown around are false. No due process means that someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume all of it is false.

jessaustin 10y ago
Why would anyone at Tor Project care what "someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume"? Impune rapists are not their responsibility; your complaints would be better addressed to police and prosecutors. If, against all odds, Appelbaum isn't actually an actual rapist, he is certainly still an asshole, and there's nothing wrong with giving assholes the boot.
- zaccus 10y ago
  I have no idea why they would care what someone unconnected would think. But the way this has been publicised sure makes it seem like they care, so here we are discussing it. What do you mean "against all odds"? Unless you're connected with this personally, all you have to go on is their internal investigation, which did not mention rape. So apparently no one is even claiming that anymore. Again, they can either turn this over to the police, or I'm going to assume it's all made up and I'm not going to care. Not that my opinion is worth any more than yours, which is to say it doesn't matter at all.
jimrandomh 10y ago
The Tor project blog post notes that they "hired a professional investigator". This is significant because PIs are a licensed profession with the training and trust required to bring evidence of criminal activity before a court of law. That would be a separate process from the HR investigation, and would almost certainly not be discussed publicly while it was still in progress.