Jacob Appelbaum Leaves the Tor Project | Hacker News Reader

Jacob Appelbaum Leaves the Tor Project

blog.torproject.org

206 pointsikeboy92 comments

There appear to be rape accusations against Jacob Applebaum. But so far only 2 Tor developers have stated this. No outside verification. Hopefully more facts surface as time goes on. This is very disconcerting.

https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73523010215444889...

https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73858143289374310...

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802983173922817

I can't believe this is still the top comment. If Jacob Applebaum is a rapist, then that is horrible and of course he should step down. But this comment links to 3 tweets that are all duplicates of each other.

Is there any reason to think that Jacob Applebaum is actually a rapist? I would really like to see some proof of that, before jumping to any conclusions.

Public rape accusations today from a female Tor core dev and her girlfriend aren't relevant to Applebaum's sudden departure?

EDIT: Tor doesn't confirm or deny the allegations drove the departure. https://twitter.com/JackSmithIV/status/738857839402311681

If the truth isn't known, Tor could be shooting itself in the foot if they 'decided' that it's one way or another. Makes sense that they would say that.

They've now confirmed. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/statement

I saw that and tried googling around and the only thing I found was him defending his stance that Assange is not a rapist by default in 2012.

Those are quite serious accusations. I really hope we'll learn more about this.

So the reply from Andrea (puellavulnerata) indicates that's not what she's saying.

Which reply?

https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73882339100054733...

She's objecting to the ((( ))) around his name (shorthand for "Jewish" in white nationalist circles).

You find more about this here: https://mic.com/articles/144228/echoes-exposed-the-secret-sy...

This explains his tweet from a few days ago: "Changing of the guards."

https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/736259103790632960

I' sorry to see him leave. I had the opportunity to attend his talks in Munich and Hamburg and he is a great explainer and so well spoken. I'm curious what he is up to next.

I'm reluctant to pre-judge someone in a situation like this (having zero facts, only allegations from people, some of whom I trust by default), but stepping down when allegations like this happen, even if you dispute their veracity, is often the best thing to do for the organization (and yourself).

This has to be tough for everyone involved. Tor is unpopular with a lot of people, and there are both internal-to-scene and journalist-vs-securitypeople historical dramas here, plus people often do bad things.

I'm confident the Tor Project will survive this; I hope justice for the people involved is served as well.

Serious, straightforward question: what was Appelbaum's operational role with Tor, that his departure would be something they'd need to "survive"?

He was strongly associated with Tor from a PR/outreach perspective. Less critical than a year ago, and not particularly operational. Hence my confidence that Tor will survive.

Apparently he also edited 53 lines of code, although that's more than I assumed.

Which is why Tor should probably operate like PaX, without real life identities associated. Some open source contributions are not very different from activism in that they can get you into trouble in certain jurisdisctions, and in essence it's not much different from banned writers.

Meredith Patterson's pulling no punches:

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802983173922817

I hope The Tor Project and Appelbaum will make statements. Their reticence and the suddenness of the resignation raises concerns that there are problems at that very important project.

Or this is FBI related, and they're barred from giving details. I'm not saying his sudden resignation is a canary, but I'm also not sure that it isn't.

After what Snowden has shown us about the lengths the government is willing to go (on our payroll, that is), how can you really trust any technology? To me, the chilling effect is far stronger than we generally suspect.

Seems oddly reminiscent of the Julian Assange case.

That's what I initially thought, but time will tell. If the media starts hyping this like the Assange case, then yes, the alphabet mafia may have had a hand... After going through some crap with an outright psychopath working for a non-profit (the signs were there (classic ones), but it took a bit of time to put together a comprehensive picture), I have some insight into how organizations (or groups of humans, fundamentally) tend to deal with this stuff. Tor's terseness does not surprise me - 'he said, she said's never go well and it violates some unspoken social rules.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt, allowing for differences in temperament and personality, amateur psychoanalyzing trying to understand a person, compassion... these are all things normal healthy people do, in the interests of co-operation - which psychopaths consciously take advantage of. And overlooking things because person X is effective at their job... it is the same sort of pragmatism that underlies the legal system - e.g. you may be entirely in the right and the other person in the wrong, but the legal system only cares about money and really, which one has more - and more lawyers. At some point, the rational person decides this is stupid and a waste of time and not worth it to their personal life, especially when society, as complex as it is now, isn't going to care that much about a bad actor unless they are very very notable.

E.g. Bill Cosby still has his supporters and Jimmy Saville got away with all sorts of stuff for years while others consciously looked away - because the cost of standing up and fighting the Establishment wouldn't have been worth it. It's groupthink, plain and simple, and a lot of people can't jump that hurdle.

Eventually, you realise how fundamentally corrupt humanity can be, and become more conservative (re: that quote). But ... if you have integrity, you have to realise why "conservatives" value hypocrisy so much because it is the foundation of power, and then you begin to see the real Truth about the world.

I don't even know what there would be to discuss with this story. It seems like the only possible outcome of it is a lot of personalized Internet drama. If there's an important story here, someone will eventually write it, and maybe that will have a place on HN. But this one-line page isn't that, and I flagged this story, and hope others do too.

Hmmm. Would you feel the same way if there wasn't so much ambiguity around his departure? There's often HN stories when notable people depart notable organizations/projects.

I definitely understand where you're coming from. This comment section certainly isn't even remotely productive and I can understand and mostly agree with your choice to flag it. But purely out of interest, I do wonder where you feel the line is. I do find it interesting to know when various people change their affiliations. It's one of the things I actually often find out about on HN, since I otherwise wouldn't end up keeping up with any of it.

I feel like most of the people commenting here probably don't know any other Tor project members by name, including the founder's, and don't really know what Appelbaum did or the project either. So the fact that we're off to these ridiculous races on this thread based on this one-line post is especially galling.

Speculation can on rare occasions be interesting, when it's done by informed speculators. But that's not what we have here, is it?

The other comments had me rolling my eyes. But far as Tor and Appelbaum, remember that Appelbaum was the public face of Tor and defender of Wikileaks for many people. Also did lots of work on these issues. Was the fieldguy in many countries deploying the tech. Justifies a specific interest in Appelbaum over others where some, including me, were wondering if aomeone missed a writeup somewhere about why he left and what's his next plans.

All this other stuff seems tabloid. Not what we need on HN.

Evangelist. Not developer.

"did lots of work on these issues" is misleading. He was an imposter and that was precisely his official role in the tor project.

I didn't say developer. So, dont correct it. I also addressed broader issues than merely Tor code. He did lots of outreach plus helped deploy Tor in a lot of rough areas. Post Snowden, he took a role both informing and being an evangelist.

You can't unroll years of video presentations and writeups by one comment. So, please cite reputable sources saying all that was a hoax in his official job duty on Tor to hoax people.

ok. I am neither a fan nor a foe of jake.

His role was evangelism, he was successful with it, but it does not affect the technology in any way. Just as the death of your car salesman would affect your customer experience but not the way Ford builds cars for you.

I have no idea what "deploying Tor" means, but apparently it means loading an installation package on a machine. So come one, you could impress non-techies with that but...

Nope.

I just think that the submission's merit is independent of the page full of awful comments it generated. The submission itself seems about as HN worthy as other "X leaves Y" submissions. IMO, the comments are a problem in the HN community, not a problem in the submission.

Pragmatically though, flagging the story and getting whatever this comment section off the front page probably makes sense.

Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately, I think the comments inflict more harm than the good the story logline provides.

People are posting related info they've found. Seems entirely valid to me (especially given that the media botches a lot of stories, like the last two revelations of "the real Satoshi").

This thread is just plain bizarre and probably the lowest quality content I've seen on hacker news. Glad you flagged it.

I respectfully disagree. He had enough involvement with the project (speaking about it publicly) that his departure on its own is sufficiently newsworthy.

(FWIW, I know a bunch of the Tor devs, Tor founders, and various anti-Jake people across areas. I've also known Jake for about 20y. I just think "person publicly associated with the org leaves" is newsworthy, since Tor itself is newsworthy.)

"I flagged this story, and hope others do too."

It's totally flagworthy but this is the same thing as 'soliciting votes' which is supposed to be a Bad HN Manners.

I agree and try not to do this often, but this is embarrassing even by HN drama standards.

FWIW, there is now a twitter account and website set up now dedicated entirely to completely assassinating his character. Whether there are claims made that are true or not, I'm not linking to either because I think the court of public opinion is the most fucked approach to getting justice (I personally know of one person sitting in prison now for 14 years for murder because his character was systematically assassinated in public leading up to the trial. He ended up pleading guilty to another crime that occurred while he was in solitary confinement awaiting trial in order to avoid life in prison).

For those curious, you can probably find both if you look hard enough, but there isn't anything substantiated or factual presented by either. If anything, they make the accusers look incredibly desperate and vindictive. Furthermore, the site references the "plagiarism" incident as one of the offenses which feels absurd after reading the thread with all the drama surrounding that "offense":

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.otr.devel/1546

Gregory Maxwell's comment on there seems the best considered reply:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.otr.devel/155...

For those that found the site, I encourage you to file an abuse complaint for libel at http://publicdomainregistry.com/report-abuse-complain/

For those that found the twitter account, I encourage you to report the account to twitter.

This is not what justice looks like.

Is he now going to get back to creating sex toys? ;)

http://www.wired.com/2007/10/so-who-wants-to/

On a more serious note, sorry to see him leave. He seemed really deeply engaged in Tor Project, I saw him on CCC (Chaos Communication Congress, a huge hacker conference in Hamburg) a couple of times. See his talks here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=appelbaum+ccc

Damn, that's a really short statement and notice. I was hoping for more details.

I wonder what the backstory is on this.

Indeed. The terseness of the announcement is quite conspicuous.

He's pursuing a PH.d.

Think this is simply him dedicating more of his time to schooling.

As far as I know he never went to college, so he's going to have to pursue his BaCS and MaCS first.

There is generally no formal requirement to have earlier degrees; they're helpful for admission, of course, but if you can convince admissions and an advisor to take you on, you're in.

As far as I know, there is a formal requirement to have, e.g., a BSc to get a PhD or a masters.

Put it this way: can you provide even a single example that proves this to be false?

I know of just one instance actually (guy who is now a professor from Hong Kong, whose incredible experience with farming was counted).

On the other hand, I do know some smart folks without college degrees whose professors fought to get them in and to get them designated in certain higher level positions but they lost that battle.

Well, Jake's listed as Tanja's PhD student, so there's one example right there. If you google for a bit longer you'll find others who hold PhDs who don't have undergraduate degrees. It's definitely rare to be admitted this way and then not all these students end up successfully defending after admission, but the formal requirement for an undergraduate degree does not exist at some institutions, or can be waived with some uncommonly used paperwork at others.

Most people are surprised to find just how many things universities have a form to do. There's very few rules at a university you can't get waived with the right signatures on the right paperwork.

My own time in academia required a lot of paperwork...

Gregor Kiczales told me he had no bachelor's before his PhD. I expect this has been getting rarer over time.

He is listed by Tanja Lange as one of her PhD students: http://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/

You can't blame college admissions staff for trying it on, but no.

I wonder if this is related to the @isislovecruft story [1] from a couple weeks back. [2]

[1]: https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/732593939719593984

[2]: http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/17/technology/tor-developer-fbi...

More likely this story.

https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/638735997396774912

Please just quote the tweet;

  Today is my first day as a PhD
  student with @hyperelliptic and
  @hashbreaker at @tue_mcs. #pqc

Is it possible that this story was planted by the NSA/CIA?

I mean, I doubt it, but it's nowhere near beyond the realm of possibility.

Working on the tor project sounds dangerous which is rather sad.

I am going to guess that he is too busy being a Ph.D. student.

Those who have worked with Jake won't be surprised at all by this. These are accusations coming from multiple people in the tech/privacy/infosec crowd, not from the government.

For those thinking these are government-sponsored lies, do you think [Meredith Patterson](https://twitter.com/maradydd) of [Status 451 Blog](https://status451.com/) is working with the government?

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738801590333624320

> [blog.torproject.org/blog/jacob-appelbaum-leaves-tor-project …](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/jacob-appelbaum-leaves-tor-...) is a gross disservice to the Tor community. People deserve to know why Tor evicted its resident sociopath.

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802325565755392

> 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.

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802983173922817

> .@mmeijeri Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as an organisation couldn't ignore it anymore.

I worked around Jake around 2009ish in the early years of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. I've seen his charismatic pushiness routine that he uses to get what he wants. I joked that if you ever wanted to find him in a group photo, just look front and center. As time went on, I did hear more uneasy things about him. His name came up with a person I met at PyCon last year in Montreal, who then relayed a story that didn't go as far as sexual assault, but was very troubling. He's one of those people that you step aside and warn your friends about. Keep an eye on your intoxicated friends when he's around.

The stories I read on http://jacobappelbaum.net/ fit exactly with the Jake that I knew. He is focused on his own wants and laughs off people's boundaries. Reading the stories on that site doesn't make me think of an elaborate conspiracy to discredit him but of how Cosby was able to get away with his crimes for years.

Before people start saying I'm a shill: I don't have any connection to the http://jacobappelbaum.net/ nor do I know the people who made it (or, at least, I don't know if any people I know made it). [I wrote a book on cryptography, and 100% of the proceeds go to the Tor Project, the EFF and Creative Commons.](http://inventwithpython.com/hacking/proceeds)

Latest developments:

"Three current Tor employees—two of which agreed to be named on the record—have confirmed that they personally know the authors of the alleged victim statements on the site, JacobAppelbaum.net. Although they continue to maintain anonymity for the authors of the stories, these Tor employees are now publicly vouching for the site’s authenticity, which Appelbaum has called into question.

Andrea Shepard, a senior Tor developer, confirmed to the Daily Dot that she was in touch with at least one of the victims on the website several months ago. Alison Macrina, a Tor employee and advocate as well as the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, also vouched for the authenticity of the anonymous victims' statements.

"It’s related to something that started happening in earnest about three or four months ago," Macrina said. "Which is simply that people stopped being afraid to talk to each other about Jake. That’s how I heard from some victims.""

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/jacob-appelbaum-tor-project...

As an outsider, I don't know what is going on at all, but since you linked to some people that are notable that are willing to go on the record, it seems appropriate to quote some of what they said,

"Andrea Shepard, a senior Tor developer, confirmed to the Daily Dot that she was in touch with at least one of the victims on the website several months ago. Alison Macrina, a Tor employee and advocate as well as the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, also vouched for the authenticity of the anonymous victims’ statements."

I feel like a conspiracy theorist by saying there are far too many rape allegations against people associated with wikileaks. Cui bono?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

Edit: As someone that has almost exclusively hung out with educated/privileged people, I am just not used to anyone that would tolerate any assault occurring around me. People have never even joked about it around me, and I am the most crude person IRL. I am aware that I could be wrong, this story just sounds difficult to believe.

ioerror is one of most amazing activists I have ever met. This is definitively a loss for Tor.

> activists

While I'm sure you intended this to be a compliment, you should know that ioerror has strong opinions (which I agree with) about the word "activist". From a recent talk[1][2] he gave about journalism and the media:

    "Activism" is used as a pejorative term in order to suggest
    that participation in a democratic society is somehow 
    outside of the normal behavior.

    Fuck that. That is wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78

[2] I strongly recommend everyone watch [1] - it's shorter than most of his talks (only 20m), and it has surprising revaluations about e.g. The Guardian. Jacob doesn't pull his punches, and he burns a few notable bridges.

I completely agree. However, the reality of things is that some people are more engaged than others when it comes to defending freedoms, advocacy, etc...

Edit : I have found this Tweet [0] I shared with ioerror himself about this same subject exactly a year ago.

[0] https://twitter.com/Raed667/status/608297894651772929

He has a problem with the word "activist" being substituted in by journalists, for other journalists. Not with the concept of "activism".

Think of all the people that have been distanced from the project because of his behavior. Think of all the other people who would be distanced from it in the future if his behavior was tolerated and defended by the organization. This is really not a loss at all!

bs.. so these people decided to tweet about it simultaneously ? k

1) no: https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73523010215444889...

2) waiting to comment until after your org has made an official statement is, if anything, erring on the side of being professional

3) Attempting to downplay rape accusations with an account that's 58 minutes old is not a good look.

Interesting to see the second response put his name in triple-parentheses. (ref: https://mic.com/articles/144228/echoes-exposed-the-secret-sy... )

Since this was thoroughly discussed yesterday, it's probably best to treat it as off-topic here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11831759.

It's an alt-right thing. Called an "echo". It's used to highlight Jews.

Oh is this why Andrea's reply to someone asking about the rape allegations is "fuck off Nazis"?

Here's the recent discussion about that article when it got submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826647

Checking that person's other tweets they appear to be some flavor of neo-Nazi.

And nothing of value was lost. Those who know, know he's all talk and no skill.

Don't smear him without backing up your claims, Mr/Mrs. green-text-brand-new-burner-account.

Good talk is valuable on own. The community and democracy need decent spokesmen.

Then share what you know.

As outlined elsewhere he's an "activist." He talks a lot but he's not a coder.

Having had several technical discussions with Jacob, I’m certain he’s technically skilled.

(I’m a former Google engineer, have worked on privacy and security software [I created Disconnect, have contributed to HTTPS Everywhere].)

I will second the statement that Jacob is an able and skilled developer.

I have worked with him on projects long ago, however, so he can certainly have chosen where to focus his time and attention. Just because you don't see him code, don't assume he can't (replying to Grandparent of course)

Are you meaning to imply that "activists" cannot or do not do anything productive? If so, you might want to reevaluate that belief.

You sound an awful lot like a developer that doesn't think they need a project manager and is oblivious to the chaos that surrounds them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com