I get the impression that almost everyone in this space overreacts and throws dirt at each other. Here is how others of the Tor project reacted in a similar situation:
Further: This is a direct description of what I have come to know as Jake's M.O. Not an isolated incident. This has to do with one person's behavior, it has nothing to do with the projects that person was involved with.
Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad. Maybe I deserved it. Fine, call me whatever form of coward or weakling you want but in the end, this was my hobby and I found other things to do with my life where I didn't have to put up with this level of stress.
But your document contains serious allegations which the body of it does not support:
> Jake has targeted, abused and silenced many close friends of mine, many of whom are researchers you probably know and respect. Whether it’s ripping off research or just harassing someone into submission, somehow we all felt powerless to do anything about it. He’s the perfect bully.
> Every criticism of him is met with suspicion, every accusation is some government-conspiracy-takedown.
> Those that tried to stand up to him were destroyed, one even took his own life after Jake stole his research. But that’s not my story to tell.
If you're not going to support these claims, you shouldn't make them. Now I get to feel like shit for calling this out-- and potentially causing you stress, because I am sympathetic to your experience...
I think your message would carry more weight if it was limited to your message, rather than setting the framing with a large number of serious but unsubstantiated claims.
Why is that? I am personally willing to believe "Multiple generally-trustworthy members of a community make accusations about a person P which, by their nature, cannot be easily substantiated to the public, which if true would imply that P is/has done X" as very strong evidence for "P is/has done X" - certainly enough to override my prior for "Most people are not/have not done X". And therefore, I think that people should make claims they believe to be true even when they are unsubstantiable by nature, and I am glad that these claims were made.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad for calling this out; you're just saying something that I see a lot in technical communities, in a lot of contexts. I would like technical communities to have a good, strong, evidence-backed way of reasoning about things like this. It seems so often that we default to reasoning about things the way the Anglo-Saxon legal system wants to reason about things when considering whether to point its monopoly on violence at a person. Especially for matters like harassment and sexual assault, we have strong reason to doubt that the legal system is well-suited in its current form at accurately making that judgment, let alone whether it is correct at judging truth, which it explicitly makes no claim to (Blackstone's dictum is specifically about how the legal system should minimize harm on the occasions it gets truth wrong). That default is baked into us by culture, but I think it's a bad default, or more specifically, an irrational and often erroneous default. Hearsay isn't allowable in a court of law, but that's not a reason that hearsay shouldn't be allowed to influence the personal opinions of community members who are making judgments for themselves and not for a government.
It's a share of what Jake is accused of: making it impossible to criticize or question.
From a perspective of statistics, these allegations are heresay-- and we've heard them elsewhere. The results in well known cognitive biases where evidence gets double counted when someone elses allegation is simply repeated by someone else.
What measure of proof do you require?
From what you describe, I don't think you were weak or cowardly, just inexperienced. There is absolutely no shame in that. Hindsight is useful for learning, but not for admonishment (by yourself or others). You had to make lots of decisions fast, amongst a bunch of bad choices with unknown outcomes. Your success rate for surviving bad situations so far is 100%, so don't beat yourself up too much, and tell the retrospective armchair philosophers to jog on.
It's really easy for me to think, when it's not happening to me, that "Of course I would do this, or that, but I'd never do nothing". And we see some of that thinking in this thread.
What people don't realise is that abusing people is an iterative process. The abuser has had a lot of practice at it, and refines the process over many years.
The victim (and that's a hard word to use about ourselves) hasn't had any experience of this kind of situation, and doesn't want to leap to the to them nuclear option.
I hope you're okay, and if you're ever in Cheltenham[1] I'd buy you a coffee[2].
> Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad.
It was bad, and most people would have had the same reaction as you.
> Maybe I deserved it.
No, you did not deserve it.
[1] The one in England.
[2] Or tea. Or beer.
One sane person using logic can't win, ever.
When there is a venue with a contract, whether that can be negotiated outside a state system, or comes with it, we can talk about this like a community. Until such time, this is torches and pitchforks, and bad precedent for our future, which is what we are for, what we are about, and what the accusers claim they are trying to preserve.
We all want that. Even the accusers have to acknowledge that Jake has contributed significant independent work to that. So in respect for not destroying the overall reputation of hacktivism in the outside world -- where we have accomplished things like:
Snowden convincing people that Comey is full of shit supporting people in Congress in the US like Leahy and Wyden Shutting down Free Harbor for it's eventual renegotiation Various leaks and their support many many direct actions many many civil disobediences many many cons and sharing information much public education through mainstream and less mainstream media and all the things that people count that I'm not enumerating because everyone has other goggles on their tin hats, this is just the first few slides on mine because I'm old and straight right?
but this stuff is morphing the world, not just our culture, and this reaches the US and EU and all over, out into tech press and MSM and everywhere else.
It is not about a bunch of play parties and cliques and hacker cons and thons and house parties and who knows who and whatnot and people being aspie and sensitive and whatever and whispering campaigns and whatever and consent culture and rape culture and all these things.
It's about that, and it's about a bunch of smiling gray faces who love to see us fight and destroy ourselves over this shit, as non-authoritarian cultures always do, like ulcers eating our own flesh. Because no matter what Jake did and didn't do, this mechanism is vigilante and abusive. It can not stand.
It is designed to prolong the chaos and damage. What is the end you have in sight? Where does the recursion end? When someone takes a hit out on him on some skanky dark net site?
This is what Hoover did to MLK in the 60s. And MLK fucked up; he was human. He was not faithful to his wife. He screamed and swore at this planning group in the SCLC.
Gandhi was a freaking monster in a lot of ways. He beat his wife. He was probably exactly a sociopath, within modern diagnostic bounds. Mahatma. Later, he sent troops to support Britain in WWII. he was not a pacifist in any absolute sense. He was HUMAN.
Mandela was in jail for years. Why? Because the Boers would not listen to the ANC when they were nonviolent -- the Boers felt they didn't have to. So Mandela took a deep sad breath, and they bombed a train which had civilians including families with women and children and civilian men, and the Boers howled for his blood! And Mandela came forward and said, "Put me in jail and don't look for the others, and I will come peacefully, and the ANC will return to nonviolence -- but understand, this is in our blood, we are Zulu, still." And the Boer listened. And this is why they always called him a murderer, Mandela. This man of peace.
This stuff is not easy. There are no saints. If you wait for saints to take up social change, you will live in hell forever.
So stop it. You are creating a world where no one will ever dare to move out of their front door and take up a life of activism, because they can not know if Jake is a sociopath, or a person who is being framed.
And unless we create some way to clarify that, you people are playing right into the hands of history that no one will come into this path. It's hard enough. It is FUCKING HARD ENOUGH to get people to take up peace and no money and justice and risk.
And you add our own FUD, on top of the FUD that gets rained down on us.
Find me a court, a contract, an actual way to resolve this, or use the state.
Fuck this noise.