Comment by shava23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shava23 | Hacker News Reader

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What we have here is a set of social engineers social engineering an ouster of a fellow social engineer from the fellowship of his fellow social engineers.

Welcome to the snake pit.

No matter what all of you may think of the stand-up-ness of any of the folks involved, there are strong agendas in whomever is presenting a case here.

I, for one, am no longer involved in the Tor Project, but I am the founding executive director, and I haven't so much as spoken to Jake for years -- I believe I ran into him very briefly at a Tor hackathon about three years ago at the MIT Media Lab -- and haven't spoken him to any serious depth for a good nine years. So I don't have a serious horse in this race. I care about the project a good deal more but I've been retired, not on the board, and not particularly volunteering due to a stroke a while back.

But this kind of thing bites.

Sit down, STFU, and wait for the courts, if any, to settle it out. We went through this with Assange too. It divides people up.

There are a few things to say here.

The most radical thing you can do for a woman is to believe her. Fine. The most radical thing you can do for an activist, is to believe him or her. Applies to Jake and to Nick, amiright? But. To. Both. The best thing you can do for your community is to stop tearing it up at the roots with gossip, like archetypical old ladies. Which I feel qualified to say, as the local blue hair (ok buzz cut battle ship gray) retiree. Opsec says, every one of these reasonable sounding people is a liar with an agenda.

So, much as I would love to believe Jake, the women involved, Nick, and the tooth fairy, all of them are hackers at hacker cons, and you are all my peeps, and I love you. And there is no spoon, no truth, and no use to hacking this out in an internet forum as a form of vigilante justice.

My gray haired thought is this is all prurient, for a loooong time.

Please chill.

This is just the kind of thing that regardless of who is in...error...makes a community spin until it's sick and the good people fly away.

If we are wise we'll all work to de-escalate, not justify or discuss, until things can go through normalized channels.

I don't expect for an moment that will happen, but I feel compelled to make the appeal.

Shava Nerad founding exec dir, The Tor Project, retired 2007 but speaking entirely for myself

At this point we have multiple respected members of various communities coming out with accusations against JA. This isn't comparable to Assange's situation. Appelbaum has repeatedly come out looking like a scumbag with no one on his side besides mostly anonymous people asking for the benefit of the doubt, and nothing but radio silence from Appelbaum for a week. A guy being a scumbag is frankly much more likely than a conspiratorial multilateral attack on his character.

Generally, my friend, if there is a crowd with torches and pitchforks approaching, it does not matter what the guilt is in the situation, one retreats and does not show ones head for a long time, or one will lose it.

You are just lending yourself to number of the many judges of the court of public opinion now, yes? Here, you may take up the torch and pitchfork of office. Wield them proudly. If you can't catch Jake, who do you think you will go after next, now that you are all dressed up and no where to go?

That's a slippery slope fallacy. Did you read the link above in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842751 ?

https://www.google.com/search?q=slippery%20slope%20is%20not%...

The "slippery slope" is not a logical fallacy, but calling it one is a great rhetorical measure to shut someone up if you don't like their argument.

Similarly, the argument you cite above, if properly applied, is valid. How about McCarthyism and such campaigns. You obviously have to protect our precious bodily fluids. It is as easy to frame this as a way to put Jake in the framing of one of the last remaining purity taboos, framed as an anonymous anarchist group. How can an anarchist advocate of anonymity object?

Except that an anarchist would contract to confront a problem with all aggrieved parties in the open, not like this witch hunt. So these people are not acting like anarchists, they are just ducking state mechanisms and summoning a mob.

This is what puts anarchy in ill repute with the general public. It's not what anarchy calls for in these cases. So I am trying to act like a responsible anarchist and picking up his advocacy. If someone from that crowd wants to pick up their advocacy and Jake actually authorizes representation outside a court (which he hasn't, btw) maybe we can have a moot.

Otherwise, this is a mob.

Joshua Gay pointed out the website to me over on Facebook, and said, go ahead and delete this if you like, and I replied:

I'm not going to delete it. That would be ridiculous considering my history. People can go look for themselves and ponder what this process means in comparison to any other sort of process that would be sane, safe, and consensual -- and accountable -- for all the people involved.

That site talks a great deal about the failings of the formal systems, but it really doesn't particularly seem to me to account for thttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible

I am not impressed. I am so not impressed. Even if it is 100% true, I am not impressed. And I am sorry for the victims if that is the case, and I apologize if they are doing this in good faith but it's wrong, and it opens up such potential for horrible horrible things in the future that they just haven't properly conceived of yet.

I am a feminist, and I have been raped, as many women have. And I say that this is WRONG. And I am a woman with Asperger's and I was chronically bullied and manipulated by asshats when I was younger, and I believe this is wrong.

The places this leads are a very fucked up rabbit hole and series of rabbit holes that go to a place that is not Wonderland, and where the drugs are not as pleasant as Dodson's epileptic fancies.

So Jake, if Jake is this predator, and say he is. Who is the next person that this is used against, this Blair Witch Predator doxxing? How popular will it become? Will it become the next GamerGate trend? Will we find TLAs stirring up little Stasi sites like this?

Or maybe just creating them for fun. How about our friends in Italy, or any of the state sponsored hacker funhouses, this site is so stylish, they could throw something like this up in an afternoon, for any of us. Even me. Even you? Do you have any oppo research? Anyone at FSF? Eben Moglen? rms? Any of my old friends? I'm sure we all have something worth digging up. I've done oppo. We all do.

Let's make this perfectly acceptable in our community. Let's make it meaningful. Let some real HELL into our lives, Joshua. We can make our community hell on earth. All we have to do is let the provocateurs be us.

This is the fastest route away from nonviolence theory and the Beloved Community and straight down that primrose path.

> Even if it is 100% true, I am not impressed.

You are not the only person to come to that conclusion. The entire situation is bizarre. Usually highly rational people are suddenly acting like an angry mob. Requests for information and explanation are ignored or shunned.

> We can make our community hell on earth.

I've been watching major parts of free, democratic society crumble for several decades. Normally change is slow, but recently we seem to be accelerating the transition into hell. The transition isn't limited to just our community: the same attitudes that treat accusations as evidence and polarize people into ideological tribes resulted in violence at a recent political rally in San Jose. Tribalism is growing rapidly, and I am absolutely terrified that society is far closer to the breaking point than anybody realizes.

> All we have to do is let the provocateurs be us.

As Walt Kelly famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

> As Walt Kelly famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

While I do share your worries, here's the context :)

> Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.

> There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

> Forward!

-- Walt Kelly, foreword of "The Pogo Papers"

Well-said. I said something similar in my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11847211

This Internet mob BS is (a) avoiding the best route (police/court) for people involved to resolve the alleged crime and (b) wasting too much time that can be spent on privacy or activism work. I recall far as Hoover days the regimes Tor fights sought to create exactly these sorts of situations to weaken citizens. Best to not help them.

Didn't you say this just a few hours earlier?

"""I agree under 2nd Amendment authority. All others have to be exhausted, though, before that can apply. So, first try your Congress people about passing laws limiting it. See if the LEO's will do anything about the abuse. Try the courts. If they all ignore the corrupt behavior, you're left with no choice but using violence to deter the aggressor. Just make it untraceable with an alibi."""

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