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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

There's something deeply alarming here, whatever the nature of the claims against Appelbaum.

There's pretty extensive evidence of an attempt to impersonate him here. There's also a lot of stuff that's alarming from a philosophical standpoint for anyone involved with privacy/anonymity - a link to an "ioerrror" (instead of "ioerror") github is a clear attempt to deceive, and it's deeply questionable to do to visitors to the site, independent of any effects on Appelbaum.

It's pretty obvious that there's serious character assassination happening here, and it's only going to tar the reputation of everyone involved - alleged victims, Appelbaum, and Tor alike. No matter who you're siding with, this is still an ugly and counterproductive episode.

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I would probably reach a similar conclusion, but many of the people speaking out against him are people that I know and respect. People who have been contributing meaningful cryptography research for decades are not suddenly going to become part of some nebulous government-sponsored smear campaign.

What has happened is that Jake has been, let's say, rather manipulative and self-promotional for many years. I've never had any issues with him, but I've witnessed him grandstanding and attacking people who he felt represented a threat to his influence. His elevated profile in the media and the platform that ToR gave him allowed him to do this successfully.

Now that it's ok to criticize him, the floodgates have opened and all the enemies he's made over the years feel that they can speak up. Maybe this looks like some kind of "orchestrated campaign" from the outside?

As for the hyperbolic sockpuppet Twitter accounts or whatever, consider that they have only served to sow doubt about the people coming forward.

I don't mean to condemn the accusations, or attribute this to a shady three letter agency (Farr's piece ought to give lie to that claim at the very least).

My only intent was to say that the initial nature of the website and twitter account were fairly alarming, and seemed to show a pretty bad faith intent to misrepresent their nature and identity. That doesn't speak to who set up any given thing; it could be the victims, but it could equally well be a destructive third party, or even a false-false-flag attempt to muddy the waters to undermine the charges.

All I really mean to say is that the initial misrepresentation of identity is something I'm uncomfortable with regardless of the charges, and that it's something I hope well intentioned supporters of the victims won't engage in (I can hardly ask 2nd party bad actors or 3rd party trolls to change their behavior). The situation is a mess, and I can't do much more than discourage certain tactics and offer sympathy to the victims.

There is the issue of troll communities on the internet.

People running a campaign to do something or another might not have any other involvement, they could just be in it for the lulz.

> There's something deeply alarming here

You need to broaden your gaze. In the wider world, this follows a very familiar pattern of defamation mixed with mass accusations but no legal involvement. It fits a narrative.

> There's pretty extensive evidence of an attempt to impersonate him here.

What? Where? Just because of the github account that they chose? The site doesn't say that Jacob Appelbaum wrote any of it. They call themselves a victims' collective:

http://jacobappelbaum.net/#faq

I am guessing that they chose to plaster Jacob's face all over it just to make the site about him, and I find it very credible that most victims would want to remain anonymous given the kind of hounding and harassment that they are likely to receive otherwise:

    How old are you? How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day?
    Well what did you have for dinner? Who made dinner? Did you drink
    with dinner? No, not even water? When did you drink? How much did
    you drink? What container did you drink out of? Who gave you the
    drink? How much do you usually drink? Who dropped you off at this
    party? At what time? But where exactly? What were you wearing? Why
    were you going to this party? What’ d you do when you got there?
    Are you sure you did that? But what time did you do that? What
    does this text mean? Who were you texting? When did you urinate?
    Where did you urinate? With whom did you urinate outside? Was your
    phone on silent when your sister called? Do you remember silencing
    it? Really because on page 53 I’d like to point out that you said
    it was set to ring. Did you drink in college? You said you were a
    party animal? How many times did you black out? Did you party at
    frats? Are you serious with your boyfriend? Are you sexually
    active with him? When did you start dating? Would you ever cheat?
    Do you have a history of cheating? What do you mean when you said
    you wanted to reward him? Do you remember what time you woke up?
    Were you wearing your cardigan? What color was your cardigan? Do
    you remember any more from that night? No? Okay, well, we’ll let
    Brock fill it in.

The fucked up barrage of questions is from here, btw: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/06/04...

The github account, along with a 'tweet' button that explicitly misleads about the nature of the site, and a twitter account that put out threats while claiming to be associated with the victims (who rejected those threats).

If this isn't an attempt to mislead, I could understand the website choice as a way to increase visibility for an important concern, but the choice of github account and tweet trouble me. I wouldn't want to click that tweet link and have a claim under my name that misrepresented what I was putting out.

None of this is germane to what Appelbaum did - I have no reason to distrust Nick Farr or others, nor do I see any evidence this is an act by alleged victims instead of some other party. But there's still a clear attempt to impersonate and mislead, and I worry that it's going to do more harm to the victims and community than anything else.

(I want to be very clear here. My reaction to the apparent impersonation is entirely distinct from any views on Appelbaum, the abuse claims, Nick Farr's post, or the Tor project's formal response. The extensive quote from the story of an unrelated assault makes me worry that you think I'm trivializing the victims; I am not in any way speaking to their claims or actions.)

Oh, you're talking about the original way that the website and Twitter account were created, which has since changed. I had to rtfa to see what you were referring to.

Oh gotcha. I started from the article (because I missed the initial furor), hence my confusion.

Yeah, the initial day(s) of the website and account are what makes me uncomfortable, not the ongoing claims. Those seem depressingly widespread and well substantiated.

> I missed the initial furor

Here you go, in a way:

https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor/blob/mast...

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