My Letter to the Tor Project | Hacker News Reader

My Letter to the Tor Project

oneeyedman.net

100 pointsKristine197516 comments

Back when I was a tech journalist, I always felt uncomfortable speaking with representatives of the Tor project. Their approach to communicating always seemed needlessly accusatory and combative. It left me with the strong impression that they are more interested in shouting down criticism and downplaying the extent to which Tor is abused rather than educating the public and engaging with the broader tech community in good faith.

The poor way that the organization and its members have dealt with the allegations made against Applebaum over the years seems emblematic of the broader problems with their culture and the inept way that they handle criticism and internal failures.

I think a lot of us, particularly open source enthusiasts and civil libertarians, are inclined to give them a free pass because we value the underlying ideas that the Tor project ostensibly represents. But it's increasingly clear that not holding the organization to higher standards of accountability was a disservice to the ecosystem.

It took many thousands of years for humans to create a judicial process with rights for the accused. It's sad to see how quickly we can all fall back to mobs with pitch forks, with justice decided on platforms like Twitter.

related (flagged) thread of the zeit.de article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12303927

Why it was flagged?

Because it is drama, just like this post.

(A more precise answer would be that your question is impossible to really answer, since it's the users of the site who flag stories; it's like asking why something was upvoted.)

It is not drama if two German equivalents of the New York Times and the Washington Post both slam the Tor foundation's behavior. This is the other one:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/jagd-auf-jacob-...

The FAZ and the Zeit are two of the most serious newspapers in Germany. FAZ is conservative/business friendly.

I'm afraid these particular authorities aren't meaningful enough to me to make compelling appeals to them. This all sure looks like drama to me. That is at least why I flagged them.

For what it's worth, I flagged a bunch of anti-Appelbaum stories too. For the same reason. Drama.

Neither you or the Tor foundation are authorities to me either. The story is not only Appelbaum, but how a bureaucratic authority can affect someone's life, how much power OSS devs should give to foundations.

Most people here are of course safe, since they don't do OSS and just leech other people's work.

Comments like this are the reason I flag anything that looks like it will generate drama. Thanks for helping me make my point.

All stories that aren't in favour of a good old fashioned lynching get flagged and then removed.

>lynching

Last I heard Appelbaum is still alive, though?

Lynching is an epithet for Social Justice, and vice-versa.

Dramatic overgeneralization as a rhetorical device isn't great for this community. What you've said is not a true statement, even apart from its inflammatory snark.

True statements include that the community is divided on most controversial issues and that there's often a tug of war between flags, vouches, and upvotes when it comes to stories like this.

> What you've said is not a true statement

Sorry. Allow me to clarify.

It is my observation that

> stories which aren't in favour of a good old fashioned lynching

often, and especially in the last 12 months

> get flagged and then removed.

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