Comment by almostbasic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by almostbasic | Hacker News Reader

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My name is Chris M and I am the CMO for Private Internet Access.

PIA management has prepared the following statement regarding Mark Karpeles’s role at LTMH and we hope it addresses your doubts or concerns:

In 2018, Mark Karpeles was appointed CTO of LTMH, which was the parent company of Private Internet Access prior to KAPE. However, Mark never had an operational role in PIA and subsequently never had access to any part of the PIA infrastructure nor any role in the planning or execution of the day-to-day operations of PIA.

The role of CTO at PIA has been run collectively by Tommie P. (SvP Software, joined January 2017) handling the software development side and Gaurav G. (CIO, joined January 2015) handling the operational and infrastructure side of the business.

Mark’s role at LTMH has predominantly been to manage development teams working on FutureFC, general R&D, and providing a broader perspective of the industry as a whole rather than PIA specific issues. His work is best summarized as a valued external consultant for specific discussions related to the advancement of our privacy and security efforts.

As part of the merger with KAPE to become Private Internet, Mark currently has no operational role in the merged entity and is pursuing other endeavors.

Are all your execs now spreading misinformation in random HN threads? Was your CEO not enough?

Making it sound like Mark Karpeles had no real association with PIA is disingenuous.

> However, Mark never had an operational role in PIA and subsequently never had access to any part of the PIA infrastructure nor any role in the planning or execution of the day-to-day operations of PIA.

You say this yet PIA says diferent in your official statement

> Specifically, as many have wondered, he is working as the global CTO across LTM, reviewing technical architecture from an efficiency and security perspective and providing advice and guidance. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/04/why-i-hir...

Sure, maybe it's the parent company but based on how they were structured it seems likely that the CTO of LTM had a lot of influence. Moreover, he was hired as a CTO somewhere by the same people making the big decision at PIA..

Also we can look through your CEO's comments from 2 weeks about Mark. E.g.

>You don’t know a person until you see them in the toughest of situations. Mark is a good man and a great developer who fought on the front lines and I’ve known for a long time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21684155

Seems like he trusts him.

Is this statement a joke? Who makes a statement from a company by saying they are making a statement by the management? What's the point? To look official? Next, this "statement" says nothing. Of course that's the point, but at least be creative. You should be, because I can imagine how challenging it is to defend something universally indefensible.

How dumb do you have to be to make this guy an officer. He could've been the chef in the basement washing just as much money.

Associations with Mark Karpeles are like wearing blackface: it's never okay. Never. It doesn't matter what the reason is.

I'm sure his role is perfectly defensible and his experience a valuable asset for PIA in this space, but I think the issue is the optics of such a hire and what it says about other decisions that have happened or have yet to happen regarding the sale/direction of PIA. It's just especially odd considering what seems to me like obvious overlap between "People interested in having VPN service", "People interested in Bitcoin", and "People who are distrustful of Mark Karpeles".

I can understand how you would feel that way if Mark was hired as the CTO of PIA, but as we stated before, he never had any operational role or access to anything at PIA.

Yep, I agree. That's why I said it was perfectly defensible. Getting burned by Mark in the past causes me a bad _feeling_, though, and the world of feeling and the world of logic often don't intersect, even within the same person. Basically I acknowledge that my feelings aren't logical, but that doesn't make them not exist.

How can we verify that he doesn't contribute to the codebase? Are there some git logs or something we can look through?

As a marketer, whoever wrote this statement should not work in marketing... at best it is simply unclear. At worst it sounds inconsistent in the truth which doesn't help the 'trust us' goal of the statement.

Chris M, I appreciate you responding to this. I was a PIA customer for years, until recently, and it's nice hearing something from your company other than "Don't trust, verify!". Direct information like this goes a long way towards reestablishing PIA's credibility. Unsubstantiated (and likely impossible) marketing ploys do the opposite. Most of what I've read and deduced about the recent changes in your company's structure has been extremely negative, and full of red flags. In my opinion the first half of PIA's new marketing slogan is an ironic reality: "Don't trust."

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