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Comment by cvursache | Hacker News Reader

People like Jake Appelbaum that manage (or actively try) to stay in the spotlight also educate the general public about security. That is something very valuable for a community: to have evangelists going around and spreading the word while getting all the attention. Just look at people like Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, and so on. They could have all been doing science instead of working for months on television programs. They didn't because they believed educating the public is a worthwhile task. I sure hope we never run out of people that share the same opinion.

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If Appelbaum is trying to educate the general public, he's doing a piss-poor job of it. Sagan, Dawkins and Chomsky approach[ed] the general public via the media and reach[ed] hundreds of millions of people. (Cosmos alone: over 500 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage) Appelbaum found himself a community numbering in the tens of thousands, rode the coattails of actual researchers to prominence by making minor contributions to their work and overplaying his role, and now rests on other people's laurels. He's only a big fish because this pond is so small.

I am not as informed about Appelbaum as you seem to be, but regardless of his actual contributions to the field, maybe it's not so clear about whether or not he's doing a poor job educating the general public. The numbers of minds captivated with stories told by the likes of Carl Sagan are, as you mentioned, orders of magnitude bigger than what Appelbaum could accomplish. But take Mikko Hypponen or Moxie Marlinspike - great speakers with great things done - would you say that they come even close to what Noam Chomsky reaches with his talks? I don't have concrete data on this, but I do believe the answer to be a clear no. And that's maybe because the majority of the population of the world isn't as interested in computer security as they are in debates about religion, science, politics, sports, consumer electronics or whatever. Maybe this field is just too young to be a permanent part of day-to-day concerns or to have more than a couple of tens of thousands of people interested in it. And maybe that's why it's probably worth considering supporting the few public figures this field has.

Jake talks about politics, not computer security.

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