When ‘he’ll be kept on payroll, somewhere’ is where you are
Since this post casts djb in an unfavorable light, I feel it&#x27;s important to post some of his emails here, so that his words can stand alone, uncolored.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hdevalence.ca&#x2F;etc&#x2F;34de2f3c2a48f7da&#x2F;EmAiLs.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hdevalence.ca&#x2F;etc&#x2F;34de2f3c2a48f7da&#x2F;EmAiLs.txt</a><p>&quot;Hi everybody,<p>As most of you know, we hired Jake for a 5-year PhD program, starting
with a 50-50 split between Tor and TU&#x2F;e, and increasing TU&#x2F;e percentage
assuming that the first year goes well.<p>The Tor Project put up a blog post yesterday afternoon saying that Jake
had resigned from Tor. The blog post doesn&#x27;t say &quot;to concentrate on his
PhD studies&quot; or any other explanation. If you look on Twitter you&#x27;ll
find a shocking statement &quot;Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as
an organisation couldn&#x27;t ignore it anymore&quot; from Meredith Patterson, and
a rapidly growing pile of comments.<p>If it&#x27;s true that Jake raped someone then of course he should go to jail
for this heinous crime. If it&#x27;s not true then the source of the false
accusation should be appropriately punished for slander. Clearly
_someone_ has broken the law.<p>But it&#x27;s not my job to issue punishment, or to figure out who deserves
punishment. I&#x27;m going to presume _everyone_ innocent until proven
guilty. Everyone has a right to due process: being told exactly what the
accusations are, having adequate chance to respond, having hearings in
front of a neutral judge, etc.<p>Often people are falsely accused of crimes. I see it as part of my duty,
as a member of a civilized society, to avoid prejudging and punishing
people who are accused and who have not had their day in court. On the
opposite side, often people are correctly accused of crimes, and I also
see it as part of my duty to avoid prejudging and punishing accusers who
have not had their day in court.<p>As long as nobody goes to court claiming rape or slander, I would ask
that you join me in presuming that the accusations of rape are false,
_and_ in presuming that the accusations of slander are false. Assuming
that someone _does_ go to court, I would ask that you join me in waiting
for judges and juries to do their jobs---no matter how tempting it is to
instead join a poorly informed mob on one side or the other. I&#x27;m not
saying that judges and juries never make mistakes; I&#x27;m saying that the
alternatives are much worse.<p>---Dan&quot;<p>Furthermore, from the article:<p>&quot;Isis told Tanja their story of being raped by Jacob, without identifing it as theirs. Tanja’s response was to ask “Why were they in the same bed with Jake?”, and when I asked Tanja whether, if someone she knew personally came to her with this story, she would believe them. Tanja said no, not without hearing Jake’s explanation. At this point myself and Isis left in tears, ending the conversation.&quot;<p>From the emails file:<p>&quot;
Dear Harry,<p>A few weeks ago you initiated a strictly confidential, and ongoing,
conversation with me. During this conversation I have been listening
carefully to what you&#x27;ve been saying, frequently summarizing to confirm
my understanding, asking questions regarding various details, and
providing my advice as to the best procedures for you to follow.<p>I&#x27;m deeply concerned about this conversation, for two basic reasons.<p>First, I&#x27;ve now heard multiple rumors making me believe that you have
been summarizing the contents of this conversation to other people in a
highly inaccurate way. Perhaps you weren&#x27;t paying close attention to
what I said, or perhaps you weren&#x27;t careful in how you summarized it.
There are other possible explanations---perhaps the rumors I&#x27;ve heard do
not reflect what you actually said; perhaps I seriously miscommunicated
something---but the bottom line is that I&#x27;m not confident in the
reliability of the communication channel.<p>Second, some of the things you&#x27;ve said sound more severe than simply
wanting advice. It seems to me that you&#x27;re facing problems that you
don&#x27;t feel able to resolve on your own: your goal is for other people,
in particular me, to take action. However, a strictly confidential
conversation makes action impossible. My role in such a conversation is
purely as an advisor; complaints and other requests for action require
different procedures.<p>Given these concerns, I&#x27;ve decided that this message will be the end of
our strictly confidential conversation. I recommend that you send me a
separate message explaining in detail what problems you&#x27;re facing---
without any reference to the previous conversation; again, it&#x27;s
procedurally impossible for me to take action that relies even slightly
on any portion of a strictly confidential conversation---and explaining
what actions you would like me to take.<p>I&#x27;m sorry if this sounds excessively formal, but following proper
procedures avoids errors and provides protection for everyone involved.<p>---Dan&quot;<p>From a followup email sent by Dan:<p>&quot;
&gt; In fact, I told both Dan and Tanja in June that I felt I had no option<p>&gt; but to resign, due to sexual harassment, blackmail, and physical abuse<p>&gt; by another of their students.<p>Mr. de Valence fails to mention that what he told me was part of a
strictly confidential conversation. I was not even at liberty to
disclose to you the existence of this conversation.<p>After careful consideration, given what I now see Mr. de Valence
writing, I have concluded that the following limited disclosure is
proper: with all due respect, Mr. de Valence is wildly exaggerating the
contents of his conversation with me. It is with the utmost care that I
am choosing the words &quot;wildly exaggerating&quot;.<p>[...]<p>&gt; That student, Jacob Appelbaum, was fired this summer from his other<p>&gt; job, at The Tor Project,<p>The article cited by Mr. de Valence says that Mr. Appelbaum resigned
from the Tor Project. &quot;Was fired&quot; is not an accurate summary.<p>&gt; on account of other abusive behaviour, as<p>&gt; described in The New York Times:<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;technology&#x2F;tor-project-jacob-appelbaum.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;technology&#x2F;tor-project-ja...</a><p>I am Mr. Appelbaum&#x27;s first supervisor. I am aware that Mr. Appelbaum has
been accused online of rape. I am also aware of the following articles
to the contrary by investigative journalists:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zeit.de&#x2F;kultur&#x2F;2016-08&#x2F;jacob-appelbaum-rape-sexual-abuse-allegations" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zeit.de&#x2F;kultur&#x2F;2016-08&#x2F;jacob-appelbaum-rape-sexua...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taz.de&#x2F;Der-Fall-Jacob-Appelbaum&#x2F;!5361578&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taz.de&#x2F;Der-Fall-Jacob-Appelbaum&#x2F;!5361578&#x2F;</a><p>I don&#x27;t know which side is correct, and I&#x27;m certainly not in a position
to judge. Obviously it is important for criminals to be punished, and it
is also important for innocent people to be protected against false
accusations; this is why we have courts.<p>[...]<p>Six days before the deadline, Mr. de Valence said on the chat system
that he wouldn&#x27;t get much done that day or the next day because he felt
&quot;quite burnt out from last week and travel and some life crises&quot;, and
that he would check back in the next day. He then fell silent, with the
status of his work far from clear.<p>Three days later, after the lead student finally managed to track him
down by smartphone, Mr. de Valence sent one message saying<p><pre><code>   Hi, sorry if I was unclear, I merged the WIP code I had into master
   so that other people could work on it, because I am burnt out and
   can&#x27;t do both implementation work and the Tor meeting at the same
   time.
</code></pre>
He then fell silent again. It turned out that the software was quite far
from a satisfactory state. The rest of the team had to stay up late
nights writing code and text to get the submission done on time.<p>Two weeks later, to my astonishment, Mr. de Valence gave a public talk
at the University of Waterloo on the results of the paper. He had never
asked the team for permission; he had never even notified anyone else on
the team that he was planning to give a public talk. (I first heard
about the talk from a Waterloo tweet two days before the talk.) The only
part publicly announced before that, a tweet in September, had clear
consensus of the team; the question of what to announce when had been an
explicit discussion topic for much longer. As for content, Mr. de
Valence&#x27;s previous slides for a private ECRYPT-NET audience needed quite
a few fixes, were missing cryptographic context, and predated tons of
work on the paper by the rest of the team. Even today I don&#x27;t know what
his Waterloo slides said; he never replied to my email asking for
slides.
&quot;<p>I have to split up this comment in order to post it due to HN&#x27;s length limit. See my reply below.