Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
What we have here is a set of social engineers social engineering an ouster of a fellow social engineer from the fellowship of his fellow social engineers.<p>Welcome to the snake pit.<p>No matter what all of you may think of the stand-up-ness of any of the folks involved, there are strong agendas in whomever is presenting a case here.<p>I, for one, am no longer involved in the Tor Project, but I am the founding executive director, and I haven&#x27;t so much as spoken to Jake for years -- I believe I ran into him very briefly at a Tor hackathon about three years ago at the MIT Media Lab -- and haven&#x27;t spoken him to any serious depth for a good nine years.  So I don&#x27;t have a serious horse in this race.  I care about the project a good deal more but I&#x27;ve been retired, not on the board, and not particularly volunteering due to a stroke a while back.<p>But this kind of thing bites.<p>Sit down, STFU, and wait for the courts, if any, to settle it out.  We went through this with Assange too.  It divides people up.<p>There are a few things to say here.<p>The most radical thing you can do for a woman is to believe her. Fine.
The most radical thing you can do for an activist, is to believe him or her.  Applies to Jake and to Nick, amiright?  But. To. Both.
The best thing you can do for your community is to stop tearing it up at the roots with gossip, like archetypical old ladies.  Which I feel qualified to say, as the local blue hair (ok buzz cut battle ship gray) retiree.
Opsec says, every one of these reasonable sounding people is a liar with an agenda.<p>So, much as I would love to believe Jake, the women involved, Nick, and the tooth fairy, all of them are hackers at hacker cons, and you are all my peeps, and I love you.  And there is no spoon, no truth, and no use to hacking this out in an internet forum as a form of vigilante justice.<p>My gray haired thought is this is all prurient, for a loooong time.<p>Please chill.<p>This is just the kind of thing that regardless of who is in...error...makes a community spin until it&#x27;s sick and the good people fly away.<p>If we are wise we&#x27;ll all work to de-escalate, not justify or discuss, until things can go through normalized channels.<p>I don&#x27;t expect for an moment that will happen, but I feel compelled to make the appeal.<p>Shava Nerad
founding exec dir, The Tor Project, retired 2007
but speaking entirely for myself