[rhblake]

Re: NSA, state actors, billion dollar budgets... I think you're giving Appelbaum way too much credit here. While he's been splendid at marketing himself, consider that he might not actually be that important to the causes he's been championing. As others have pointed out: if said state actors wanted to hurt Tor and related projects, he'd be pretty far down the list of targets.

[pdkl95]

Did you forget that Appelbaum was involved in the release of the NSA ANT catalog[1], or his involvement with Laura Poitras and the Snowden documents? Never mind his involvement with Tor (which has been a recent target of various state actors). I'm sure many intelligence community want Appelbaum only slightly less than they want Snowden.

Or do you want to argue that the NSA doesn't care about the person that revealed a catalog of their tools to the public?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog

[rhblake]

No, I didn't forget that he was one of three people involved in writing stories about the NSA ANT catalog, nor that he worked with Poitras (after she, Greenwald and MacAskill had done the most important part). I also did not forget that while he's been good at marketing Tor -- I've seen him at CCC in Berlin/Hamburg a bunch of times 2009-2015, he's become a good speaker -- he's never been important from a tech/operations point of view, from what I understand.

So, yeah, I maintain that there are plenty of juicier targets that Jacob Appelbaum. I'm also sure that he'd like you to think otherwise.

[pdkl95]

> (after she, Greenwald and MacAskill had done the most important part)

They are also targets. I made no claim about the relative importance of Appelbaum's involvement, which is completely off-topic. He gave the talk at 30c3, which makes him a figurehead and thus a target.

> he's never been important from a tech/operations point of view

So what? That doesn't make him any less of a target from agencies that are pissed off about their documents being leaked to the public. The TLAs would love to make an example out of any of the people involved.

> I'm also sure that he'd like you to think otherwise.

That's your interpretation. To be clear, I haven't stated my interpretation, as my only point was that Appelbaum is absolutely on the short list of people we know are the target of state agencies so dismissing the possibility of their involvement is foolish.

[rhblake]

So a number of high-profile, veteran, respected, typically anti-authoritarian members of the hacking community - including multiple Tor project members - have spoken out against Applebaum in the past week. That it's all being orchestrated by some three-letter agency is theoretically possible, sure, but I think that's extremely unlikely. Applying some Occam I just end up with a tragic case of an abusive asshole.

(I don't personally know Appelbaum, nor his accusers, although I've spoken to several of them and seen them at conferences throughout the years. I thought Appelbaum was great at promoting Tor. I also remember my second conversation with him, at 26C3 in 2009: he bragged about how he'd stayed at a squat during his visit in Stockholm the month before and fucked some anarchist girl. Which, at the time, I thought was a bit odd bringing up in casual conversation with someone he didn't know.)

[kbenson]

> Which, at the time, I thought was a bit odd bringing up in casual conversation with someone he didn't know.

I'm not sure that being crass is necessarily an indicator that he's more likely to be a rapist. That's the problem with all this, there's a lot of substantiated stories about him being an asshole, an actual refutation by the party involved of one of the stories that was originally conveyed by a third party, and a bunch of unsubstantiated stories about him being as asshole and a rapist. I don't think the correct thing to do in this case is to assume his guilt. The right may not include assuming his innocence either, until more information is presented.

There's a lot of "you should believe the victim" stuff going around, but at this point are we sure there even is a victim (in the rape accusation)? Is it all third party accusations about anonymous victims, or do we actually have a victim that has come forward? I think that's an important distinction. I put a lot less trust in anonymous sources.

[syngrog66]

it almost makes me wish we had some kind of... I dunno... "system" by which we as a society can be very specific about what is allowed and not. and a system for determining whether the disallowed things happened or not. and a system also for then punishing people who have been found guilty of those disallowed things.

I'm just brainstorming. Perhaps in a hundred years we'll create a way to do that. Until then, let's all just whisper and rumor and accuse and retweet and go with how we "feel" at any particular moment. /s :-)

[xcasex]

Veterans who have spoken out about brashness, him being socially clumsy, him being an asshole.

There are as of yet unsubstantiated, uncorroborated & unverified stories.

[rhblake]

They have essentially described him as a sociopath. That's very different from merely being brash and clumsy...

[mtgx]

He was on the short list for having all of Snowden's documents. If that doesn't make him a primary target for the US government, I don't know what would.

Remember Greenwald's partner was harassed and detained all the way in UK at the request of the US government because he was close to one of the people on this short list of Snowden documents holders.

[rhblake]

What short list? I know he's had access to some of them, along with other journalists, but I've never seen anything about him having all of them.

[syngrog66]

agreed. I forgot to mention Tor and Snowden explicitly in my OC but agreed that these facts are all relevant to how we need to interpret events in this space. because it gives even more motive for certain actors to smear Applebaum.

[petertodd]

Creating drama in a community is harmful to the community as a whole by discouraging outsiders from joining, and encouraging people to leave. Those are all plausible goals of an attack regardless of the direct importance of Jacob Appelbaum himself.

Regardless of whether the allegations are true, false, or a mixture of both, the Tor community needs to find better ways of handling situations like this in the future to better protect both victims of abuse, and victims of false accusations, to make sure people in that community feel safe and can focus on their work.

[mtgx]

> "When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment," Appelbaum told the paper after discussing other situations which he said made him feel uneasy. "When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. And some of my effects, whose positions I carefully note, were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off."

http://www.dw.com/en/snowden-ally-appelbaum-claims-his-berli...

And other similar and very recent account of the US gov harassing Tor developers:

https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

[rhblake]

> And other similar and very recent account of the US gov harassing Tor developers:

> https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

It could be noted that the core Tor developer (@isislovecruft) who wrote that post has also spoken out against Appelbaum.

[syngrog66]

can you link to something specific that @isislovecruft said? A specific statement, by him/her, first-person, as an independent direct witness, against Applebaum?

because I did a quick search and saw nothing in their blog or Twitter stream. Instead... I saw a lot of what I expected to see: smoke, emo-drama, innuendo, rumor and SJW brigading.

I'd love to have my views corrected by facts and something concrete. It would help everybody involved in the discussion.

[asuffield]

There's a more compelling argument: if any of the large state actors were involved, they'd probably have done a more competent job of it. This all sounds pretty amateurish to me.