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Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

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Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#131

Post by y7 »

fredgrott wrote: post #90

What is strange: First, both the accusers and the accused should have their day in court. It should not be debated any other way. That being said the TOR project had an obligation to be transparent about this situation and failed to do so.. Some of us do in fact run open source projects and should we abide by TOR's example when we are confronted with the situation of accusations of illegal acts by a project contribut…

Courts aren't about truth finding, they're about establishing whether there's enough evidence that a specific crime was committed. Something like Nick Farr's story[1] is, if true, not against the law, but it does display behaviour that can be really detrimental to a community.

1: https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr-nickf4rr-35c32f...

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#132

Post by devishard »

espadrine wrote: post #85
Houshalter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this essay, about 3% of men will get falsely accused of rape in their lifetime: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-so... The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.

May I argue that it is uncomfortably low? The estimated percentage of women that are the victims of sexual assault is an order of magnitude higher. (See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_S... ) > 23 percent of women and 4 percent of men reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact Even worse, 3% of false positives is a twenty-eighth of the percentage of unreported rapes: https:/…

>> According to this essay, about 3% of men will get falsely accused of rape in their lifetime: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-so....

>> The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.

> May I argue that it is uncomfortably low? The estimated percentage of women that are the victims of sexual assault is an order of magnitude higher.

If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to think the solution to the problem of rape is to falsely report more men?

How does arresting non-rapists for rape prevent rapists from raping?

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#133

Post by throwaw11122334 »

jacobappelbaum.net is hosted on github at:

https://github.com/cephurs/jacobappelbaum.net

Cephurs was an op in a channel run by the law enforcement folks who took down LulzSec:

http://www.xeroflux.net/uploads/Operation_Anon_Rat.pdf

Kinda suspicious.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#134

Post by cuckcuckspruce »

bcg1 wrote: post #103
Sacho wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a site that alleges you are a rapist is an amazingly stressful process for the presumed innocent person, requiring him to respond to a torrent of media and social hate and shunning, being tried in the public eye, open to claims of being a "monster", etc. You could argue you're "helping" more people by believing rape claims, but that's both mob rule(the rights of the many trample the rights of the few) and no…

"Presumed innocent" is only true with respect to the legal system of the state. Individuals are free to presume whatever they like for whatever purpose.

Awesome! I presume you're a mass murderer. Prove to me you're not.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#135

Post by tptacek »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #107
tptacek wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that rape victims who don't report crimes to law enforcement are illegitimate is horse-shit, and people who suggest otherwise should be embarrassed.

I'm talking about these people in the smear campaign which Ive referenced repeatedly here. Not arbitrary victims. It's these people that will "report crimes" to everyone on Internet but not to law enforcement. Even with hashes and shit. You know, like most rape victims trying to stop specific rapists from hurting others...

Please stop assigning responsibilities to the victims of abuses.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#136

Post by Fricken »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #70
moyix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the web site denies involvement with the twitter account: > I SAW SOME DIFFERENT TWITTER ACCOUNTS CLAIMING TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS SITE. IS THAT YOU? > No. Since it is no longer possible to create a Twitter acocunt without a phone number and because we believe anonymity is important, we opted to boycott direct Twitter presence for this site. We don't have a Twitter account. > We have seen the…

This is a claim by one member in a smear campaign saying they're not working with others despite everything happening in a day or so. Their claim isn't worth anything.

Of course their claim is worth something. Everybody is suspicious now of Jacob Applebaum, which is exactly the intended outcome of a smear campaign.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#137

Post by marshray »

tptacek wrote: post #79
Chris2048 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While conspiracy theory is a risky proposition, in this case the agencies involved are known for such things. COINTELPRO, prism etc, so it's no entirely implausible to raise such concerns.

First: no, this is not plausible. Second, a question: exactly what is it that people think Jacob Appelbaum did to make him Public Enemy #1 of any government? He's not an especially important Tor contributor. Tor is not only funded by the US Government, but it began as a project at the Naval Research Lab. He's a spokesperson for Wikileaks, and Wikileaks has gotten itself engaged in serious legal issues with the US Gov…

> What's so important about Appelbaum that he'd be a state-level target?

Uh, maybe because he could roll over on Assange?

I have personally witnessed mysterious people engage Jake in conversation, try repeatedly to get him to admit to committing fraud in the course of his security research, and even try to literally hand him incriminating evidence presumably to get his prints upon it.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#138

Post by tzs »

tptacek wrote: post #86
nickpsecurity wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google "rape conviction overturned DNA evidence." Happens too much.

There were 67,000+ sexual assault convictions in 2012, and 18 overturned convictions. Would you like that as a percentage? That's 0.02%.

Shouldn't the comparison be with the number of rape convictions, not the number of sexual assault convictions, since he was bringing up the number of DNA overturned rape convictions?

I've not been able to find the number of rape convictions in 2012. I found a claim of 85000 rapes in 2012 [1], and claims that 3-10% of rapes lead to a conviction.

If one really wanted to do this right, it would be necessary to look at what fraction of those who are convicted and claim they are innocent are able to get a retroactive DNA test on the evidence, and also take into account that such testing often comes after years in prison and so the comparison should be taking into account the rape convictions in the year that someone was sentenced, not the year they their conviction was overturned.

Considering that I was not even able to find a good number on the number of convictions by year, though, I have no hope of reasonably finding the information necessary for the aforementioned analysis. I've been noticing this kind of thing (not being able to find some statistics that I would have expected to be trivially findable in an intuitively obvious way by the most casual searcher) happening quite a lot over the last couple of years, and it puzzles me.

[1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#139

Post by devishard »

Quite frankly, why is this on Hacker News?

Maybe Jacob Appelbaum raped someone, maybe he didn't. That's not anyone's business except Appelbaum's, his accusers', and the legal system's. It certainly is not a public concern, and it's irrelevant to Tor.

Re: Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community

#140

Post by tptacek »

marshray wrote: post #137
tptacek wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First: no, this is not plausible. Second, a question: exactly what is it that people think Jacob Appelbaum did to make him Public Enemy #1 of any government? He's not an especially important Tor contributor. Tor is not only funded by the US Government, but it began as a project at the Naval Research Lab. He's a spokesperson for Wikileaks, and Wikileaks has gotten itself engaged in serious legal issues with the US Gov…

> What's so important about Appelbaum that he'd be a state-level target? Uh, maybe because he could roll over on Assange? I have personally witnessed mysterious people engage Jake in conversation, try repeatedly to get him to admit to committing fraud in the course of his security research, and even try to literally hand him incriminating evidence presumably to get his prints upon it.

What does "roll over on Assange" mean? What is it that Appelbaum would know about Assange that would mean anything to any government anywhere?

There are quite a lot of people in the security research field (or whatever you want to call it) that really dislike Appelbaum, so I am not at all surprised that he gets messed with.

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