[tor-talk] Any updates from Tor Project on ioerror?

[notfriendly at riseup.net]

On 2016-06-05 15:38, jacob appelbaum (ioerror) questions wrote:
> https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr-nickf4rr-35c32f13da4d
> 
> Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr)
> 
> I used to be a pretty effective organizer working behind the scenes at
> Hacker Events in Europe and on various projects back in the USA. After
> a deliberate campaign of abuse orchestrated by Jake Appelbaum at the
> 30c3, I don’t feel safe or welcome in the community anymore. In fact,
> I physically shut down every time I get close to going back.
> 
> I’m both relieved to talk about it and ashamed that it took me this 
> long.
> 
> Jake has targeted, abused and silenced many close friends of mine,
> many of whom are researchers you probably know and respect. Whether
> it’s ripping off research or just harassing someone into submission,
> somehow we all felt powerless to do anything about it. He’s the
> perfect bully.
> 
> Every criticism of him is met with suspicion, every accusation is some
> government-conspiracy-takedown.
> 
> Those that tried to stand up to him were destroyed, one even took his
> own life after Jake stole his research. But that’s not my story to
> tell. In the scope of people Jake has targeted, of the number of
> stories that have emerged in the wake of his departure from Tor, my
> story is fairly benign. I suppose that’s why I have the luxury of
> attaching my name and face to my story.
> 
> My first Chaos Communications Congress was the 23c3 in Berlin. The
> annual C3s and biennial European Hacker Camps are the finest gathering
> of folks working in all kinds of technology all around the world. From
> the crew that first jailbroke the iPhone to Julian Assange’s first
> Wikileaks speech and in literally thousands of other ways it’s hard to
> overestimate the impact the C3s and Camps have had on our world today.
> These events are probably the world’s last true “Hacker” gatherings,
> not having been co-opted by the Network Security or Startup
> industries.
> 
> I was invited to the 23c3 on account of my work in the US. Being
> there, being in that open, inclusive, chaotic, intensely creative and
> amazingly enthusiastic environment with thousands of passionate
> hackers renewed my faith in the community to do good work on a global
> scale. I encourage everyone to go to experience it. Complete newbies
> and the most accomplished Hackers in the world talk about their first
> Camp or Congress with the same level of enthusiasm and hope, a feeling
> hard to describe and unique to those events and that culture in
> particular.
> 
> Only a few months after attending the 23c3, I’d be dragging 40
> Americans from DEFCON to the 2007 CCC Camp on the first Hackers on a
> Plane. I wanted everyone I knew and then some to experience what was
> happening in Europe.
> 
> Jake was on that trip and pretty much every person on that trip can
> tell you what an epic asshole he was. Where everyone else contributed
> something to making the trip a better event, Jake destroyed whatever
> he needed to in order to gain more fame for himself.
> 
> At that time, Jake couldn’t overshadow the awesomeness of the Camp and
> the burgeoning Hackerspace scene I started working on back at home.
> Over the years of doing that (HacDC, Unallocated Space, NYCResistor,
> etc.) I enjoyed coming back to Europe to help organize whatever needed
> organizing. It was a way of recharging, taking in the amazing energy
> at those events in Germany and the Netherlands.
> 
> One of the many things I used to help out with were the Lightning
> Talks. From the 27c3 onward, I coordinated and emceed these sessions
> where anyone could speak pretty much about whatever they wanted in 5
> minutes or less. The format that I developed over the years is
> basically what they use today. If you could follow basic directions, I
> did whatever I could to get you on stage to say what you had to say.
> 
> Part of this open policy meant dealing with folks who may not be
> entirely stable. Often, these folks would end up not following basic
> directions and they’d fall off the schedule for that reason.
> Generally, they accepted that and trusted I was not trying to silence
> them, I was just being fair.
> 
> One person following this pattern submitted an LT proposal alleging
> that Jake was a US Intelligence Operative. I LOLed. After a few rounds
> of encrypted e-mail pestering and a few texts, they insisted on being
> put on the schedule. I did so to appease, as was my strategy at the
> time, with every intention of pulling them off after they inevitably
> failed to follow directions. You can go look at the wiki histories for
> any LT I organized to show this was what I often did with dubious
> presentations. Organizing the LTs, answering e-mails, checking slides
> and confirming with each presenter took nearly 3 hours for every hour
> of LTs and a lot of that work happened while I was still in NYC, weeks
> before the event. I often went to bed well after 2 AM the nights
> leading up to my flight out to Europe and I wanted to be done with
> this fool and get some sleep.
> 
> The next day I wake up to an e-mail from Jake, followed by e-mails
> from very important people in the CCC chastising me for what I had
> done to Jake’s reputation. Jake demanded all the records I had
> received from this person. Jake also had the CCC edit the 30c3 wiki
> database to eliminate any trace of the offending talk.
> 
> Because the last thing anyone needs is to be targeted by Jake, I
> purged everything this person and sent and refused to hand over
> anything on privacy grounds. I explained what my reasoning was for
> doing what I did, was chastised further, let it go and considered the
> matter over.
> 
> But really, I thought, why would Jake be so defensive about some
> random LT that might have otherwise gone completely unnoticed? If I
> were a government operative hell-bent on destroying the global hacker
> community, what would I do differently from what Jake is doing now?
> 
> Once I arrived at the 30c3, not more than 10 minutes went by before
> Jake himself comes and accosts me, warning “there will be severe
> consequences” unless I hand over everything this person sent. I told
> him that I no longer had the records he sought, but that simply wasn’t
> good enough. Without warning, several times each day throughout the
> 30c3, Jake or one of his proxies would find me say the same thing.
> Each time, no matter who I was with or how long they had known me, I
> was made out to be the one “causing drama”, bringing down the good
> feelings whatever group I happened to be around.
> 
> Every night, I came back to my hotel room, a typewritten note on my
> pillow stating, “Don’t make us use extreme measures. Hand it all
> over.”
> 
> I tried to reach out to people I thought I could trust. I tried to
> tell them what was going on. I tried showing them. I told Jake very
> calmly when he approached that he needed to stop harassing me.
> Everyone I talked to told me to just give him what he wanted, to
> “dialogue” with him to “find a solution” and to “stop creating drama”.
> 
> You can’t dialogue with a sociopath. What’s worse is when people you
> consider your trusted friends take the sociopath’s side.
> 
> At that point, I was rather well known, I had earned a pretty good
> deal of social capital, thousands of Twitter followers from Europe and
> the confidence that people knew me and trusted me. But none of that
> mattered, Jake was a rockstar whose followers went to great lengths to
> make me feel unsafe and unwelcome in the very place I felt most at
> home in the entire world.
> 
> By the last night of the 30c3, after one last ditch effort to get Jake
> and his cronies off my back was rebuffed, it got to be too much. I
> physically could not take it anymore, handed in my badges and phone
> and left with no intention of returning. It was only with a lot of
> support from 3 friends, one of whom was another victim of his abuse
> that I was able to fulfill my commitment to show up for the last day
> of the LTs.
> 
> After breaking my back the following August, my doctors had cleared me
> to travel internationally by the time the 31c3 was coming around. When
> it came time to actually figure out the logistics, my body shut down.
> While there was a lot physically wrong with me, the doctors told me
> that what ailed me was very likely stress-related. I had long since
> repressed why this was happening, chalked it up to my pain medication,
> really anything other than what I had experienced on account of Jake.
> But in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense why I physically couldn’t
> bring myself to go. One measure of the support I enjoyed and
> recognition of my work was the hundreds of postcards I received from
> well-wishers at the 31c3, cards I still cherish today.
> 
> But even with the encouragement of hundreds in my hands, I couldn’t
> physically bring myself to go to the 2015 Camp. I tweeted about a
> “diagnosis” to avoid “creating drama” but the truth of the matter was
> by that point, the damage was done. Jake destroyed those events for
> me, and I didn’t even consciously realize it until I started writing
> out this story. Ironically, I feel safe thinking and writing about
> this only after seeing others come forward with their stories of what
> Jake did to them.
> 
> While I am truly humbled and honored by all of you who have asked me
> to come back, I want to be part of a community where this kind of
> behavior isn’t tolerated from the inception. I want to be part of a
> community where incidents like this are addressed promptly and fairly
> and not dismissed as “drama”. Admittedly, I could have done more to
> make this happen when I was part of the community and I did not. There
> were victims whose accusations I treated much like the folks then
> treated mine, ones I swept under the rug in the name of what I thought
> to be the greater good.
> 
> Had I stood up for them, maybe someone would have stood up for me.

It looks like our sender just compromised their anonymity (or at least 
finally switched to a psudonym). "Hi. I’m Nick Farr" (sent from the same 
address that sent the http://jacobappelbaum.net/ link). We now have more 
information on who sent out the original message. I just thought I'd 
point it out.