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Tor - Statement

Over the past several days, a number of people have made serious, public allegations of sexual mistreatment by former Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum.

These types of allegations were not entirely new to everybody at Tor; they were consistent with rumors some of us had been hearing for some time. That said, the most recent allegations are much more serious and concrete than anything we had heard previously.

We are deeply troubled by these accounts.

We do not know exactly what happened here. We don't have all the facts, and we are undertaking several actions to determine them as best as possible. We're also not an investigatory body, and we are uncomfortable making judgments about people's private behaviors.

That said, after we talked with some of the complainants, and after extensive internal deliberation and discussion, Jacob stepped down from his position as an employee of The Tor Project.

We have been working with a legal firm that specializes in employment issues including sexual misconduct. They are advising us on how to handle this, and we intend to follow their advice. This will include investigations of specific allegations where that is possible. We don’t know yet where those investigations will lead or if other people involved with Tor are implicated. We will act as quickly as possible to accurately determine the facts as best we can. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we do not expect results to be made public.

People who have information to contribute are invited to contact me. I will take input seriously, and I will respect its sensitivity.

People who believe they may have been victims of criminal behavior are advised to contact law enforcement. We recognize that many people in the information security and Internet freedom communities don't necessarily trust law enforcement. We encourage those people to seek advice from people they trust, and to do what they believe is best for them.

Going forward, we want the Tor community to be a place where all participants can feel safe and supported in their work. We are committed to doing better in the future. To that end, we will be working earnestly going forward to develop policies designed to set up best practices and to strengthen the health of the Tor community.

In our handling of this situation, we aim to balance between our desire to be transparent and accountable, and also to respect individual privacy.

We expect that this will be our only public statement.

Shari Steele
Executive Director
The Tor Project

Contact information:
ssteele at torproject dot org
pgp key:
69B4 D9BE 2765 A81E 5736 8CD9 0904 1C77 C434 1056

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/statement

04.06.2016

jacobapplebaum.net

Hey there! We're a collective of people who have been harassed, plagiarized, humiliated, and abused — sexually, emotionally, and physically — by

Jacob Appelbaum. Jake enjoys manipulating people through his built-up social capital, influence, and power, in order to get what he wants.

Here are some of our stories.

http://jacobappelbaum.net/

He said, they said

Content note for discussion of sexual violence.

Leigh Honeywell @hypatiadotca
The problem with "open secrets" is that they are never open enough to keep people safe :(
11:30 PM - 3 Jun 2016

A number of people are now coming forward with details of the long record of sexual misconduct committed by Jacob Appelbaum. The stories I have read are entirely consistent with my own experiences being sexually involved with Jacob in 2006-2007.

I am writing this under my real name because I am fortunate enough to be able to afford to. I am lucky to have a stable economic and immigration situation, and I am not close enough to Jacob’s world to be in any way dependent on his opinion of me, or on the opinions of people who might support him. I know that’s not true for everybody, and I recognize that many of the people speaking up about Jacob’s abuse are marginalized – by state surveillance, by gender, by sexuality, by geography, by poverty, and by other factors. I stand with their decision to publish their accounts of his actions in a way that allowed them to feel safer speaking out. I am also glad that Nick Farr has also felt able to come forward with his own experience under his own name.

Jacob and I were involved on and off over the course of 2006 and 2007, mainly spending time together at security conferences. During that time, I was also seeing other people, with the consent and awareness of all involved. In that time we spent together, he violated boundaries I set as though they were a game, particularly at times when I was intoxicated. There were a number of times I felt afraid and violated during interactions with Jacob. Being involved with him was a steady stream of humiliations small and large as he mistreated me in front of others and over-shared about our intimate interactions with friends who were often also professional colleagues.

For example, on several occasions in professional situations, he told other people that I was good at a particular sex act. On another occasion where my primary romantic partner at the time, Paul Wouters, was also present, Jacob ignored my use of a safeword when his sexual behavior turned into violent behavior that violated my limits. Paul and I both had to repeatedly tell Jacob to stop, and the experience was profoundly upsetting. I believe that one of the common elements of Jacob’s abusive behavior is humiliating one or another member of a couple in front of the other – as other accounts of his actions are published, that is something worth watching out for. (NB: I am including Paul’s name here with his consent – because that matters.)

Jacob was a charismatic and central figure in the security community I spent the early part of my career in. Many of our friends and colleagues saw the way he treated me and did nothing about it, so it took me years before I realized how abusive he was to me. Until that realization, I remained “friends” with him. It was witnessing his uncritical support of Assange and smearing of Assange’s accusers – something I disagree with intensely – that made me understand the true measure of his character. It was seeing him deny other women’s experiences of sexual violence that made me fully realize how bad my own experiences with him had been.

If you are horrified by this and want to take action, here’s what I suggest.

1. Believe victims.
2. Educate yourself on your role in enabling sexual violence: victim-blaming, the phenomenon of “missing stairs“, the effects of misogyny in activist communities, and why “go to the police” is so often bad advice for victims. Learn more about what you can do to fight it.
3. Donate to nonprofits which fight sexual violence, such as SF Women Against Rape or Sexual Health Innovations, whose Project Callisto is trying to automate the process of collecting reports of sexual assault and connecting victims with each other, much in the same way Jacob’s alleged victims connected with each other. (Disclosure: I’m a volunteer on their advisory board because I care so much about what they do.)

One final note of warning: I’ve noticed at least one person who also has a history of sexual assault spreading word about the accusations about Jacob in a supportive way. I just want to say that, like Jacob himself, simply talking the talk about consent and sex positivity and “yes means yes” does not make someone a safe person to be around. Watch for people using this technique to groom future victims and don’t let someone’s words speak louder than their actions, big and small.

Comments are open but will be heavily moderated. I would prefer that people not contact me to disclose their own stories of mistreatment, as I am not (currently) a trained counselor and am already struggling with the emotional toll of publishing this. But know this: I believe you. If you need emotional support, please reach out to people close to you, a counselor in your area, or to the trained folks at RAINN or Crisis Text Line.

https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/07/he-said-they-said/

07.06.2016

The Forest for the Trees

It feels rather sardonic to say this now, openly, after two years spent alternating between trying to inhibit my rage and convince myself that I hadn’t been hurt, followed by seeking out other victims, in order to develop the collective capacity to defend ourselves and to have the simple ability to speak out in a manner which would be heard and not discarded.

I’m Forest. Here’s my story, as submitted to the anonymous site jacobappelbaum.net:

Transformative Justice is not the “Death of Due Process”

First, some backstory is in order.

Seven or eight years ago, I was involved in an anarchist collective process for a male person in an anarchist activist community who was accused of and eventually admitted to raping two anarchist women. Since none of us would turn him in to the police, we gave him a choice of either leaving or going through a rehabilitation programme which we would create, in an attempt to transform him into someone just as capable of contributing in all the productive ways he already was but without harming other people and decreasing their abilities to contribute and to do so safely. We warned him that, if he skipped town, I would personally hunt him down to whatever city he ran to, contact the anarchist organisers there, and attempt to give them (as non-biased as possible) an account of the events. He didn’t run.

At first, he participated grudgingly, but later he broke down crying in front of the two victims, apologising sincerely and begging them for forgiveness. As part of the rehabilitation, one of the things we determined to be cause for his behaviour was a very negative self-body image, i.e. he was quite overweight and under the impression that women “only like dudes who are ripped”. Part of my responsibilities in the rehab process was to go to the gym with him, to help him have better body image, demonstrate that not all women are into “dudes who are ripped”, and help him become more comfortable with the idea that women are intelligent creatures as opposed to being merely some sexual object to be won over. He eventually successfully convinced both us and the victims that he would not abuse anyone else. To date this has been successful, and he’s had healthy relationships with several partners, including a transperson.

The Plan

When I first started seeking out other victims, about six months ago, I did not want to formally report any of the stories I had heard from Jake’s victims to the Tor Project or others, for two primary reasons. First, that my main motivation in this was to ensure that these behaviours stopped, and it was not clear to me that any traditional punitive “justice” measures would achieve such. Second, I feared retaliation from Jake, as well as retaliation towards any of the victims whose stories I would divulge. Multiple victims at the time expressed that they didn’t want me to tell The Tor Project, later admitting they feared retaliation to be extremely likely, as well as difficult to combat.

Instead, I had planned to gather people for a secret meeting in Valencia, somewhere calm, neutral, and away from events, like on the beach, invite Jake, and have everyone willing who has ever been sexually assaulted, humiliated, harassed, or felt their boundaries disrespected, by him to take turns telling a few sentences about what he did to them and how it made them feel. Then we would tell Jake that, as his friends, we thought this needed to stop, and that we’d either deliver a list of the stories to The Tor Project and other organisations, or make all the stories public, if he refused to hold himself accountable for his actions or his behaviour did not appear to improve. In planning this secret meeting, I tried to determine what would cause Jake to perpetually disrespect other people like this, and if there were any positive things we could do to help him.

Somehow Jake got word of all this, and proceeded to go back and forth between everyone I knew, starting, it seems, with one of my roommates and a reporter acquaintance, to force information out of these people, including more names of more people involved (to force more information out of). He seemed to have put the whole story together from all the bits and pieces he was given. In between my efforts to get work done and give a lecture, he imposed on me that my ten minutes of coffee break time should be spent speaking with him, because it was An Emergency. During that rather one-sided conversation, Jake described all the time, effort, and ways he was using in order to completely ruin someone’s life who had attempted to stand up to him, as well as previous ways he had managed to get someone fired from their position and ostracised. He pointedly mentioned, several times, the names of multiple people who he had destroyed in the past for standing against him. In his current efforts to harass one of these people — which through backchannels I was already aware of, he said, “I’ve literally been spending 15 hours a day on this. […] I’ve been speaking with an investigative journalist team to make sure they don’t believe [that person]. […] I heard there was a plan to ‘Confront’ me in Valencia. If that happens, I probably will not take it very well…”

This was chilling. Why was Jake saying those things, non sequitur and without provocation? It was clear to me that they were thinly-veiled threats, descriptions of what would soon happen to me. If I stood up to Jake, I could expect him to try to get me fired from The Tor Project. To try to block my acceptance into the doctorate research program he knew that I was, at that point in time, applying to. To feed the media stories about what a horrible person I am. To ostracise me from my social circles.

In all of this, I tried to do the right thing, to ensure that no more people were harmed, to give Jake one more chance. I wanted the anarchist, rehabilitation-focused solution, but Jake had only responded to that with threats. Meanwhile, River and I were introduced through a mutual friend. When Jake threatened me, I was, for a moment, frightened. Then I flew into a fucking rage. Sorry, Jake, but attempting to blackmail me into silence whilst I was defending others is really not a good look for an “anarchist” “free-speech advocate”.

Having run out of ideas and being threatened out of alternative options, I reported everything to the rest of The Tor Project. Well, almost everything. Originally, I only reported others’ stories (with their permission). I left my own story out, and I did not tell it until it was decided that Jake would no longer be part of The Tor Project.

The Trees

This isn’t about any one individual’s story. This is about addressing the issues and finding means within our communities to ensure this doesn’t happen again. This is about building communal structures so that it does not require, as Jake has rather entertainingly called it, “calculated and targeted attacks” from victims who otherwise felt alone and powerless to stand up and fight back.

I have spoken personally with every person whose story was published in the original set on the anonymous site. I am convinced beyond reasonable doubt that each of them is true. I added my own story to the site in solidarity with the other victims, especially these who remain anonymous, as someone with the social standing, and hence, enormous level of privilege, required to be able to eventually go public. Many of the other victims do not have this privilege. Whether due to marginalisation, fear of retailiation, or being new to our communities, many sexual assault victims require anonymity, because — without anonymity — they would be silenced.

Jake never apologised to me, nor — to my knowledge — any of the other victims. I don’t condone his actions. However, and no apologies for being crass, I can’t seem to motivate myself to feel any pity towards him for any of the admittedly horrible things which are now happening to him. He ruined lives. The number of people we would have in a significantly more productive and less damaged state were it not for his actions is substantial, and futher, those people in a less damaged state would be overall substantially more beneficial than having a Jake in a less damaged state. Additionally, we would likely have had more diverse contributors to Tor, if we had dealt with Jake sooner, since, for years, many people have been warned about Jake through a whisper network and disuaded from becoming involved.

There are some differences between how Jake is behaving to how the other anarchist I mentioned above was behaving. The other anarchist was willing to engage in the defined process, respectful of his victims’ needs, and eventually sincerely apologetic for his actions.

I cannot condone his actions; however, I cannot condone violence and threats against Jake. Full stop. That is not productive. If he is further harmed, we never see the end of the wretched abused-abuser cycle.

People who behave as Jake does are sick, and they need help. Often, it is because they were severely hurt at some point. As the activist adage goes, “We need to be gentle with one another, so that we can be dangerous together.” If we think Jake has any capacity for change, then it is our responsibility to ensure that he is not simply swept under a rug of academia where he will most certainly find a deeply-ingrained institutional structure of rape apologists ready to turn a blind eye and willing to help Jake “fail up” to another position of power and credibility, where he will use that power to commit further acts of abuse. I am thoroughly dismayed for what is statistically likely to happen again, causing harm to and trust issues for their students, and professional and reputational issues for them.

Realpolitiking

Now. For all of you screaming “This is not what justice looks like! Why don’t you just go to the police?!” let me just wax realpolitik and, like a good little German, quote some Gesetz and cite some statistics.

The “due process” of a state court, in my case, will be detrimental to both Jake and I, as well as numerous other people. The law is very clearly against both of us in this case, with the overwhelmingly likely outcome that he would be kicked out of Germany. (Additionally, in Germany, multiple independent allegations can result in a conviction given the absense of other evidence.)

The other outcome is one or more convictions. While convictions for rape and sexual assault are statistically unlikely, given that only about 7% of reported rapes result in a conviction with similar numbers for Germany, we have an advantage. By German case law, multiple independent allegations are very likely to result in conviction(s), even despite the absense of other evidence, e.g. bruises, marks, semen, which would be required in a solitary allegation. If brought to court, here are some of the applicable laws and their corresponding minimum/maximum prison terms:

Forest

• One count of rape (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 1) for a person in an unconscious state or otherwise incapable of verbal disagreement or resistance (§179 of the Strafsgesetz): minimum, one year; maximum, ten years.
• One count of blackmail: minimum, none; maximum: five years.

River

• One count of rape (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 1), including
• Instructing a third party to rape the victim (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 2, sentence 2), making it a “severe case”,
• Both counts were penetrative intercourse (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 2, sentence 1), also making it a “severe case”,
• The victim was additionally in an unconscious state and uncapable of verbal or physical resistance (§179 of the Strafsgesetz, including paragraph 5, as well as paragraph 5 sentence 2): minimum: two years; maximum: ten years.

Sam

• Sexual assault (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 1): minimum, one year; maximum: ten years.

Totalling to four years minimum and thirty-five years maximum for those cases alone, along with potential fines and reparations, and expulsion from the country afterwards (cf. §53 and §54 of the Aufenthaltsgesetz). (For English speakers curious about the German laws I’m referencing, there are also official English translations.)

Not to mention that, if our goal is to prevent more people from being harmed by Jake, prison is not an option. Overwhelmingly likely, even in Germany, Jake would be raped in prison. I do not wish these painful things I’ve gone through on anyone, not even those who have caused me pain. Further, most abusers have a history of having been abused at some point in their past, and Jake going to prison certainly will not help him amend his behaviour.

Alternatives

Some people are asking what the victims want out of this.

Personally, I would be completely ecstatic if Jake decided to move to Alaska. Forever. Jake is still threatening the other victims to try to keep them quiet, and additional reports of extremely severe sexual assaults and rape are pouring in to The Tor Project. Meanwhile, Jake is preparing some sort of public “apology” statement. Alaska, or northern Siberia — it doesn’t matter. Until his sociopathic behaviours are revised, there is no place for him in civil society.

As it is obviously rather untenable that Jake move to Alaska, I suggest the following. Please note that these are my suggestions alone, and do not necessarily at this point in time reflect those of all of the other victims. We’re all still processing this.

1. We need to entirely remove abusers from our communities, until such a time as they have sufficiently demonstrated to their victims that their abusive behaviours will no longer continue. Jake should be removed from all places where his victims, their loved ones, and friends might come into any form of contact with him. Given the enormous amounts of pain myself and the other victims have gone through, the draining emotional stress, and (please excuse my rather dark humour) the development time wasted, I am not willing to revisit this issue for at least four years. After that time has passed, it may be possible to reassess whether there is any path forward for Jake.

2. We need to assess the cultural issues within our communities which require that victims report anonymously, due to fears of retaliation, further abuse, and not being taken seriously. Once identified, we need to devise better reporting and support structures to help allay these fears.

3. We need to take victims’ stories seriously. It should not be required that victims band together in collectives in order to be heard. Nor should it be required that someone who stands up for others must have and share their own story of victimisation to “prove” the credibility of the others, as was my case. It should not be required that a dozen people are harmed before any one of them is taken seriously.

4. We need to critique the institutions — sociocultural, academic, and organisational — which made these events possible.

5. Those who must still have some form of contact with Jake, and by that I primarily mean others within the academic and journalistic communities, need to be given ways to raise safety and ethical concerns without fear of retribution or retaliation. It is my understanding that several researchers and students do not currently feel this way, and that this is having a severe impact upon their abilities to be successful and productive.

Lastly, I would like to say that I’ve never been prouder to work for The Tor Project, as their recent actions to stand against abuse have set nothing short of an exemplary model for other organisations.

https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/the-forest-for-the-trees.html

13.06.2016

Isis Agora Lovecruft

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. — Arundhati Roy