Status 451

Those who have worked with Jake won't be surprised at all by this. These are accusations coming from multiple people in the tech/privacy/infosec crowd, not from the government.

For those thinking these are government-sponsored lies, do you think [Meredith Patterson](https://twitter.com/maradydd) of [Status 451 Blog](https://status451.com/) is working with the government?

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738801590333624320

> [blog.torproject.org/blog/jacob-appelbaum-leaves-tor-project …](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/jacob-appelbaum-leaves-tor-project) is a gross disservice to the Tor community. People deserve to know why Tor evicted its resident sociopath.

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802325565755392

> Tor had the chance to nip this in the bud back when Jake was just a plagiarist. They ignored it, and he graduated to sexual assault.

https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/738802983173922817

> .@mmeijeri Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as an organisation couldn't ignore it anymore.

I worked around Jake around 2009ish in the early years of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. I've seen his charismatic pushiness routine that he uses to get what he wants. I joked that if you ever wanted to find him in a group photo, just look front and center. As time went on, I did hear more uneasy things about him. His name came up with a person I met at PyCon last year in Montreal, who then relayed a story that didn't go as far as sexual assault, but was…

Here ya go: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

>Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.

>One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.

>Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.

Bill Ayers bombed the US Capitol building, something completely forgotten today. You might remember him - he was Obama's mentor. Someone tracked down a rare first edition of his manifesto and reviewed it and scanned a bunch of pages in.

http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/

>Page 40 of the manuscript is typical: It outlines the Weather Underground's strategies for overthrowing the United States. Among the many…

I'm assuming you don't mean the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Perhaps you mean the alleged Ada Initiative sexual honeypot, which came from noted "personality who no longer matters" and general wingnut Eric S. Raymond and was AFAIK never verified by anyone.

I used to work in an office shared by some members of the Ada Initiative (the Wikimedia Foundation). While I can never say there isn't a secret conspiracy – that's the thing, one can never prove a negative – I know these people & why they do what they do, and these allegations are ludicrous IMO.

Furthermore, one of the accusers, Meredith L. Patterson, hates the Ada Initiative and its founders, passionately. She's also been a strong voice against similar rushes to judgment and what some term "SJW" activism. While I think she's misguided in her dislike of the Ada Initiative, there's no chance she would collude with them, and there's no chance she would take part in some sort of conspiracy.

You attacking her with MRA-style conspiracies... there's many levels of irony here that I find difficult to unfold. For the record I like her personally, I think she's a cogent voice of criticism that needs to be heard if you're seriously concerned with diversity. And, let's not forget, she's a brilliant computer scientist. I personally think she's given too much credence to MRA-style conspiracy theory in the past, but here you (and the rest of the MRA internet) are hitting her with one. I wouldn't wish that on…

Heavy moderation is why people don’t hate each other even more. When I started using Twitter I followed loads of people who disagreed with me politically who I thought were intelligent. Lots of them are, and thoughtful but it just made it really obvious that there’s still plenty of support for people and views I consider odious. Non-filtered news consumption leads to a more accurate picture of reality in which huge portions of the population hate each other and there’s an excellent chance of widespread violence at the level of the US in the 1960’s again.

https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

>> “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

> Recently, I had my head torn off by a book: Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, about the 1970s underground. It’s the most important book I’ve read in a year. So I did a series of running tweetstorms about it, and Clark asked me if he could collect them for posterity. I’ve edited them slightly for editorial coherence.

> Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.

Okay, so you're moving from "I think it's a conspiracy of anti-Tor state forces!" to "I think it's a conspiracy of women Jacob worked with, who I will stereotype as feminists and therefore likely to make false rape allegations!".

There are several remarkable things about these thoughts -- such as the idea that you've already decided there's a conspiracy and are just trying to pick which one.

But I'll concentrate on the last point. Both Meredith Patterson ("Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as an organisation couldn't ignore it anymore.") and Andrea Shepard are literally anti-SJWs:

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/01/07/social-justice-warriors-wreaking-havoc-in-open-source-software/

http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/indiegogo-campaign-funding-tech-conference-white-nationalist.html

https://status451.com/2016/04/11/against-blacklists/

.. which raises the question, at least to me: what kind of prejudice did you apply to come to the ridiculous conclusion that the accusers "fit the stereotype" that they've so publicly criticized, other than that they are women?

The group that I see increasingly discriminated against in tech are those on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum. In the past few days I've seen aspie wielded as an insult on more than one occasion. People on both sides of the spectrum contribute to cognitive diversity. People on the aspie/autistic end of the spectrum are increasingly at risk in environments where what you say and how you say it matter since they may not have the same social faculties/graces to know the right way to talk about something or even be aware that something is inappropriate. Political correctness creates a hostile work environment for those on the aspie/autistic end of the cognitive spectrum.

BTW, If you enjoyed that article, also read this more recent article by the same author:

https://status451.com/2017/08/06/judging-things-by-their-side-effects/

Edit: To whomever thought this comment was downvoteworthy, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures".