Content Warning: rape, sexual assault, whistleblower retaliation
Sarah Jeong’s recent article, Vulnerabilities and exploits: what happened when the infosec community outed its own sexual predators, discusses some positive cultural changes in North America since the outings of serial rapists Jacob Appelbaum and Morgan Marquis-Boire.
This post is not about those positive changes. This post is about people and organisations which haven’t changed, such as the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), who have attempted to save face in public, while privately working to undermine positive change and enable rapists.
In June 2016, I and others spoke up about serial rapist and abuser, Jacob Appelbaum. Unlike other organisations — such as The Tor Project, or The Cult of the Dead Cow — the CCC delayed for more than a month in responding. Eventually, their hand was forced by a parody “@chaosupdales” Twitter account announcing that the CCC had expelled Jake. First, the CCC clarified that they had not expelled Jake. Then, the CCC posted a vague statement that “all are welcome”. Finally, the CCC claimed that their statement had, “of course”, referred to Jake all along. Of course, they only clarified this on Twitter and never updated their statement. In English, this is called “gaslighting”.
There were no Tor talks last year at 33C3, because every Tor talk submitted was silently removed by the CCC to “avoid controversy”. Before the congress, the CCC requested a meeting with their selection of representatives from Tor to discuss a way forward. I requested to attend the meeting, and was forbidden from attending by the CCC organisers, who said that the meeting would not occur if I were present. Two other members of the Tor community were expelled for their participation in River’s brutal assault. The CCC continued their pattern of feigning interest in making progress, while privately showing no interest in learning about what had happened from the survivors.
One of those expelled was 7a573b399812f3260385bd1790cd3e22612fad1b02ad8d95946bd096f1c8455d (hereafter truncated to “7a573b39”), the second participant in River’s account, which describes a horrific assault while she was intoxicated to the point of being non-responsive. Unlike my coworkers, 7a573b39 was given a talk at 33C3. (Ironically, on a project I helped design and implement.) This was the CCC’s idea of the way forward.
Survivors of Jacob’s abuse had collectively agreed to give 7a573b39 a second chance: he said he had been manipulated by Jake into participating in the rape; he did not appear to have committed any similar abuse; he expressed remorse and apologised to River; he claimed to have taken a class on not only recognising, but enacting bystander intervention in sexual harassment.
Here is 7a573b39 nine months later, in September 2017, standing next to Jake:
|
This photo was taken in Cuba at ASCrypto, a self-described school for “graduate students in cryptography” aiming to “build cryptologic research capacity in the region”. 7a573b39 explained to others within the Tor Project that he hadn’t intended to run into Jake, and that Jake had “followed” him around “harassing him” the whole time.
7a573b39 is not a student of cryptography, so it seems pretty implausible that he’d fly all the way to Cuba for a cryptography school with lectures given by Jacob’s advisers and enablers, Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange, and then be shocked (shocked!) to discover Jacob there. But even if this story were true, standing idly by your fellow abuser is not the action of someone who feels genuine remorse or regret.
This appears to be the same pattern of behaviour as the CCC: in public, do the bare minimum to feign progress; in private, do whatever they think they can get away with.
This year, for 34C3, the CCC rejected talks discussing harassment and abuse, yet they found time to give 7a573b39 two talks. They shut down conversations on paths towards progress, safety, and inclusivity, but they allow an assembly which proclaims “a code-of-conduct free zone”, warning attendees to “enter at own risk”. It is never enough to just work against abusers. The rot stems from within a larger system, and it is vital to fight, root and branch, against the organisations, structures, and people which enable sexual assault, harassment, and other forms of discrimination. The CCC’s actions have been entirely within bad faith, meant to cause and enable further harm. I do not say this lightly: the CCC hates women.
Edit (2017-12-27 18:00): After additional conversations with River, we have agreed to edit this post in the following ways:
First, it is important to clarify that River describes Jacob Appelbaum’s actions as rape, and the other participant’s actions as sexual assault. Further, we would like to make clear the differences between the two: Jacob has never attempted any apology to any of his survivors (and instead has proceeded to threaten and direct further abuses at them), while the other participant, as described above, has taken every step asked of him in an accountability process, only to afterwards betray survivors. There are degrees to violence and sexualised violence, and, within context, the actions of one abuser should not necessarily be categorised as equivalent to another. (The author, isis agora lovecruft, takes full responsibility for the mistakes in the original word choices and would like to point out the importance of having survivor-led processes and noting the ways in which accountability may fail.)
Second, we have chosen to redact the other participant’s name. While it is one thing to speak in our own words of his successes and failures in healing alongside with survivors, it is our fear that others will use his name with words that are not ours — that is, not survivor-led — in ways that might damage his capabilities for further healing and remediation. It is our hope to work with him to combat the ongoing damages of our patriarchal society, our systems entrenched with and built around (trans)misogyny, and to build entirely new systems and spaces for community interaction which prevent what we have survived from occuring in the future.