This sort of thing really merits a judicial investigation. It's not appropriate to place these issues in the eyes of the public until then, and I've never appreciated these sorts of articles in my feed.
Some will be swayed by the fact that the internal investigation turned up some legitimate claims, but if the judicial system disagrees then this guy's life is already ruined, and I don't think that's appropriate. The whole situation reflects poorly on everyone involved.
* The judicial system is the only system capable of determining facts.
* Our adversarial-driven judicial system is an effective way of determining facts.
Neither of those are true. The ability of any group of independent experts to collect information/evidence, analyze it, and come to a conclusion about a reasoned set of facts and inferences is something I am comfortable assuming. This happens all the time, and I can't help but think that the context here (i.e., a man harassing a women) has some influence on this point of view.
What TOR produced and published is in my eyes perfectly appropriate and reasonable. Bad conduct not always does, nor should it, necessitate a judicial investigation. Especially when that investigation is carried out by the state who have a significant tension with the TOR project. Not to mention that the victims have asked for that not to happen.
>This sort of thing really merits a judicial investigation
The victims involved in this have specifically asked this to not happen. I'm sure you can understand why the members of a community like this would have personal or political reasons to avoid a judicial investigation.
I heard he raped or sexually assaulted someone. Someone wrote "a rapist lives here" outside his window.
If he did rape someone, no due process means we're treating rape as a mere HR issue, and he's free to go rape more people.
If he did not rape someone, then at least some of the allegations being thrown around are false. No due process means that someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume all of it is false.
The Tor project blog post notes that they "hired a professional investigator". This is significant because PIs are a licensed profession with the training and trust required to bring evidence of criminal activity before a court of law. That would be a separate process from the HR investigation, and would almost certainly not be discussed publicly while it was still in progress.
Why would anyone at Tor Project care what "someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume"? Impune rapists are not their responsibility; your complaints would be better addressed to police and prosecutors. If, against all odds, Appelbaum isn't actually an actual rapist, he is certainly still an asshole, and there's nothing wrong with giving assholes the boot.
I have no idea why they would care what someone unconnected would think. But the way this has been publicised sure makes it seem like they care, so here we are discussing it.
What do you mean "against all odds"? Unless you're connected with this personally, all you have to go on is their internal investigation, which did not mention rape. So apparently no one is even claiming that anymore.
Again, they can either turn this over to the police, or I'm going to assume it's all made up and I'm not going to care. Not that my opinion is worth any more than yours, which is to say it doesn't matter at all.
Avoiding interaction with the state is understandable. However, the state is not the only option. Various types of arbitration could be used, for example. These may not have the power to enforce criminal punishments like the state, but as you said, they already dismissed that option.
I don't know what the truth is here, but I can't trust anyone who won't make the investigation public by that very fact.
And just for the record, I have been severely sexually harassed, enough that the person responsible was fired. So it's not like I can't sympathize with victims of harassment. Yes, it really is uncomfortable facing them, but it's also the right thing to do.
EDIT: Not clear why this is so controversial, but that doesn't beget trust, either. But it's true and I'll stand by it.
Normally an independent investigator is paid regardless of their findings, and future business with other clients is dependent on maintaining a reputation for impartiality.
try to take a more balanced view. just as we should not automatically assume that a person making an allegation is not telling the truth, we should also not automatically assume that the person being accused is guilty of the allegations.
by requesting NOT to have a judicial investigation the accusers are effectively saying "we are content to allow for trial by torch-wielding-mob in the court of public opinion and reputation" instead of allowing for a trial by an institution established specifically for impartiality and upholding the rights of both the accusers and the accused.
I personally have had to deal with someone who, IMO, is a psychopath - he forced the rest of us out of this non-profit using manipulation, etc while the rest of the organization (i.e. everyone else) make the mistake of empathising with him (assuming his behaviour was the result of personal stress). At the end, he flat out stated his end goal was to derive a salary from the donations the general public was making to the org, contrary to the organization's constitution... He's now commercializing the heck out of things while having a personal (and unstated) financial interest in the commercialization.
I stupidly hadn't asked enough questions about the back story of how this guy got involved with the previous incarnation of the organization - he came in, stirred up trouble, drove out the existing leadership and due to their missteps, was able to portray his behaviour as reasonable... when it became apparent he was losing some level of control over the current org, he did it all over again. My fault entirely for being not cynical enough and the other people for believing in his bullshit.
I understand your point of view, but until you have been in a real world situation where the legal system is COMPLETELY USELESS, you will never really understand how the world really works (aka reach 40, not a conservative, no brain etc). The amount of ambiguity inherent in evaluating human behaviour is a lot more than you think, and people like this use it to their advantage. And the legal system is very expensive, so trying to use it to achieve 'justice' tends to be, overall, not cost effective. The legal system is ONLY about monetary issues.
And people like Appelbaum know this - they know how to skate the line and to use the weaknesses of society, social relationships, the legal system ... to their advantage. Reading about Appelbaum triggered all my triggers about people who should be avoided. I really "get" this ideal of Solomon-like impartiality, but facts / evidence / scientific-ish attitude... you have to also understand people as well besides this to grok the truth and that requires actual wisdom. And over 40, you begin to understand that an awful lot of people have zero integrity, especially those whose primary goal is power of some sort.
None of the arguments you raise point in one direction or the other. It's possible Applebaum is the psychopath you describe. It's also possible that a different psychopath has "came in, [is] stirr[ing] up trouble, drove out the existing leadership [...] due to their missteps".
The fact that psychopaths exist is not evidence of Applebaum's guilt. This torch wielding angry mob might have a legitimate grievance, or they might be a spontaneous torch wielding angry mob, they might even be stirred up by a psychopath like the one you describe.
That's why we need a process better than the torch wielding angry mob.
I wouldn't say Appelbaum is a psychopath, but I'd say he's certainly trouble. I agree torch wielding angry mobs are not a solution; so how do you prevent that, yet deal with the problem without relying on the legal system?
Perhaps the global 'social networking' phenomena / the democratization of the media / etc offers something - all in all, all the discussion around things like this is ultimately useful; it raises people's awareness.
I don't need the certainty of a court verdict to convince me a bozo isn't worth my time. When there's no shortage of good people to work with, anything less than a "yes" is a "no".
Conversely, I also choose my own friends. I've befriended social pariahs many times, because having played that role many times myself, I get it.
I really don't understand your point. I did pick up on the fact that you may be assuming or insinuating that I'm under 40, conservative or brainless. That's a really shitty thing of you to write regardless of whether or not you meant it that way.
So, since I have no idea what your point was, can you rephrase your post? What was your point?
No, sorry, I wasn't talking about you, if I came off like that, I worded things badly. I'm still processing what I've been through and rants on HN are the result.
I mistakingly assumed everyone has heard of the maxim attributed to Churchill. It's a bit flippant, but there is some truth to it if you look past the surface meaning. The world is fundamentally run by money and power, two things 'conservatives' are stereotypically obsessed with. When you see that 'liberals' can be driven by those two things as well, then how society really operates becomes a lot clearer.
As for my post, I was trying to say the legal system is inadequate for some things. In a small community, there are social mechanisms by which the group can deal with problematic people, if the group steps up to the task. Western society today is not a "small community" but perhaps the rise of social networking etc allows for this. The problem then becomes acting with integrity, and trying to deal with the issue evenhandedly - I am of course assuming the Tor Board did its best here. It's unfortunate those that things needed to get to the point where there was enough of a public outcry to finally address the issue - as I understand it, people have been complaining about Appelbaum for years (same as for Jian Ghomeshi in Canada). But that is how it usually works - people "knew" about Bill Cosby and Jimmy Saville for years but the issue never got addressed.
How can communities police themselves without having to rely on an external authority or hierarchy? Always relying on the legal system as the external authority is impracticable.
> How can communities police themselves without having to rely on an external authority or hierarchy?
communities can police themselves about how well their members fit in with the group and obey social norms using whatever tools they like, up to a point.
up to a point.
the point where self-policing must end and external authority must take over is when criminal allegations are made against a member of the community. if someone is accused of sexual assault, that is a crime they can face prison time for. it is deeply inappropriate for the community to try and self-police a criminal allegation of that weight.
if the accuser is not willing to let the criminal justice system investigate a criminal allegation then I think there's something else going on. using criminal allegations for social-normative or political ends is a dangerous game though.
A relevant, albeit bullshit, maxim is: "Those who aren't progressive at age 20 have no hearts, those who aren't conservative at age 40 have no brains." Perhaps certain parochial minds might assume everyone has heard that maxim, or even that everyone believes it?
It isn't really "shitty" to be under 40 or conservative.
metaphorm, I think the post wasn't about you. Generally, as a rule I have learned that it helps to assume people aren't talking about you. Mostly they are more involved in their own lives and ideas. the [grand]parent post is interesting and useful, and I'm sure not aimed in any detrimental way at you.
There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization.
What you are arguing is that, in the absence of a trial by a government, people have the active right to participate in an organization that doesn't want them. That goes against every bit of the ethos of a project like Tor. (And if you won't believe any other argument, keep in mind that it's not fair to him: why would the state be inclined to treat him fairly, for everything he's done to oppose the state?)
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
> There are no torch-wielding mobs here. Nobody is attacking his physical person. They're excluding him from an organization.
I think you may have missed what the front-page of HN looked like when this was first happening. I won't bother re-quoting/linking things beyond previous discussions (since those contain the information) but your comment is entirely out-of-sync with what was happening.
Can you be more precise about where you saw someone attack or attempt to attack his physical person?
If you're referring to the "DieJakeDie" account, I acknowledge that it existed, but it was very clear that it had no involvement with victims or (as far as anyone can tell) anyone involved in the Tor community. The integrity of the Tor process was not compromised by its existence, any more than the integrity of a government trial is compromised by protesters outside calling for blood.
"Victim" is not a predominantly judicial term, unlike "defendant" or "felon", so the everyday meaning of someone who suffered something applies. That's a factual thing, not procedural as you claim above.
The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing. I'm making a procedural objection, yes, and I'm doing it because accusations are too important to be left to innuendo.
> The operation of the judicial system is how we establish facts in the scenario where a person is accused to wrongdoing.
No, its how the justice system determines whether fact claims are adequately supported to apply legal sanctions.
Individuals are free to determine and speak on their conclusions as to the truth of fact claims independent of judicial conclusions; this is a fairly fundamental freedom (reflected in the first amendment) and essential to the marketplace of ideas.
I don't buy that. This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again? I think you have to be held accountable, legally, if you want to bring forward acusations that can do that.
This sort of event will ruin Jacob's life. You think there's any chance he'll ever get a job again?
Occam's razor, and straightforward root cause analysis -- via the weight of numerous (largely very credible) statements from multiple witnesses -- suggest that he ultimately ruined his own life by choosing to engage in a persistent pattern of aggressive and uncivil behavior towards others in his community.
Not that it was ruined "because of" the statements the Tor project made about his case.
Thought experiment: Someone is accused of behaving improperly in a way that does not reach the bar of criminality, but is unprofessional enough to justify Tor firing them. Should Tor be able to warn others about their unprofessional behaviour?
I wouldn't put it past Tor to fire him even if it was just because of the controversey around his digital lynching, regardless of the truth. Even so, sometimes people make mistakes. Maybe he just pissed people off enough make someone want to falsely acuse him. Yeah, these are big maybes, but the point is that there's not certainty. It's the court's job to establish certainty and the acusers have expicitly asked for that not to happen. Does that justify preventing him from ever being able to fix his mistakes and move on? Or does it lead to a downward spiral where his life is permenantly destroyed because of this and things only get worse?
That's not the situation I posited. I expressly said that in this hypothetical scenario, the behaviour did not reach the level of criminality, and so there's no way for a court to find the individual guilty. In that scenario, should Tor be allowed to say why they fired them?
How do you uphold a claim in court when there's no criminal activity involved? Are you seriously arguing that companies should not be permitted to say "We fired this person because they never showed up to work"?
Well, I suppose that's a fair point. I wasn't considering situations that weren't lawbreaking. I'll clarify my position: acusing someone of lawbreaking should not be permissible if you won't back yourself up in court. There's a big difference between being fired because you weren't on time, and being fired because you felt up a coworker.
In either case, however, I don't think Tor's actions would be very professional. How often do you see a company blog about why they fired someone?
If your argument is that people shouldn't be allowed to say things that harm the employment prospects of others, whether the accusation meets the threshold of criminal behaviour or not seems irrelevant. So why is crossing that threshold different? Why is it ok to say "We have evidence that this person did not turn up to the office" but not "We have evidence that this person engaged in sexual harassment"?
Because there's a significant difference between acusing someone of crimes and acusing someone of not being a diligent worker. And no, I'm not arguing that this is related to harming someone's employment prospects, but their reputation in general (which happens to encapsulate their employment prospects).
There are crimes I can be accused of that will enhance my reputation rather than diminish it. There are perfectly legal things I could be accused of that would destroy my career and my social relationships. If your argument is about reputational damage, then using criminality as the threshold for "It's not ok to make a public accusation" is entirely arbitrary.
> I'll clarify my position: acusing someone of lawbreaking should not be permissible if you won't back yourself up in court.
That's an interesting position which you haven't presented much reasoning for; its not, however, what the US has generally decided, so if you want it to change, you should probably say why.
The decision the US has mostly come to is this:
(1) You can't impose legal sanction without proving something in court.
(2) If someone is harmed (including by accusation of criminal behavior) by something you say, they can challenge it in court as defamation (e.g., slander, libel). and they must show evidence that it is false.
Your proposal is a fairly radical restriction on free speech.
Given you have so many opinions, I presume you're aware of what libel laws are, right? So if he had a legal case (I'd imagine he does in fact, not have a legal case) he would be perfectly entitled to rebuke their claim, however, the claims would have to be untrue.
Sure, but the damage has been dealt. Unless he wins his libel case and the subsequent media coverage has as much or more reach as the media coverage over the acusations.
You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works. If Applebaum wants to sue people for slander or whatever the system is available to him.
>You seem to want the accusers to somehow be held accountable, legally, but that's not how the judicial system works.
"The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be confronted with the witnesses against him.
...
The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. "
Per its own text, the Confrontation Clause only applies to "criminal prosecutions", not to "stuff people say that doesn't make its way to a courtroom".
There are a body of accusers who don't want to be targeted or draw out a process. In some circumstances it sounds like Jacob walked a fine line in terms of what is lawful making successful prosecution unlikely.
There should be an unbiased mediation system available to resolve this, but the judicial system is not that. This is a shift in society as we begin to care more about these types of allegations.
Just as these things were often unfairly ignored before they may now be addressed in ways that are potentially unfair to the alleged perpetrator.
It's an evolution of our society away from bias towards the agenda of dominant men. Like it or not, this is the direction we're heading.
My answer to this is very simple: It is a property of a state of law that no one is to be considered guilty unless it can be proved by a court. In this sense Jacob Appelbaum is to be considered innocent.
Legally, he is considered innocent. No charges have been brought forward, and no legal investigation is under way.
It is the right of most organizations in most states/countries to exclude people of their choosing. They have verified a couple complaints and decided he was enough like a person they wanted to exclude. Which it sounds like he was doing from his side as well.
So I'd say that legally, he is being considered innocent.
This is like 'I can say whatever I want without the consequences of my peers because of the first amendment.' The right to free speech and the right to be innocent until proven guilty apply to a citizens relationship with the government.
This account would be more believable if "severe and possibly child-endangering criminal charges" weren't such a common trope of USA divorce proceedings. You're complaining about the cost of lawsuits? By prolonging the case as you describe above, you are part of the problem.
The reason no one else "gives two shits" about a father spending time with his children whom he loves and supports even though his ex thinks he's a cretin is because that's how it's supposed to be. If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. There are lots of kids who've never even met their fathers. Lots of them would be happy with the cretin.
For one, I intentionally did not use gender pronouns in my comment to avoid seeming like I was blaming someone in this sort of trope. Yet you inferred them anyway.
Secondly, the child in question was unplanned, in a relationship that was never planned for marriage (and the two indeed never were married). The mother in question was extremely young herself, and almost 20 years younger than the father.
Thirdly, there's a shitload of actual evidence of harm which was obtained from the father's personal computer and forms the basis of 8 counts of a class D felony in this state. But you know, you don't seem to care about evidence.
You also clearly have zero understanding about how civil parenting and custody cases work if you think that a court's willingness to laissez-faire just let people have unsupervised time is somehow evidence that the person "isn't so bad." In my mom's experience, she's even seen a father who was convicted of raping his own daughter be awarded parenting time visits with that same daughter after his jail term had ended, despite the daughter's own testimony that she was afraid of him and did not want to ever see him.
> If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children.
You probably don't know someone has >1000 child porn images on his computer when you first meet him. Especially since such people are well-known to be manipulative, particularly of young women.
Wow. You are a piece of work.
BTW, this is all publicly searchable. I want to emphasize that, until the conclusion of the criminal case, these are merely charges and he may not be found guilty. But from the position I am in, knowing what evidence there is and the feelings of professionals that he is dangerous, it is obvious that I feel a need to protect my nephew as much as possible.
Feel free to go to the Indiana MyCase website and search both the criminal and civil cases. < https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search >. I don't want to give the other party's name here, since it will get indexed by Google, but you can feel free to email me at < spearsem@gmail.com >, and I'll tell you the name in personal correspondence and then you can go and look at the extensive case log yourself.
I'm trying desperately to protect my nephew Ian from what I believe to be an actually dangerous person. Not trying to aid in vindictively settling an angry divorce case by appealing to inflammatory stereotypes. I personally don't care at all if anyone other than the court believes he's dangerous or guilty, nor even if he avoids jail time or never pays back owed child support or anything. I 100% only care to keep my nephew safe from him.
Your lazy and clumsy I-wish-I-was-actually-smart-enough-to-make-SJW-contrarian-arguments-like-Scott-Alexander-does-but-I'm-not-and-don't-have-the-self-awareness-required-to-understand-why-my-bastardizations-of-those-contrarian-arguments-are-harmful thinking is really fucking tiresome.
I know it's gonna fall on deaf ears, but you really, really should be ashamed of yourself. The attitude you depict is morally reprehensible. It's not because you fail to bombard caricatures of evil dead beat dads with morally vindictive insults. I don't want those caricatures anymore than anyone else. It's because you're a contrarian fanboy regurgitating thoughtless bullshit in an arena that actually causes people fucking harm. There really are abusive or dangerous fathers out there, and truly the only thing your faux righteous babble does is to perpetuate a culture of blaming their victims and giving them endless second chances with which they just harm and harm and harm some more.
I'm sorry that your family has had this difficult experience. Based on this thread, one suspects you're too close to this particular situation to retain a proper sense of perspective. No disinterested observer of the USA court system would suggest that the problem is not enough family court intervention or not enough criminal prosecutions. On both of those measures, USA leads not only all other nations, but all other nations in history.
Even though your comments seem unrelated to the topic at hand, they might be in some sense a twisted reflection of the common sentiment here. Many comments say, "It ought to be illegal to speak of the guilt of those who haven't been convicted by a court." You say, "The court should decide ahead of time which divorced parents are destined to do awful things to their children." These propositions seem to be at odds, but really, both you and others here decry both the fallibility and the limited purview of the courts. It simply isn't possible for the courts to punish all rapists, nor for them to predict ahead of time which divorced parents will illegally harm their children. In many cases, we must decide for ourselves whether to kick assholes out of our organizations, or have children with them, or do something else entirely.
Eventually one finds the courts to be a human institution: fallibility is unavoidable, so their limited purview is all that can save them from creating tyranny. When the courts are silent, we may use our own judgment.
I really do disagree with your premise. My experience in this issue has been expansive, even far outside of just the legal system.
The organizations that conduct supervised visitation, for example, are basically hard-coded misogyny, and have caused us considerable trouble because they don't enforce their policies at all, have allowed the father in this case to even bring his cell phone into his supervised visits and take pictures, which a private detective we hired later found on VK being used most likely for purposes of grooming -- and, there was already a court order in the civil case that the father was not allowed to maintain that VK page (we had used screenshots of it in one of the hearings) and that the supervision facility's own written policy, which my sister was given a copy of, said that all cell phones were disallowed during visits.
She (the supervisor) was forced to admit that she violated that rule in court, or else admit perjury, because we were able to present the photo captured from the VK page showing my nephew inside the visitation facility!
The women operating the supervision facility have treated my sister like she is the scum of the earth the entire time. Basically the way it works is they assume anyone who is ordered to interface with any kind of visitation must be a deadbeat, both the mom and the dad, or a drug user, or some kind of criminal unfit to have kids, and that the poor dad is just being railroaded and probably, on balance, deserves custody about as much as or more than the mom.
As a result, they sympathize with the dads ordered to have supervised visits, cut them breaks, bend the rules. And then act like hard-asses to the moms, write up court notices if they are 5 minutes late because of a snowstorm, or if the kid has his shoes untied when he shows up.
When we first started this whole endeavor, our attorney told us that we should expect, even in the absolute best case scenario when there is smoking gun evidence involving child porn and it is as open-and-shut as it can be, that it will take probably around 4 years to get a conviction, and that the prosecutor and others will focus almost solely on cutting deals to get guilty pleas rather than have it tie up the court for 4 years and be a big headache. That has been true. The opportunity for frivolus continuances, motions, etc., is through the roof, etc.
The criminal defense attorney in this case is a real life version of Better Call Saul from Breaking Bad. He's a genuine psycho. He told my sister in one meeting that poor people should just be euthanized, and then basically laughed about because what's she going to do, tell people he said that? And even though trying to get a deal where the father has a reduced sentence and gets counseling is probably what would be in his best interest, his attorney is taking it as a personal vendetta to take it all the way to the bitter end of a jury trial.
He said, literally, to our civil case attorney that his client, the father in this case, is a "good kind of pedophile" and laughed about it. Our attorney's mouth just dropped, and he looked like he might even cry when we were all debriefing afterwards. He said in his ~ 20 years of practicing he's never seen a defense attorney like this guy.
At a regional level, for me in northeast Indiana, I've even begun researching into the National CASA Association, because some of the higher regional administrators in that organization have actually married regional judges here and things, and it seems like some glaring conflicts of interest regarding sending business their way.
They use untrained volunteers, and some of the stuff in their manuals is unbelievable. There actually are online support groups of people (mostly women) who have been absolutely screwed over by CASA, especially in cases involving child porn, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. These people are not trained in psychology, especially the manipulative aspects of dealing with child predators. And most of them are young women volunteers, exactly the people that these child predators manipulate most often. It's really a disgusting Catch-22.
When I look at the whole thing, I absolutely do not see a broad US legal system that intervenes too much as you suggest. I absolutely see a system where regional/county level prosecutors do not give a shit ever about child safety, they try to get the cases out the door as fast as possible, mostly by cutting guilty plea deals, they throw people into volunteer-based supervised visitation services that are basically the personification of misogyny, and they utterly do not care if someone raises a fuss about it at all.
I have already begun speaking with some attorneys about the possibility of suing the National CASA Association and/or their parent company United Way to recover some of the extreme legal fees we've faced, specifically because their failure to follow their own rules with the cellphone photo incident directly put my nephew in more harm (his photo landing on VK as part of grooming activity), and then we had to pay a bunch of money to file a motion and request a hearing for that, and put the supervisor on the stand and make them admit to it and everything.
Anyway, I definitely do not see it the way you describe. The system basically fucks over women and goes to the greatest lengths possible to give white men infinity chances without any serious jail time or serious penalties.
Edit: Added detail about the connection between judges and CASA.
Here's a link to some biographical info about the magistrate judge Paul Cherry for the northeast Indiana district court. His wife is mentioned there, Kristi Bachman Cherry, and she is the executive director for Northeast Indiana CASA:
Obviously, this mere fact of marriage is not that big of a deal. But in light of all of the other shit I've seen go on in just the tiny sphere of my nephew's single court case, it sure does make me very, very suspicious about how such an incompetent organization as CASA seems to be thriving and receiving tons of business from the courts here.
Wow this is the second instance of Indiana judges' egregious nepotism I've heard about this month. It reminds me of Heidi Humphrey of the Indiana Supreme Court Ethics and Professionalism Committee and her handling of a case involving one Judge James Humphrey. I'll stipulate that as awful as the USA justice system is, the family courts are among the worst parts of it. The capriciousness is a feature, not a bug: that's how they extort more money out of both parties to a divorce. The intensely personal nature of the conflicts leads wives and husbands both to irrational, win-at-all-costs mentalities that harm children, and the family courts encourage a feedback loop of escalating conflict. All the various hangers-on (psychologists, facilities, etc.) get their share of money that could otherwise have stayed with the family and its children, and they're careful to donate enough of the windfall to judges' reelection campaigns.
One way to win would be to hire the local judge's favorite lawyer. The better way to win is not to play the game in the first place. Don't have children with unsuitable partners, and if you've made that mistake, don't compound it by dragging the whole family into court.
In other words: since the family courts do such a poor job, why would we want them to do more?
Well, what we have received for our huge sum of money + stress + dealing with this abusive legal apparatus is that my very young nephew has not been physically alone with his biological father for several years, thus ensuring that he hasn't been sexually abused by his father, nor has his picture been used to trade with others in exchange for pictures they might have, nor used to signal in his father's online accounts that he is open to exchanging pictures (apart from the one photo that was wrongly taken while he was at a supervised visit). And through the civil case we gathered affidavits from counselors and psychologists which are also useful to the criminal case and may end up being a cornerstone in the criminal case.
How to put a price on ensuring your 5-year-old nephew is kept away from a highly probable source of abuse? Had we not pursued this through the abusive, misogynistic legal system, we would have had no enforceable way to keep my nephew out of immediate risk of grave and really, truly serious harm. Not the false, inflamed stereotype of harm you described earlier about dead beat dads who get railroaded. Not that. But real sexual and/or physical abuse, and well as the potential for psychological harm related to seeing or being made to take part in child pornography.
The legal apparatus, for all of its horribleness, allowed us to convert metric shitloads of money into safety for my nephew. At least we've gotten several years of safety for him, even if the father ultimately slips through the cracks and gets off easy in some way. At least we've given my nephew the chance to have some years of a safe and normal childhood routine, and allowed him to age and hopefully get to a point where he could recognize if his father ever tried to do something wrong to him in the future.
One way to put it is that you love them so much you agree to basically free fall into PTSD and financial instability if it spares them the strong risk of harm. You hate that that's what the scammy legal apparatus makes you do, but you do it for them. Avoiding it to keep the money really, really won't be better for them if they are significantly abused. People can go on and on about how you shouldn't throw yourself into ruin, much as how you should eventually embrace hospice care and physician assisted suicide when you're terminally ill instead of cranking up the medical bills hoping to prolong life in vain. I see a lot of people mistakenly think the same sort of logic applies when a young, defenseless child is at risk of serious abuse or harm. It doesn't. If the best you can do is throw all your resources at it and you still come up empty handed, well you still have to try. Having saved all those resources and secured a more comfortable life in other ways in the future is completely devoid of meaning or utility if your defenseless young family member really does suffer the harm you failed to relentlessly try to prevent.
I think a lot of your comments are moralistic as well. Of course no one wants to "play the game." The mother in this situation, my sister, was extremely young, uneducated, and in no way even remotely close to a life situation in which she should have made these sorts of decisions. Now she's older, busting her ass at a decent job, raising her kids as a single mother who receives no child support, went back and finished college while working. Frankly she's one of the most impressive people I know. And yet her life is defined by living with mistakes she did not even understand she was making at the age of 21. Being punished over and over for decisions made out of youthful ignorance and small, isolated moments of rebellion.
Yeah, if you're lucky to emerge from youth not happening to have made these mistakes, it's great to turn around and blame others. Or, in my case I didn't make mistakes myself, and in fact managed college and grad school really well, and still had my life ruined by extension when it fell to me to bear the bulk of financial responsibility, and then later also a whole bunch of other things too.
I'm sure the same thing happens to drug users and their families, and all sorts of other hardships. It's like what Philip K. Dick wrote: these people were punished entirely too much for what they did. And what's so sickening is that the other side, the biological father who has caused all of these problems, is not punished at all. His license is suspended and he drives around town anyway, never gets in trouble. He's thousands of dollars in arrears on child support, never pays it back, doesn't matter, no one does anything to him, even as he is delinquent in payment for years. His family are close friends with a local attorney who has basically worked his civil case for free, meanwhile we've paid a huge sum of money just to secure bare minimum supervised visits (which aren't even conducted properly).
The victims in these situations are the ones who are punished. Not the perpetrators. And they are punished for decisions they did not comprehend or understand -- often which they could not have comprehended at all. Yes, it's better if you don't "play the game" but truly no one ends up there through their own volition -- not even when it was based on a choice like drug usage or unprotected sex. When these things are lifelong problems for which you are perpetually punished for something you did before you could even legally buy alcohol, it's really just an unlucky lightning strike that you'll be punished for forever. It's not "your fault" in any realistic sense.
But grandstanding moralists who want to blame the victim will still say it is. Oh, you don't want to have to spend > $100k in legal fees to protect your son from a child predator when you're in your late 20s? Welp, then when you were extremely depressed that one semester in college 6 years ago, you shouldn't have accidentally drank too much and then had unprotected sex that one single time and gotten pregnant. Since you did "choose" that, you are hereby punished for decades. Ugh.
Elsewhere the state will pay for an attorney if you can show in a pretrial proceeding that your claims are not obviously without merit and that you are indigent.
Not "reimburse later and hope you're solvent long enough", but actually "paying the attorney".
So maybe you should reexamine your premise before dismissing the idea.
Its not about whether or not he did it, it is simply about the fact that what we as a group are talking about is the actions (or at least accused actions) of a person.
"This sort of event" is an incredibly passive expression of what he is accused of doing. Such language is incredibly common [0] in rape and sexual assault cases, because it removes actors from the conversation. You can say "The actions that Appelbaum people have accused him of" and be much more actively voiced while also respecting your wish to present him as simply the accused.
[0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf
Quoting: "The language of headlines that participants generated for their reports also reflected judgments of assailant and victim responsibility. Implications for the non-reactive assessment of responsibility attributions and directions for future research are discussed."
you're making a semantics of language argument? really?
you said "it was his actions". this asserts that you know, positively, what his actions were. do you really? I said you should not act like you are the judge or jury because I find it highly unlikely that you really know the facts of the case. I don't think anyone really knows the facts of the case, and we never will, because there won't be a fair trial.
It is not simply 'semantics', there is a research basis to suggest that these semantics are used in specific ways in specific situations that bring into question the intentionalality and choice behind them.
I too don't understand the rationale for this process having taken place in public.
All allegations of sexual abuse make third-parties confront a web of trust problem. Since the facts are most often not independently verifiable, there is little else for anyone to do than to evaluate who they trust more.
These days we are told this is best performed by taking the accuser's statements as-is, and refrain from interactive cross-examination and questioning the accuser's motives and behavior, as having our opinions swayed by such information can be construed as victim blaming, which we'd want to avoid. What I find puzzling is at the same time, we're encouraged to confront the accused, which further perpetuates an information asymmetry.
This process is awful for everyone involved, but doubly so for the actual victim, who faces an uphill battle to convince everyone that the abuse indeed took place. In this (and other) cases, the presence of multiple, independent accounts of abuse by the same perpetrator sways a rational actor's trust towards the accusers. The same may not have been true with just one report.
By going public, we have all been made third-parties forced to derive our own judgments about who to trust, but we're also not all stakeholders and don't participate in the same social circles as the people involved. Specifically, if a criminal investigation isn't desired, the discourse should take place within the affected social circles, as there is no compelling public interest to know that the alleged abuser is indeed an abuser. If, on the other hand, there is a compelling public interest, the justice system provides a better venue for the public -- us being the new parties to this discourse -- than simply making public statements.
IMHO, people can say what they want in the public
We then have libel and slander laws to take care of the issues, and to dissuade people from being reckless.
If they don't make up for the damage people cause, the easy way to remedy that is to up the remedies until they do.
This "shoot and sue" attitude is one of the reasons why the US is regarded as hyperlitigious across the rest of the world.
SirCmpwn is right. If this guy is innocent, his life is ruined now. And we've seen this pattern elsewhere, outside of tech; teenagers/adults falsely accused of rape or worse. People pissing behind a bar with a permanent contextless "sex offender" mark on their record. Etc. Lives ruined - innocent people escaping justice.
I honestly think this can be taught: Respect for the presumption of innocence. Why people should be presumed innocent should be taught from a young age. A similar respect as the one america gives to freedom of speech (although I'd hope it would come with a better understanding of what it means).
PS: I don't want to sound partisan or anything - I have no idea what this TOR investigation and affair is all about. In fact that's what's scary; I have no idea about the facts of the case, yet I've now been told that Jacob Appelbaum is a sexual predator.
Edit: It looks like nobody in the replies understood what I was talking about. It's naive to assume that the public at large respects the presumption of innocence that the govenment grants this man and other people in his situation. The system is broken if the citizens don't understand why this is important. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of people even in the comments here don't understand why it's important, so it looks like this is falling on deaf ears.
> If this guy is innocent, his life is ruined now. And we've seen this pattern elsewhere, outside of tech; teenagers/adults falsely accused of rape or worse. People pissing behind a bar with a permanent contextless "sex offender" mark on their record. Etc. Lives ruined - innocent people escaping justice.
What exactly do you even mean by "his life is ruined"? There are no criminal charges. No pre-trial detention. No trial. No prison sentence. This is a loooong way from his life being ruined. In all likelihood he will move on with his life, with no connection to Tor project.
The solution is simple. You presume he's innocent, so you offer him a job. The whole "life ruined" argument depends on literally every possible employer making the same guilty assumption that you say nobody should make.
As he hasn't even been charged, he is considered innocent for sure. The contract of the presumption of innocence is between the citizen and government, as is freedom of speech.
> IMHO, people can say what they want in the public We then have libel and slander laws to take care of the issues, and to dissuade people from being reckless.
This is the POV of a lawyer who understands how the legal system works and can (financially) afford to sue.
> If they don't make up for the damage people cause, the easy way to remedy that is to up the remedies until they do.
If both parties lack resources, you can't really receive damages comparable to a reputation destroying event.
Tor has a financial pot big enough to actually pay damages if these accusations were malicious AND false. However, iirc, Tor is based out of the US and the standard is malice. Tor is clearly not being actively malicious and being honestly mistaken would still be enough to destroy someone's reputation.
Now, in this case, I'm pretty sure Jacob has the financial resources to sue for slander but since its pretty clear its not a malicious act on Tor's part...its a fool's errand and his reputation will remain destroyed. Now, its quite possible that such destruction is deserved given this was an independent 3rd party, my problem is with your proposed solution if it was false.
Slander laws and "increased penalties" are not an effective solution.
Unless the target is a public figure including a, somewhat oxymoronically named, limited purpose public figure. It's a far broader category than it might seem at first glance.
For them (US) defamation law doesn't dissuade people from being reckless, only malicious.
The blog post said nearly nothing about what the investigation determined about Jacob's behavior. The focus is on mechanisms that Tor is putting in place to ensure that future allegations are taken seriously and investigated fairly.
> Many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied and frightened by Jacob, and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him. Some of those incidents have been shared publicly, and some have not. The investigation also identified two additional people as having engaged in inappropriate conduct, and they are no longer involved with the Tor Project.
EDIT: Curious why some here want to bury this again? The tweet was confirmed later by many people and you can get more sources about that on Jacob's Wikipedia article. It's highly relevant to this discussion, so leaving it out seems unusual.
I understand the concern, but please keep in mind that for many (if not most) victims of sexual harassment face considerable skepticism when they bring their claims forward, and that much of psychological trauma of sexual harassment arises from getting the authorities or the public or even their own friends to acknowledge that such harassment occurred in the first place. In that sense, Tor's announcement is less about Jacob per se and more about reassuring the victims (or people worried about becoming victims) that there's a place for them in the Tor community.
I don't have any answers for how you reconcile that with Jacob's presumed innocence or the risk that everyone got it wrong. Especially if the victims are unable or unwilling to bring legal charges. But I'm not sure how Tor would be able to move forward without some sort of public acknowledgement of Jacob's actions.
"This sort of thing really merits a judicial investigation."
If there's been a crime, and the victims step forward, then yes.
Until then, "we" should wait and see. Dirty laundry has been aired, everyone's hyper vigilant. How do the actors behave from this point forward? Is Appelbaum more Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas? Time will tell.
By this logic, are you proposing that any sort of action by a company against an employee would require judicial involvement so as to protect both sides by the formal finding of fact?
"The investigation also identified two additional people as having engaged in inappropriate conduct, and they are no longer involved with the Tor Project."
Damn.
This effort feels like the kind of deep introspection that every organization should undertake. Every org has their bad apples. But as of yet, there's no norms for addressing them.
"code of conduct", etc
Thank you. This is excellent news. These types of innovations in governance will become the norm. Thank you for leading the way.
> I'm not saying that's what's going on here. But it comes to mind.
Stop with this Fox News bullshit. If you have a theory about what's happening here, own it - enough of these "I'm not saying... " non-accusation accusations.
I don't know the facts around this case, and frankly, I don't particularly care: that's his business and the business of his victims. If Applebaum is a rapist, he should be in jail, if not he shouldn't. Either way, society has decided that rapists shouldn't be allowed to do good things like contribute to Tor. This means that accusing people of rape (truthfully or not) is a viable attack on projects such as Tor. There's no denying that this incentivizes actors who want to weaken Tor to accuse people such as Applebaum of rape.
I think that at this point, keeping Applebaum involved in the Tor project would be bad for Tor, regardless of whether he did it or not, so conversations about whether or not he did it are rather academic.
If we're going to engage in academic speculation, I do think Applebaum did it. The other members of the Tor project seem to have investigated and concluded that (admittedly it's not 100% clear), and have little reason to lie about it.
However, this doesn't in any way mean that there wasn't foul play. Even if most rape accusations were true, that doesn't mean they all were, or that people came forward for altruistic reasons.
We do need to come up with defenses against the attack where people accuse people of rape to damage the projects they contribute to. One such defense is to not have any players in a project feature so prominently that a hit to their reputation is a hit to the reputation of the project.
Totally unrelated. The Panthers were actually taking charge of their own community to police it because the police would not. They fed the hungry and took care of the poor in their communities because people would not. The FBI then ruined them by selling them illegal guns through Richard Aoki, and arresting the people who bought the guns.
Jake, on the other hand, talked at conferences and took credit for tech work. Then he raped some people. Plus, he's one dood. Sooooooo, no, no similarities at all, actually.
i think it's relevant to consider if this is a COINTELPRO type operation. and important, given the treatment of what's-his-face, who wound up in the Ecuadorian embassy.
that said, it seems like we can dismiss the likelihood of a COINTELPRO-type operation happening right now. rather, it seems that Jake's a snake... sadly. Sad for the folks at tor who had to put up with it. Sad for all the chumps who are distracted from the importance of Tor, in favor of disputing the validity of claims about sexual harassment (or worse).
You'd have to be out of your mind or staggeringly naive to think this isn't happening. Or is it just a coincidence that the people who are big movers and shakers in areas that shake up government apparently are all rapists and evil?
The people who are the brains behind the project can always fork. An organization that's turned inward and primarily concerns itself with rules, codes of conduct, procedures, and investigations will always lose to an organization full of people who are passionate about the problem and the code.
The pattern I've seen over and over again is you have a core group of creators who are talented, but prickly or obnoxious in some way. The project creators spend years of their lives building the project and making it successful. Then others come into the project, and use real or imagined personal offenses to boot the creators out of the project. These usurpers don't have talent, but because the project is successful already, the impact of booting the creators doesn't become apparent for a while. The project, however, cut off from its engine, stagnates and dies.
Best example? Apple.
Maybe Appelbaum bucks this trend by not having the talent to balance his flaws. I don't know. But I'm pattern-matching against the phenomenon I described above, and so far, it looks like a perfect match.
Appelbaum had a fair number of commits, 2008-2011. [0] There isn't much recently, and overall one doesn't get the impression that he'll be able to transition from his recent evangelist role to that of a hard-charging developer of his own fork.
Putting the court of public opinion aside for a moment, I think it's good for a company to hire an outside investigator to get to the truth, but I'm also concerned that when you get right down to it, it's the company that is to be protected. Yes they may get rid of bad employees, yes they may project a transparent investigation and its results, but at the end of the day it doesn't really do much for the people involved. It only serves to protect the company. Out of this I would like to see Tor and other silicon valley companies focus more on protecting the rights of employees, both those harmed, and those accused, until all the evidence is in, and then take steps to remedy the situation for those employees. So many of these investigations, from GitHub and Go Grid, to now Tor, is about protecting the companies and their executives. Only when that changes will things be better.
Some will be swayed by the fact that the internal investigation turned up some legitimate claims, but if the judicial system disagrees then this guy's life is already ruined, and I don't think that's appropriate. The whole situation reflects poorly on everyone involved.