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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

What's happening is that you pay disproportionate attention to accusations against "the government's enemies", and not much attention at all to accusations of people in the government. Here, you have a story about someone removing themselves from a private project over accusations. Nowhere in your comment do you, for instance, acknowledge Denny Hastert being sentenced to 15 months in prison.

Also: of the people who do serious work on counter-censorship, anonymity, privacy, and the like, the overwhelming majority have had no accusations made at all. For that matter, despite a long prison sentence, neither has Chelsea Manning.

Could it be that your sample size here is "2"?

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How many of those people left the country permanently because of constant harassment by government agents? How many lost their girlfriend when she got freaked out because a guy with night vision goggles was spying into their apartment in the middle of the night? You're writing this off like it's a simple statistical unlikelyhood without making any consideration into specifically what has happened to Appelbaum before.

I'm not even defending him, I just think you're doing a crap job of dismissing the concern.

Few. None.

Applebaum is a big fish in a community under consideration whose removal and replacement could be justifiable under national security.

The setup for this hints at a managed campaign. Twitter, anonymous hit piece, website with stories. The kind of plan that comes out of a powerpoint.

There may be truth in the accusations, but the evidence does hint at a guiding hand fleshing them out.

I can and do doubt that.

No.

You're basically saying that there's no evidence that it's a coordinated campaign (really, the fact that it was talked about on Twitter isn't evidence of anything at all), and that lack of evidence is why it has to be a coordinated campaign. Which is a logical fallacy at best.

EDIT: that wasn't quite what I meant. There's some evidence that somebody is coordinating it. There's no evidence that it's a hostile government. The evidence suggests that the coordinator is somebody who feels that they were sexually harassed.

No.

I said there are hints of evidence of a coordinated campaign. Which there are. This could be from the number of people involved, or a guiding hand. I placed no stake in the ground on either possibility.

Your personal attack at calling it a logical fallacy is noted.

"Your personal attack at calling it a logical fallacy is noted." - no, it's not a personal attack, I'm saying the argument is incorrect.

The argument you read incorrectly and misinterpreted.

You might not have been arguing that it was related to the government, but the two posts you were replying to sure did, so I assumed you were as well, apparently incorrectly.

If there's anything else I've misinterpreted, you're going to have to spell it out.

While this is an extremely well known charachter attack vector most publicly probably used on Julian Assange, as noted by tptacek this just means there will be more scrutiny of the accusation. I am not familiar with his exact contributions to Tor, but I would suspect that they aren't extremely dangerous to U.S. interests nor is he well known enough outside the security community to have his charachter asassinated in a fabricated potentially damaging (to the agency) way.

I will assume he is innocent until proven guilty & it is possible or even probable he is innocent. However, given the degree this happens at companies it is totally possible this is simply a regular ambiguous he said she said which has happened in Gamergate, Tinder Github ect. Not that I mean to trivialize it, just to point out there is a large precedent for such things to occur naturally & given he worked with wikileaks it would probably be a dumb way to go about dissuading him, although it can't be ruled out until more info surfaces.

I agree with most of your points but one stands out. Tor is absolutely perceived as a threat to US national and general security. The silk road takedown put it vividly on radar.

The goal of an operation like this would be to replace the non compliant actor with a compliant actor. In this case, remove the guy and replace him with someone willing to insert code to compromise the codebase.

We don't know if that's what happened/is happening here, but we don't know it's not either. And I personally don't subscribe to the stupidity/malice law that's regularly thrown around here on HN.

Wouldn't they stop funding it if that was the case?

Tor is a product of the Naval Research Laboratories and is continually funded by the US Government.

One of the accusers (Andrea Shepard) is a current and veteran employee and developer of the Tor project itself. Another (Meredith Patterson) has been working in the open source crypto field for decades. To believe in the conspiracy of this being motivated by anti-Tor forces, you would have to widen the conspiracy to believe that Tor already has been compromised from the inside by its own employees for many years.

Conspiracies don't get that big without bursting.

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