This is why it took me so long to come out with this story. The last thing I want to do is put myself out there only to be dismissed as part of a larger smear campaign (as I was at the time.)
Further: This is a direct description of what I have come to know as Jake's M.O. Not an isolated incident. This has to do with one person's behavior, it has nothing to do with the projects that person was involved with.
Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad. Maybe I deserved it. Fine, call me whatever form of coward or weakling you want but in the end, this was my hobby and I found other things to do with my life where I didn't have to put up with this level of stress.
Psychopaths have a lot more experience at being psychopaths than regular people have had experience at dealing with psychopaths.
From what you describe, I don't think you were weak or cowardly, just inexperienced. There is absolutely no shame in that. Hindsight is useful for learning, but not for admonishment (by yourself or others). You had to make lots of decisions fast, amongst a bunch of bad choices with unknown outcomes. Your success rate for surviving bad situations so far is 100%, so don't beat yourself up too much, and tell the retrospective armchair philosophers to jog on.
I just wanted to thank you for telling your story.
It's really easy for me to think, when it's not happening to me, that "Of course I would do this, or that, but I'd never do nothing". And we see some of that thinking in this thread.
What people don't realise is that abusing people is an iterative process. The abuser has had a lot of practice at it, and refines the process over many years.
The victim (and that's a hard word to use about ourselves) hasn't had any experience of this kind of situation, and doesn't want to leap to the to them nuclear option.
I hope you're okay, and if you're ever in Cheltenham[1] I'd buy you a coffee[2].
> Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad.
It was bad, and most people would have had the same reaction as you.
Hi Nick. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience. :(
But your document contains serious allegations which the body of it does not support:
> Jake has targeted, abused and silenced many close friends of mine, many of whom are researchers you probably know and respect. Whether it’s ripping off research or just harassing someone into submission, somehow we all felt powerless to do anything about it. He’s the perfect bully.
> Every criticism of him is met with suspicion, every accusation is some government-conspiracy-takedown.
> Those that tried to stand up to him were destroyed, one even took his own life after Jake stole his research. But that’s not my story to tell.
If you're not going to support these claims, you shouldn't make them. Now I get to feel like shit for calling this out-- and potentially causing you stress, because I am sympathetic to your experience...
I think your message would carry more weight if it was limited to your message, rather than setting the framing with a large number of serious but unsubstantiated claims.
> If you're not going to support these claims, you shouldn't make them.
Why is that? I am personally willing to believe "Multiple generally-trustworthy members of a community make accusations about a person P which, by their nature, cannot be easily substantiated to the public, which if true would imply that P is/has done X" as very strong evidence for "P is/has done X" - certainly enough to override my prior for "Most people are not/have not done X". And therefore, I think that people should make claims they believe to be true even when they are unsubstantiable by nature, and I am glad that these claims were made.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad for calling this out; you're just saying something that I see a lot in technical communities, in a lot of contexts. I would like technical communities to have a good, strong, evidence-backed way of reasoning about things like this. It seems so often that we default to reasoning about things the way the Anglo-Saxon legal system wants to reason about things when considering whether to point its monopoly on violence at a person. Especially for matters like harassment and sexual assault, we have strong reason to doubt that the legal system is well-suited in its current form at accurately making that judgment, let alone whether it is correct at judging truth, which it explicitly makes no claim to (Blackstone's dictum is specifically about how the legal system should minimize harm on the occasions it gets truth wrong). That default is baked into us by culture, but I think it's a bad default, or more specifically, an irrational and often erroneous default. Hearsay isn't allowable in a court of law, but that's not a reason that hearsay shouldn't be allowed to influence the personal opinions of community members who are making judgments for themselves and not for a government.
Because they can't be defended against, and especially can't be defended or questioned without being insensitive to the complaints which are supported.
It's a share of what Jake is accused of: making it impossible to criticize or question.
From a perspective of statistics, these allegations are heresay-- and we've heard them elsewhere. The results in well known cognitive biases where evidence gets double counted when someone elses allegation is simply repeated by someone else.
Maybe to offer another insight that is not obvious: When you reach a certain point in an organization, what you do and how it impacts the thing you work so hard for becomes very obvious. Yeah, you sacrifice your personal safety for it as much as that sounds awful in retrospect.
What would I have to gain getting the police or others involved in a creepy note left in my room? The fact is, they proved they could gain entry whenever they wanted and no amount of police protection would do anything about that.
And then what...start rumors about creepy notes? Have people tell me I made the whole thing up? Get told by the Police there would be nothing they could do, or worse, invite them in to a world where they're actively detested?
What would all that do to the conference? It would be another circus taking away attention away from people who rightly deserved it for the great work that they're doing. Just like this whole thing is a circus.
The best thing that could have happened did, some friends of mine were scheduled to crash with me--one of whom was sick the entire time. After that, the notes stopped.
I totally understand your skepticism there. Yes, I was totally an idiot for not keeping the notes, not going to the police, etc. etc.
If I can offer anything, by the time it got to that point, I had already been told to "stop making drama" about the whole thing and somehow just pacify Jake by many people I trusted.
So I bring them a note! I bring them to my hotel room! Let's walk through the scenario in my head: What's to make them believe me now because I have some anonymous piece of paper. Who's to say I didn't make the thing up myself to try to get back at Jake? Why would someone believe me just because there's a shred of something.
My whole approach up until I couldn't take it anymore was to just ignore, to let it slide, to not think about it and move on. THIS IS WHAT HARASSMENT VICTIMS DO and yes, I should have recognized it at the time.
> What's to make them believe me now because I have some anonymous piece of paper.
I don't know anything about policework, but entering in a place illegally (I assume Jake or one of his friends doesn't have legal free reign in random German hotels) to intimidate someone into doing something is quite a thing. I could imagine the police caring enough to try to get fingerprints off of the piece of paper and perhaps come to the hotel room to check video footage and other fingerprints.
I'm not saying I don't believe you, but someone mentioned something that caught my eye as well, so I commented on it.
Up until now I hadn't doubted Jake's legitimacy. I also didn't agree with everything he said (having heard him speak and answer questions in multiple places, and briefly talking to him personally), but I figured it's just normal not to agree with everything someone says. Your article made me realize I should listen better and judge whether the good intentions are really there, and it made me much more hesitant when it comes to Jake and the Tor project in general (another comment linked an article with similar things about the Tor project as a whole). So thanks for sharing this.
Even if you didn't ignore it, it sounds like the well was already poisoned for you. I think you've made the right decision to leave this group, sad though the situation is.
I guess I didn't make this clear enough in the post, but I had no intention of letting the talk go forward unless the presenter could bring up some really solid evidence of some sort. Slides, some kind of visual element or documentation were required to earn/keep your LT slot and, for understandable reasons, some people wait until the last minute to submit the final draft of those.
To be crass, I threw this person on the schedule and gave them a deadline with every intention of removing them the next day to shut them up so I could go to sleep. The LT schedules change up to and during the event itself and I've rejected a lot of talks once it was clear that the slides or revisions contained inappropriate material.
The goal of the event is to give everyone a chance to take the stage, the point is to not curate beyond clustering similar topics together. People sing songs, do dances and any number of crazy little things and sometimes will blow you away with an amazing idea.
That being said, I started training my potential replacements for the LTs at the 30c3 for the reasons you stated, among others.
I believe today, the talks are assembled by a team of three people with each person taking the helm on a particular day.
Thanks for sharing your experience and speaking out. I'm sorry for sounding overly critical of you...not all organizations have the capacity/resources to be run in an ordered way, and some things are done ad-hoc until they're popular enough for a more formal system (as lightning talks generally are in various conferences). While I can see why JA would be offended/paranoid by the very contemplation of the topic, I reiterate that does not at all justify the level of continued hostility, or the demands for you to violate the privacy of the proposal's submitter.
I know it's a hard job...that was part of the point that I think got lost in the whole article. That being said, this intimidation strategy (along with the rampant drug war incarceration of anyone who isn't 100% clean) has "cleaned up the city". Once the crime rates start going up again, it's going to get a lot worse.
Beat cops aren't just supposed to write traffic citations. They're supposed to get a litany of these "pink ticket"s, which account for all the quality of life violations that the Broken Window theory goes after.
Bear in mind, I didn't get a ticket from the Stop-And-Frisk incident, I got one for trespassing in Central Park a few months prior.
I plead not guilty because I was TOLD by the Police Officer that the ticket would get thrown out. I assumed this meant that the officer would not appear were I to appeal it, and when the officer appeals it gets thrown out.
What I didn't know is that the "ACD" option--Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal--was not offered to be at my arraignment. The first magistrate I saw wanted my $25, and didn't say a thing about throwing the ticket out. Not knowing my rights at the time (i.e. the ACD option), I plead Not Guilty.
Turns out the officer did appear and I was offered ACD. Had I continued with the trial, I would have made a point of the officer's statement saying that "this ticket would get thrown out as long as you appeared".
I didn't put it in the article precisely because I didn't want the shift in focus--but this incident made me think a lot harder about wearing my Google Glass again.
That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times. It's more for their benefit than ours.
As far as technologies that reliably work, the stop-and-frisk app is actually quite good, but requires practice like anything else.
I'd also be all for photographing cops out of habit. I stopped short of recommending that...but, hell, there's plenty of fodder here for a good month's worth of posts.
> That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times.
True. This would be a major positive change to our system.
> It's more for their benefit than ours.
False. Everything is already all the cops' way. They have nowhere to go but down. Their court testimony is legally privileged over yours (this really galls me in the face of the idea that "all are equal before the law"). They don't like being filmed because it hurts them. In this case, what we have is a case of "good for us because it's bad for the cops".
Oh, a Glass would actually be pretty useful. Make a photo every 10-30 seconds and automatically upload it to a secure server (offshore). Then, give the access credentials to your lawyer.
If you get arrested the lawyer can download the last photos.
I'm actually going to take you to task on this once, precisely because the NYPD is set to become a "minority majority" force if current hiring trends continue. I've had many, many more interactions with the police than these two incidents in a variety of different contexts and I believe they're decent human beings who want to do the right thing. The systematic mistreatment of all underprivileged groups (including poor whites and the mentally ill, btw.) is, when you look at it, the bad cops getting the outsized share of attention. There are lots of cops who do the right thing when they can, I see it happening all the time even beyond the patina of the blue line of intimidation.
i don't live in NY, so i'll concede to your actual experience with NY cops. BUT, i think your assumption that a lack of mistreatment of minorities results from a more diverse police force is naive. in my experience, i have seen abuse against ethnic minorities at the hands of police who are themselves ethnic minorities - sometimes even the same ethnicity as the victim. perhaps in many cases police brutality falls along racial lines, but only by correlation. i think it is probably more of an issue of class, and groupings like "people who look like thugs to me". either way, as a professional-looking white or asian dude, you can usually escape being classed as a "thug" sight-unseen just for your appearance.
i would also offer that due to the fact you're a successful guy, you have probably not had police interactions in, say, east new york. police attitudes and behavior are highly variable based on where they work. if you're in a shitty neighborhood, you will have much worse interactions with cops no matter your race. in nice neighborhoods, cops are nice.
In my case, it was a freak occurrence. I chose to wear my admittedly ratty looking but thrift-store looking hat along with a Century 21 snowboarding jacket.
Had it been a slightly warmer day, this incident would have likely never occurred.
That being said, I think what's happening on the left coast is the widening income gap coupled with a context switch that the cops are still catching up to. There are a lot of kids who bleed entitlement, some of whom are quite wealthy and some of whom are dirt poor.
There was no official charge in the Stop-and-Frisk incident. I'm comparing that to a very professional (almost apologetic) Central Park trespassing ticket that ended up getting thrown out, as most of them do.
I'm assuming I was not charged with anything after the stop-and-frisk because they figured out I was probably a lot more trouble for them than I was worth. In this case, appearances were deceiving...what I was wearing at that time, due to the weather, screamed "punk kid/hipster" far more than the "Privileged Accountant who passes for White" clothing I had on underneath.
I believe everyone who's saying a person of color or otherwise underprivileged person would have had a much different outcome is 100% correct.
Further: This is a direct description of what I have come to know as Jake's M.O. Not an isolated incident. This has to do with one person's behavior, it has nothing to do with the projects that person was involved with.
Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad. Maybe I deserved it. Fine, call me whatever form of coward or weakling you want but in the end, this was my hobby and I found other things to do with my life where I didn't have to put up with this level of stress.