The Weaponising Of Social Part 1: The Crucifixion of IOError

Thanks to a small group of supposed anonymity-protecting privacy activists thousands of people now know the name of Jacob Appelbaum’s fiancée`. Even those that didn’t want to.

We found it out by reading an extremely controversial website launched a week ago, that had a few sparse accounts of some nasty sounding happenings allegedly involving Jacob, with promises of more to come.

No one truly concerned with privacy issues should care if Jacob has a fiancée let alone who she is, out of respect for his right to a private life and because it is patently obvious that attacks on him shouldn’t extend to her.

Her name was later removed after the bulk of the damage had been done, without any editorial admission that it had ever been there in the first place.

Unfortunately, that simple yet far-reaching invasion of privacy, is only the tip of the iceberg.

[Update 12/06/16: Detractors are claiming the above is factually incorrect as they say Appelbaum is no longer engaged. The source was the smear website itself, which named Appelbaum’s ‘partner’, then removed her name and called her his ‘fiancée’, and now implies past tense. IMO, who he is or isn’t engaged to is frankly his own business. The point stands.]

Preamble

In a strange paradox, Jacob Appelbaum’s accusers both want to deny any relevance between their accusations and him being a known target of the US government as a result of the nature of his work, while having the clearly stated aim of wanting to prevent him from being able to continue it.

Even as they are being dwarfed, swept aside and forgotten in the controversy, the topics on which Jacob Appelbaum and WikiLeaks work are much larger and more important than any individual.  Those who concertedly dedicate themselves to such causes are unjustly forced to quite literally risk our safety, our families, our livelihoods, our citizenships, our liberty and everything we own, in our fight to preserve our ideals and our planet.

The high stakes in a situation like this demand more than knee-jerk reactions, hearsay, and because-all-my-friends-say, when one of us is attacked or discredited. They deserve the investment of time; of serious, weighty yet measured consideration; analysis; and investigation. All of the elements that should be prerequisite to forming any intellectual opinon, let alone one where reputations and potentially lives are at stake.

But we are yet to see any of that, at least anything more in-depth than a series of personal statements via “Twitlonger”. Just a whole lot of uproar; a whole lot more silence; and a bunch of axe-grinding. With very little actual analysis, because the topic of rape is so taboo that most people are shit scared of approaching it objectively.

As such, this post should be subtitled “We Owe IO More Than 600 Words”. Because we do. We owe him much, much more than that.

We owe it to him and to our causes, to find out the truth.

Preamble dispensed with, I’m going to give some historical context to what made me write this article and analyse the claims made on and by the anti-IO website. In Part 2 of this article, we will look into the main personalities that appear to be driving this, discuss some of the environmental factors affecting the response and get into the wider context, which is all but being ignored

Lessons Long-Since Learned 

The website now being widely sourced as justification for dismantling Appelbaum’s career and reputation does as much to discredit itself as it does to discredit Jacob.

That the name of the female closest to him was disclosed in a forum that claims to exist to protect women was not the first red flag.

Several years ago, a situation unfolded where a prominent activist (Activist A)  was privately accused of rape by another activist (Activist B). This was then broadcast far and wide through the creation of a Twitter account that purported to be Activist B talking directly and openly about her first hand experience of being raped by Activist A.

Many fell for it, and instantaneously an online frenzy was being whisked up against Activist A. For all the same – on the surface – seemingly valid reasons that we see people turning on Jacob Appelbaum for now.

However, when I read the tweets of the account calling for the persecution of Activist A, I innately knew that what I was reading was not the words of a rape survivor. It came across to me as someone trying to posture themselves as one, out of empathy and/or indignation, rather than legitimately recounting an actual firsthand memory of a personal experience.

So I did the socially unacceptable but morally right thing and spoke out. While people were aghast that I dared to question a “victim” – the facade soon crumbled and it turned out that my instincts were absolutely correct.

The account claiming to be a rape victim was not Activist B at all. It was Activist C, her boyfriend, who had (according to Activist B, without her knowledge) taken it upon himself to impersonate her and attack Activist A in public after she had raised issues in confidence. There had been some question of infidelity, she had privately claimed lack of consent, Activist C had decided that Activist A’s life should be ruined as a result, and gone public.

Whether or not Activist A ever did in fact rape Activist B got lost in the controversy of Activist C’s foolish meddling in the entire situation. Activist A claimed no. Activist B claimed yes. Activist C permanently obscured the situation by his actions.

So how was I able to immediately identify, on gut feeling, that this anonymous account claiming to be a rape victim was not a rape victim? And why did I risk my “social capital” to speak out on such a highly contentious topic?

Because people who are not survivors of rape cannot competently impersonate survivors of rape. They think the act itself is the whole story but it is just a tiny fraction of it. So when they attempt to concoct the scenario, they always limit it to the specific event rather than the holistic experience, the emotional journey.

Rape Testimony

Real rape testimony is 20% what physically happened and 80% how it affected us. It is visceral. It is memories and shapes and impressions and images. It is sights and smells and feelings, a twisted nostalgia we would desperately like to free ourselves from but cannot ever. It is asymmetrical and it evolves. It unfolds. The expression of it is a cathartic, painful release but a necessary step in the healing.

It is not a telegram. It is not a thematical construct with set form or submission rules.

They are not a fixed length. Nor fixed sentence structures. They do not have a statistical linguistic pattern. They are not uniform. They ebb and flow in proportion to the victim’s telling. They sway and move, mobile in the outpouring of emotion, of grief.

When multiple examples of rape testimonies are compared side by side, they don’t conform in any way save in their effective translation of trauma, of a raw and primal pain.

So when I realised the extent to which the accounts on the anti-Jacob website do conform and began to note other anomalies, huge alarm bells started ringing.

Speaking From Experience

As someone intimately acquainted with the plight of survivors, you can feel inside you when something is just not right with a situation like this. As a survivor, my personal obligation to other victims and to the truth has led me to speak up several times in the past – even when it is utterly humiliating, damaging to my reputation or even outright dangerous to do so. This is not an expectation I have of others – I have the benefit of the passage of time, maturity, experience and healing – water under the bridge – that many others don’t. Thus I spoke out in an article addressing statements made by the Minister of Police and the grotesquely poor conduct of NZ cops in handling sexual assault including my own historical abduction and gang rape. I likewise spoke the difficult and humiliating truth against the notorious ‘FBI’ snitch Sabu when he assumed the identity of one of my friends in order to target me sexually, in an attempt to entrap me. I spoke out about my favourite publication in the world when a new staffer there published a ridiculous pile of rape apologist bullshit. I spoke out against the self-admitted serial pack rapists known as The RoastBusters who weren’t even so much as arrested after bragging about stupefying and pack-raping dozens of 13-16 year old girls. Then I spoke out against media’s irresponsible reporting on the issue. And again, when the Minister of Justice used the plight of the many Roastbusters victims who had received no justice whatsoever, in order to falsely justify the passage of anti-trolling legislation.

Even though it triggered the hell out of me to do so, I attended protest events, supported movements, and covered live actions in support of survivors, and in defiance of the repressive tactics wielded by New Zealand’s blatantly corrupt and incompetent police forces, who so profoundly fail survivors, and the public.

As faithfully as I spoke out in all those cases, so must I speak out too when I believe that rape testimony may be being falsely manufactured, or manipulated, or misrepresented, or used to serve the ulterior motives and agenda of someone(s) who may not be rape survivors at all.

“Believe victims“, some people say. The key word is not believe. The key word is victims. Not “believe any two-bit twat(s) who impersonate survivors and/or edit rape testimony because they have something to gain by smearing someone all over the net, in the name of other victims.”

Especially when in doing so, knowingly or not, those someone(s) are also serving the interests of The Empire and damaging movements that people pay dearly to create, build and sustain. (If you are in any doubt about this take note that among the first people gloating about Jacob Appelbaum’s perceived downfall was in fact, Sabu.)

For The Empire, I can assure you, does not give the slightest flying shit about rape victims, unless they can be used to its advantage. On a daily basis, it perpetuates and facilitates mass rape all over the world, while expending tax dollars to cement and maintain all of the societal and environmental conditions that create rape culture.

The double-edged sword of the taboo of rape was constantly wielded against Julian Assange and his supporters over the last five years, albeit with ever-dwindling effectiveness. Allegations of rape against information activists are a lose-lose situation for us but a ‘win’ for our enemies, and that is again apparent in Appelbaum’s case. The end result is a real-life example of why these types of accusations are such an efficient tool for those wishing to utterly devastate and incapacitate a perceived rival. It emboldens the targets enemies and silences their friends. It isolates them and eclipses all their prior undertakings.

For all these reasons I cannot merely sit silent, or put out an ambiguous 600-word opinion piece sitting on a fence.

Instead I did what I do best. I read, read, read, read and read more. Dug, investigated and analysed.

The following, is my findings.

Analysis Is What We Do Best – So Let’s Do It

In the first hours of the allegations against Jacob hitting the public sphere, they were primarily pushed through one website, a shady Twitter handle with acrid yet low output, and two personal Twitter accounts. Although in the days that followed many, many others jumped on board, some of the first out of the gates were:

The Meredith quoted above, who, incidentally, is described as the founder of a “think-tank” called “Weaponizing Social”, went on to send more than a dozen tweets about the situation, in surplus to those quoted above.

From this post about Weaponizing Social on AspirationTech.org:

What a strange question they ask – “who watches those watching the watchmen?” One would assume, the Watchmen do, because they keep a super close eye on anyone questioning or shining a light on them, and in reality they do much more than simply “watch”.

[“Weaponizing Social” both as a concept and an entity will be further discussed in the second part of this article.]

For now, looking closely at the anonymous website featuring the accusations against Jacob is key to better understanding the whole situation.

JacobAppelbaum.net

The first impression of the website (which strangely, is not HTTPS) is of a huge picture of Jacob Appelbaum with his name written across it in bold type. It initially gives the impression of being an official website. Until you read the ‘About’ page.

Hey there! We’re a collective of people who have been harassed, plagiarized, humiliated, and abused — sexually, emotionally, and physically — by Jacob Appelbaum. Jake enjoys manipulating people through his built-up social capital, influence, and power, in order to get what he wants.

Here are some of our stories.

— http://jacobappelbaum.net

Any activist worth their salt – let alone a legit Tor developer – has already been doxed or worse, long since. First and foremost by multiple governments and a network of private security companies (yup, they call it a file) then secondarily through social media. Such people are already harassed on a daily basis. Are usually rightly in fear for their very life.

The only people who could reasonably by “afraid” of such elementary levels of actions being taken against them, at this echelon of infotech, are either active in fields which are not seen as threats at all to any government, or who serve their purposes. Everyone else is a target.

There are gaping holes all the way through the rest of the FAQ. From the claim that Twitter requiring phone numbers for new accounts prevented them getting a Twitter (as if there aren’t free guides as to how to circumvent this, not to mention the option of just buying a throwaway SIM or using a virtual number… come on now, countless anonymous accounts are created every day…) to the claim that the site was created out of an altruistic wish to make people safe. Considering the timeline of events as revealed by Cryptome, there are indications that the existence of the complaints were used as a tool for what could easily be described as employment-related blackmail before they even went public.

If that isn’t damning enough: the proof is in the pudding:

The best part of a dozen images of Jacob Appelbaum appear under (fake) names of victims – each linking to an individual story of being wronged by him. Unfortunately, in its first iteration, the vast majority of these images, when clicked on, simply lead to text which read  “This is a placeholder“.

Several instances still remain to this day. Leaving it up to our imagination as to whether or not there was actually a victim behind each fake name at the time of first publishing, or whether the publishers were hoping to collect more once the site was live and post them at a future date.

Immediately sensing something wrong, I tried to put my finger on it. Then I realised the first giveaway. The word counts. I ran some basic stats on each testimony that was posted. These and my observations on the stories that did appear, both initially and in the later versions of the site, are as below.

Story 1: Sam  (369 words)

2. River (703 words)

This account was one of the first published and is by far the most serious accusation against Jacob. Firstly because it is the only story that involves an actual allegation of outright rape and secondly because it implicates (but does not name) other people as being witness to and/or complicit in the alleged rape.

The account begins: “I didn’t know until very recently that nonconsensual sex, by a friend, is rape.” indicating that it is a historical claim (which does not make it any more or less valid, but is contextual information) and that something that has occurred “very recently” has altered how the alleged victim viewed what happened.

There are 34 instances of the word “I” in the first section of the story before there is a break in what had very clearly been, until then, a first-person narrative. The break reads in its entirety:

“This cannot continue.

He cannot be a leader in this community, the first name that many people think of, an inspiration to those new entering the field, and also someone who uses his power and influence to sexually prey on individuals who think he is trusted.

It is critical that our community is safe for women, and for any individual who is passionate about protecting privacy and anonymity.”

“The Tor Project in particular should be recognized for how they have handled this respectfully and honorably.”

Due to the sudden lack of personalisation of the sentence structure, and the concrete position, it reads as if another voice has been inserted into the text.

The break over, the testimony is concluded with a final paragraph, which includes another 6 instances of the term “I”, feeling very much as if it has returned to the original voice.

The most puzzling aspect of the account is why the person involved fails to name any of the eye-witnesses and/or participants that they allege were present.

Under the cover of anonymity, and obviously having a good idea of what was at stake for Jake, why not name the others involved? In not naming them, anyone who is one of Jacob’s “friends” or “followers” is subject to fall under the cloud of suspicion. Was this intentional or negligent?

The storyteller states firmly that they believe they were not the only one to receive this treatment from this group of people. So if the stated aim of the site, as it claims, is to forewarn other women and to protect them, why only name Jacob? If he is, as claimed, just one of a group participating in the sexual assault of intoxicated women?

3. Forest (596 words)

The lack of hard evidence is likely why the media were initially reluctant to report on the accusations, although that changed when Tor released a statement about Jacob Appelbaum leaving the Project.

Given the recent unravelling of some of the accusations, and the fervour with which the same paid government troll accounts that have been going after Assange, WikiLeaks, Snowden, Appelbaum and anyone associated with them for years, are now lapping up the opportunity to milk the Appelbaum controversy for all it is worth, it is impossible to exclude the motives of and gain to The Empire, from this analysis.

The Empire

Nothing pisses The Empire off more than those of us who engage others to fight against their corruption and oppression. Perusing and spreading information puts you on their radar. Instructing others to undertake actions takes you to a whole other level.

So when you hear Jacob Appelbaum openly calling on the employees of intelligence agencies to leak secrets to him, or encouraging people to compromise utilities at NSA facilities as acts of civil disobedience, there can be no doubt how far up the shitlist of the military-industrial complex that puts him.

By its own admission, The Empire classifies us all as either:

a) Idealist (can be disillusioned, such as by fallen heroes etc, or otherwise convinced to turn away from their ideals)
b) Realist (motivated by money or self-interest, can be bribed/coerced into capitulation)
c) Reformist (restricted to conventional avenues of political change… politics, academia, NGO’s; places where you are forced to  ultimately tacitly compromise your ethics in order to achieve/excel or progress in your environment)

OR… dum de dum dum….

d) Radical (demands system-wide change, is active & incorruptible)

The Empire has decided that the best way of dealing with “radicals” (the label THEY have constructed and imposed upon qualifying “persons of interest”) is to completely dismantle their lives at a “whole of Government” level. Which means, politely, using all the various departments and avenues of civic oppression available to them.

The Empire has deemed Jacob Appelbaum, a radical.

As it did Julian Assange.

Part Two of this article will cover the elephants in the room:

• The (second) Tor Statement

• The media response

• Other accusations against Jacob on the WWW

• The WikiLeaks Connection

• A much deeper look into those who lay behind the curtain of JacobAppelbaum.net

To be continued…

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