Yet another reason to admire that community!
From the post:
The current incidents come at a time when suspicion, slander, and threats are endemic to the online world. They create an environment where the malicious feel safe and the misguided feel justified in striking out online with a thousand blows. Under such attacks, many people have suffered — especially women who speak up online. Women who work on Tor are targeted, degraded, minimized and endure serious, frightening threats.
I am at a loss. trollies attacking contributors to a project that allow them to trolley anonymously? No Tor for you, one year!
Context?
It is not at all clear what, if anything, they are actually doing about this. Or have done, or will do. Simply “refusing to tolerate” isn’t going to make Mister Troll feel much pain; in fact, such people would count this statement as proof of their importance. Bonus points.
Readers interested in context and specifics are invited to
https://storify.com/ShrillBrigade/geronimo
I’m not sure if that storify will make much sense to people who weren’t following this already. But at least it offers clues to the broader context of this.
Jeremy Becker has been harassing Andrea Shepard, for months. Shepard retaliated by doxxing Becker, exposing his legal name and place of employment. I think it’s fairly clear that Becker’s behavior was outrageous, and the retaliation was an appropriate response.
Complicating this is that it occurred in the context of criticism of Tor’s funding model by Pando.net and various left activists: specifically, that Tor was originally invented by the US Navy and the Tor Project still receives much of its funding from branches of the US government. Becker’s harassment of Shepard includes a mix of sexism and accusations of collaboration with the Feds. My sense is that the critics of Tor have been sloppy in their arguments, and many of them lapse into conspiracy theories. On the other hand, the defenders of Tor have been entirely too dismissive of criticisms, when there are very good reasons to be concerned that the Tor project is funded mostly by institutions closely related to the institutions it’s supposed to be defending its users from.
Unfortunately, Tor defenders have used Becker as a proxy for all critics of the Tor Project, and critics of the Tor Project have been rallying around Becker and condoning his harassment of Shepard.
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