Fair witness, objectivity, Jill Bähring, and @ioerror from here out

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Jill Bähring was the young woman in the lobby, the woman standing by the hotel desk. As you can read, she was not being made uncomfortable by Jake Appelbaum, and she was not unhappy because of him standing by the front desk later.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2858345-Statement-by-JB-for-IMMEDIATE-RELEASE.html

But we are all human, and what we see in the world is colored by our experience, and our filters.

I do not know that the victim collective is dubious in any other personal accusation, and I do not know if Jill is correct in casting strong aspersions on their credibility regarding their personal accounts. I do not know that Jake is innocent or guilty of some or all.

But the damage to the victims' credibility today is from flawed process, as surely as if they had gone to through lawyers and the courts. And it comes from them reaching too hard to make their point in the press -- beyond their personal experiences, to "everybody knows..."

It is the inherent awfulness of such a process that damages, not just the awfulness of the courts and adversarial legal system. The community, without a formal structure, will do as bad and worse with the energy in the system spun up so high. At this point it is likely there is no escape.

Heinlein had the institution of the Fair Witness, and when a fair witness was asked, "What color is that house on the hill?" she responded, "It's white on this side."

The space for fair witness in this affair has been eroded at this point. We are in the wilderness. Now there will be two camps facing off. I am getting out of it, because if there is a process that emerges, now it will be parlay among the adversaries. My role is over, except perhaps observing from the sidelines.

The Spiral of Silence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence) on the matter, regardless, is broken, and I'm not needed in such an active role anymore.

That's my perception, anyway, and so far my perception has been pretty good. So I'm going to return to my retirement -- I'm really rather ill, that's why you don't see me much these past few years -- and let younger people carry this forward. All sides. I will be here to chat as usual. (And, thank you Jill, I think I may sleep a week!)

But the Tor Project board and decisions are under direct attack as of today, when less than 48 hours ago I was assured it was an insane thing to imagine such a thing would be consequences of this dispute. Now it's international headlines.

Confidential personnel emails authored by a staffer who was engaged for a very short time that year are appearing -- at least once with a prepended "...should have known better than to use gmail" (nice, nice) although there are many possible channels for the leaks such that this would make me look harder at other paths, personally.

Jill's letter will be used to dismiss victims who come forward in future cases and make their lives harder, even if it is proven that Jake is a monster, because people are goldfish regarding news items, and they don't look at context.

And if Jake is innocent, or relatively so, even more tragic, because we've created one more ironclad tool to defend rapists and molesters who say, "You see, it's really never the case..."

It's important that this matter should be handled with responsibility, patience, and decency, but for my health, I can't maintain this intensity.

I'm hoping there are people fixing the code on the Kobiyashi-Maru simulation on the fly, so we get our happy ending. We need a patch, stat.

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