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Why the Trolls Will Always Win
It turned out that a man named Andrew Auernheimer was responsible for having harassed Sierra. Known as 'Weev', he admitted it in a 2008 New York Times story on Internet Trolls. There, he spoke to the lengths which he and his cohorts went to discredit and destroy the woman. "Over a candlelit dinner of tuna sashimi, Weev asked if I would attribute his comments to Memphis Two, the handle he used to troll Kathy Sierra, a blogger. Inspired by her touchy response to online commenters, Weev said he "dropped docs" on Sierra, posting a fabricated narrative of her career alongside her real Social Security number and address. This was part of a larger trolling campaign against Sierra, one that culminated in death threats."
Now, seven years later, Kathy Sierra has returned to explain why she left and what recent spates of online harassment against women portend for the future if decent people don't organize. The situation has grown much more serious since she went into hiding all those years ago. It's more than just the threat of Doxxing to incite physical violence by random crazies with a screw loose. Read on for the rest of maynard's thoughts. These days, malicious trolls have taken to SWATting, where harassers call police and make false accusations to induce a SWAT raid. One prominent example is that of game developer Chris Kootra, who experienced a SWAT raid on camera while playing an online video game recently. There is also the troubling trend of developing malicious software intended to harm victims directly. For example, posting images on epilepsy forums which flicker at rates known to induce epileptic seizure. Given that Sierra is epileptic herself, this kind of harmful trolling hits home personally. She writes:
[While not photo-sensitive], I have a deep understanding of the horror of seizures, and the dramatically increased chance of death and brain damage many of us with epilepsy live with, in my case, since the age of 4. FYI, deaths related to epilepsy in the US are roughly equal with deaths from breast cancer. There isn't a shred of doubt in my mind that if the troll hackers could find a way to increase your risk of breast cancer? They'd do it. Because what's better than lulz? Lulz with BOOBS. Yeah, they'd do it.
And yet Auernheimer, the man who put her through all this horror, has for entirely different reasons become a kind of 'Net cause célèbre for Internet freedom. After having committed a hack against AT&T where he obtained the email addresses of thousands of iPad users, he attracted the attention of federal authorities. In due course he was convicted and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Many thought his conviction and sentence egregious. Weev attracted support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and prominent Georgia University Law Professor Tor Ekeland, and they worked together to craft an appeal and overturn the conviction. In April 2014, they succeeded. Auernheimer is now free.
Ekeland wasn't the only one bothered by the government's case. Even Kathy Sierra disagreed. Yet she's appalled that somehow she'd been dragged into supporting the very man who'd abused her.
But you all know what happened next. Something something something horrifically unfair government case against him and just like that, he becomes tech's "hacktivist hero." He now had A Platform not just in the hacker/troll world but in the broader tech community I was part of. ... But hard as I tried to find a ray of hope that the case against him was, somehow, justified and that he deserved, somehow, to be in prison for this, oh god I could not find it. I could not escape my own realization that the cast against him was wrong. So wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in a way that puts us all at risk.
The lawyer Ekeland, in recent commentary at Wired, continues to defend Auernheimer as having been wronged by an overzealous prosecution, the precedent of which could have significant ramifications for 'Net freedom. "...the crucial issue here is not weev or his ideas but the future of criminal computer law in the U.S. You may think weev is an #@$hole. But being an #@$hole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers."
Which leaves Sierra lamenting that Auernheimer still hasn't been charged and convicted for what she considers the real crime of harassment he'd committed, harming her and countless others. Where's the justice? Inciting violence and dissemination of "fighting words" are not free speech. Yet, as she admits, unless you're a celebrity, you're "...more likely to win the lottery than get any law enforcement agency to take action." So there is none. "We are on our own," she laments. "And if we don't take care of one another, nobody else will."
Thus, Sierra returned to push back — to push back against prominent journalists and members in the tech community who'd conflate prosecutorial violations of due process with the right to disseminate harassment and cruelty.
I came back because I believe this sent a terrible, devastating message about what was acceptable. ... To push back on the twist and spin. I believed the fine-grained distinctions mattered. I pushed back because I believed I was pushing back on the implicit message that women would be punished for speaking out. I pushed back because almost nobody else was, and it seemed like so many people in tech were basically OK with that.
Auernheimer, for his part, remains unapologetic. Responding to Sierra on Livejournal, he writes:
Yesterday Kathy Sierra (a.k.a. seriouspony), a mentally ill woman, continued to accuse me on her blog of leading some sort of harassment campaign against her by dropping her dox (information related to identify and location) on the Internet. ... Kathy Sierra has for years acted like a toddler, throwing tantrums and making demands whenever things didn't go her way. She rejects any presentation of polite criticism or presentation of evidence as some sort of assault on her. She was the blueprint for women like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian, who also feign victimhood for financial and social gain. Kathy Sierra is the epitome of what is wrong with my community. She had something coming to her and by the standards set by her own peers in the social justice community, there was nothing wrong with what she got.
Some people never change.
I really wish we could just drop the sexism part of this right now. Both genders get attacked by these people.
The second issue is if you want Anonymity than you will have this issue a lot.
Third is the simple fact that it is just a small number of folks causing the issue. The trouble is that it does not take a lot of folks to cause a good amount of harm.
The issue is that some people make heroes out of the idiots that do this when they do it to someone they do not agree with or like.
It really needs to be a time where all attacks are looked down on and discussion takes it place.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think you're minimizing things just a bit, aren't you? While trolls may not focus specifically on women (my opinion, is that they do), women certainly face much more intense and prolonged harassment in the form of campaigns. How many men have had death/rape threats against them AND their families AND have been forced to move AND taken a 7-year hiatus?
In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"
We see this in our current political system as well - wingnuts running the show in both parties because reasonable people won't speak up.
Time and again I've seen this on forums I've been on that have been unmoderated, such as the OkCupid forums. After awhile, only the rudest and the crudest remain there along with those willing to tolerate them.
I truly don't understand this. When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests. Us guys totally loved the few geeky girls that were around and always wished there were more.
Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?
This isn't about women, or trolling, or "culture". Andrew Auernheimer is a fucking sociopath loser who has no concept of what it means to live in a society of decent human beings. that he thinks he is "fighting the rich" or "part of the struggle" is fucking meaningless. It's just the stuff he tells himself to try to give some meaning to his pathetic, pissant little life where no one gives a fuck about him or who he is.
For some reason, it's culturally acceptable for men to learn how to defend themselves from sociopaths (who, like all predators prefer soft targets to hard targets).
This has nothing to do with self-defence. Believe me, no respectable troll will ever attack you in any manner that you can fairly fight back. I got the full package once. Personal details published, implied threats to my family (nothing over the line to prosecutable of course), calling up my company and my company's customers in an attempt to get me fired, etc. Until you've had one come after you, you really have no idea.
The same technique is used by Marc Morano to silence climate scientists:
Whether one agrees with that message or not, there’s no denying that its tone is drastically different from much of the email Hayhoe has been receiving after Limbaugh’s denunciation, Gingrich’s decision to kill her book chapter, and the repeated publication of her email address by an influential conservative blogger who ceaselessly campaigns against climate science and climate action, Mark Morano. - http://texasclimatenews.org/wp...
Morano has sicked his minions on her for the crime of publicly discussing her scientific findings. Here is an example of the vitriol she is now receiving: Nazi Bitch Whore Climatebecile [] You stupid bitch, You are a mass murderer and will be convicted at the Reality TV Grand Jury in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania. AGW has never been anything but a Rockefeller depopulationary eugenical scam. [] After the Grand Jury indicts you, I would like to see you convicted and beheaded by guillotine in the public square, to show women that if they are going to take a man’s job, they have to take the heat for mass murder, just like the men do when they get caught. If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery of lying to get ahead, when they see your baby crying next to the basket next to the guillotine.
They'll go after anyone. Yes they are drawn to weakness. But being a woman isn't a weakness unless women are inferior to men.
I don't believe women are inferior to men. So I don't see why being a women is a weakness especially on the internet where strength is irrelevant.
Why would a man on the internet be more powerful then a woman? Are not women supposed to be superior at social dynamics? Social intelligence? Then if anything women should have an advantage.
So I don't see why men or white men are more able to fend off attacks.
I have fought a LOT of trolls. I am a battle hardened forum warrior. I have been called everything under the sun. I have been doxxed. I have had my sexuality questioned. I have had... anything else you and imagine really. But whatever I felt when that was happened, I showed no weakness. No reaction.
I laughed at them. I showed them contempt. I gave them nothing.
And I won every single fucking time.
On the internet... so... whatever that is worth. But if these women did what I did... they'd win too.
They're big girls. I don't see why this is so hard. Why is it that I can read harassment posts directed at me and respond with cold ridicule and these women can't?
Is it sexist for me to suggest that an equal sex should be able to deal with this? Because men deal with this crap all the time.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Listen the the podcast on 5x5 called "overtired". In episode 15, the incredible Christina Warren describes the shit that she gets every day, and how she deals with it. I have some hope that a younger generation of women like Ms Warren will be able to react to attacking idiots without disappearing from the 'net.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It doesn't suggest that at all. It does suggest that these kinds of attacks on women are worse, and well, that's pretty obviously true. Can you imagine a male blogger on his private blog receiving that kind of over-the-top campaign if he considered moderating comments?
This is not a problem exclusive to women. [...] but if you are subject to it as a man you'll get much less support to cope with it.
That's true, and an independent yet important problem as well. However, I think we can agree that when men get less support (or even suffer stigma from not being "manly enough" to cope with it, which is pure BS), women face an echo chamber of aggressive misogynistic a-holes, ready to take on a crusade against them on a scale that most men never face. Just read the first comments here. In short, the harassment of women is more intense (from more harassers) and is pandemic.
I thank God that my two boys live in a house where we've NEVER told them to toughen up or compared weakness to being a girl.
You realize that's a token indicator of a lot of what's wrong here? That men are seemingly most insulted by being called feminine slurs, and women by calling them feminine slurs. So we have people that intentionally or not reinforce the idea that being female is a problem.
That little tidbit, plus another one that's been passing around social media are so telling to me: (summarized) "When you send a girl out of class / home from school for 'inappropriate' dress you're telling her a dress code or preventing male distraction is more important than her education, and that the boys' distraction-free education is more important than theirs."
My boys are in high school now, but I also have a young daughter. I'm trying to ensure she lives in a world where equality (gender, sexual, marriage, etc.) is a goal if not reality. I want all of my family to live in that world.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Perhaps you should live the life of a woman for a while and see how it feels. Women usually try and talk out the problem in order to educate and eradicate the problem. Trolls who hide and make threats from under cover are basically shitty little cowards. Women and men should have recourse to the law for protection from trolls who intimidate by making death, rape threats etc and these trolls should be exposed and jailed in the same way if they had made the threats face to face. Just because its digital doesn;t make it any less a threat.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I believe GP was saying that the particular study cited had a questionable definition of "rape", not that the victims were lying. The survey didn't ask if they were raped. The survey asked questions about if this happened or that happened, then the researchers call it rape, even if the "victim" was perfectly happy with what happened.
One question was if they engaged in sex while drunk or high to the point that they couldn't really give informed consent, or if their partner initiated sex while they were asleep. The researchers then called that rape, which is many cases it probably was. In other cases not - I recently spoke with a woman who didn't remember having sex with her husband one night when they were drunk. It just so happened that he videotaped about two minutes of it, and after he starts, then backs off she says "what are you doing, I thought we were going to have sex?" Upon viewing the tape, she wasn't bothered about it. Since she didn't remember it and was too drunk to really give consent, this study would call that rape. The woman doesn't think it's rape, but the researchers say it is.
I've actually talked to my wife about some of these situations ahead of time. I've told her I'd very much enjoy being awoken by her in a special way, and she said it's fine if I massaging her and such while she's asleep, waking her with sexual contact. The RESEARCHERS call that rape, we call it a great way to wake up.
The researchers also called it sexual violence if the partner did any of these things (quoting from the survey):
doing things like telling you lies, MAKING PROMISES ABOUT THE FUTURE WHICH THEY KNEW WERE UNTRUE, threatening to end your relationship,
or threatening to spread rumors about you?
wearing you down by repeatedly asking for
sex, or SHOWING THEY WERE UNHAPPY?
So letting my wife know I'm disappointed that our last two date nights were cancelled and I'd like to have a romantic evening is sexual violence, as defined by these researchers.
Sexual violence is an important issue. These researchers trivialize it and create more problems when they define "showing they were unhappy" as sexual violence.
cast it all the way back to the start of the industry
Here you go. Most computers were women.
In 1943, the United States Army authorized a secret project at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering to develop an electronic computer to compute artillery firing tables for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. The project, which came to be known as ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was completed in 1946.
Previous to the development of the ENIAC, the U.S. Army had employed women trained in mathematics to calculate artillery trajectories, at first using mechanical desk calculators and later the differential analyzer developed by Vannevar Bush, at the Moore School. In 1945, one of these "computers", Kathleen McNulty (1921–2006), was selected to be one of the original programmers of the ENIAC, together with Frances Spence (1922– ), Betty Holberton (1917–2001), Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman (1924–1986), and Betty Jean Jennings (1924–2011). McNulty, Holberton, and Jennings would later work on the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer developed by the Remington Rand Corporation in the early 1950s.
Men originally saw computing as a "woman's job."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you put your name to something unpopular in public, people may hate you for it. That's never been any different. That's why we have had anonymous pamphleteering and pseudonyms for as long as we have had free speech, and we protect them. This is not a women's issue or a feminist issue. And it's not a "civil rights" issue either. People like Sierra and Citron are not fighting for civil rights, they are a privileged and entitled elite who think that if they speak, the masses should listen in awed silence, no matter how offensive their speech may be. They want the same status that Catholic priests used to have: unquestioned respect and authority.
Fortunately, it's not going to happen. Use your head before you speak in public. And if your entire life is based on publicity and notoriety, realize that that the benefits you received from that can quickly turn into a liability when you fall from favor.
It is an appeals court for the rest of the constitution, but I hope we can agree that there is hopefully a lot of other options being tried first before reaching for it. I always considered the second the last resort item. Be willing to use it if need be, but only after every other possible option has been tried and failed. I'm a big fan of the Four Boxes of Liberty, but I consider two things important about them:
1. Be prepared to use them all if you start using them.
2. Use them in EXACTLY this order and do NOT skip a single one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sony? Really? The Justice Department bitchslapped Sony so hard the shareholders cried (they missed their quarter, by a lot, due to the fines and the CEO resigned) over the rootkit fiasco. There are real examples of corporate corruption of the justice system, but that's not one of them.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Jack Thompson got the same threats and many men have been doxxed. Moving and running away for 7 years are purely things SHE CHOSE to do, not something she was forced to do. Men aren't given the luxury of doing things like that and having it considered reasonable behavior.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."