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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.
Don't try to play the sex card, that guy is an asshole. Do you think the reactions 'round here would be different if it had been a woman harassing a guy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
More bullshit from the "people regularly threatening women in public is no big deal" crowd.
Nobody said women are "always victims" but you shits have absolutely nothing to attack unless you can craft fake arguments to dismantle. You're trapped in a room with straw walls closing in, and only you can dismantle, their evil insidious not wanting to tolerate misogynistic assholes in public spaces.
People are bigots to other groups too, and feminists, by and large are quite reasonable in their acknowledgement of that.
Who's not being oppressed? People who are being told that maybe they can't threaten the lives of women freely. Those people are meeting the boundaries known as "the law" and "common decency" and feeling just so oppressed by it.
The second amendment is not supposed to be the appeals court for the first...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes and no.
Sociopaths are a problem, but we're also facing people who think there shouldn't be consequences for how they attack others. That's not a symptom of anti-social personality disorders(they tend to know that what they do is condemned and lack the self control to stop themselves). That's strictly a matter of people who specifically think what they're doing is acceptable. Which suggests, as lots of people have said with various evidential justifications, that culture is part of the problem.
Anti-feminists, on the other hand, are only a problem in that they will cry "false flag" at literally every situation that implicates a culture hostile to prominent women, turning every discussion about solutions into long drawn-out dismantlings of their conspiracy theories.
It's about anonymous online sexual harassment, particularly when it's done by packs playing the part of street gangs.
Trolling is like ranting about systemd in response to every single /. article.
No, it's about online criminal harassment.
We have to face it, these things will get a lot more traction if we just treat the perps as what they are - criminals that need prosecuted, rather than people harassing someone soley because they are female. Once the dude started with her SS, fake CV, and death threats, welcome to skeeveland.
As for trolling - eliminating that will be like eliminating anyone who disagrees with you. Because that's how some people define trolling.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
"What is the threat with squiggles on a piece of paper?"
"What is the threat of vibrations in the air?"
"What is the threat of someone pointing a metal tube in your direction?"
I hate to be rude, but that line of logic sounds quite sociopathic, and a good line of reasoning for offending someone and justifying the actions.
Precisely. Women tend to call for help or say comments hurt their feelings or otherwise give the EXACT reaction the trolls want.
They do the same thing to most men and... no reaction.
This is what is causing the focus on women. Not that the trolls are against women though I'm sure some are... but that the women often do not know how to deal with bullies.
Men are taught how to deal with bullies from a very young age. You toughen up or you're a weakling. The boys will literally call you "a girl" if you complain.
To not be "a girl" boys must hide their feelings and laugh off abuse. And then at some later date... taking some revenge is generally considered par for the course.
Women need to understand that they can't rely on men or society to come to their aid on the internet. They're going to have to take care of themselves and toughen up a bit. Crying foul just causes a troll feeding frenzy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Kathy Sierra did no such thing. Making shit up just makes you exactly the like the OP I was chastizing for needing a straw-argument to dismantle, all the while feeling SOOOO oppressed.
As for the 1 in 5 women thing... well
The CDC just recently verified that number that MRA types have been insisting is biased. Every study comes up with markedly similar results about that.
Kathy Sierra has written several books that were very helpful when taking java exams. She has the ability to clearly explain things that not many people have mastered. She also created the javaranch.com site which is a great place to look when you have questions about java. I appreciate her contributions to the community and wish there were more people like her.
Let me stop and mention here that last week weev caused a storm when he wrote a racist screed for a white supremacist website. As usual I found out about it when my twitter timeline lit up with exhortations to do something about my client, the unpopular defendant. To me his bigoted viewpoint is just noise; 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 asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.