Bonum Certa Men Certa

Bad faith: real origins of harassment and evidence

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2024

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

They submit many boilerplate documents containing copies of the domain and trademark registrations. On top of that, they only submit three other documents.

One of those is the copy of a judgment from a previous Debian dispute. The judgment expresses concern about some specific images on another web site. The complaint does not provide any examples of those images or any similar content on any of my own Debian web sites. Therefore, this judgment can't be extrapolated to content on my own web sites.

They provide a copy of biographical information about me from my company web site. This is not published on one of the domains in dispute so it is not relevant. By providing this, they are insulting me. Looking at the very first archived copy of an email from the debian-project mailing list in 1994, we find that Debian co-authors are using the term Debian Developer four years before there was a trademark. That is four years before the Debian Project constitution. The term Debian Developer is completely valid for somebody who has done significant creative work over many decades. In plain English, the term Debian Developer can mean three things: somebody who possesses the skill of creating Debian software, somebody who has an authorship interest in the Debian software and thirdly, but lastly, somebody who is a member of the clique. Copyright law does not require somebody to be a member of the clique. I never joined the Debian Project Unincorporated Association, I have always used the term Debian Developer first and foremost to describe myself as an author with moral rights in the creative work. Given that they have taken this text from a web site that is not even part of the dispute, I feel the legal panel would be best to avoid getting involved in this aspect of the dispute.

The third document they provide is a defamation they created themselves. They are clearly hoping to have WIPO republish insults and defamation to cause some sort of harm to my ability to work and feed myself. They allege that there was some issue of harassment but do not provide any details. They claim it was in the year 2018, a period when I lost two family members. Their insistence on twisting a knife in my back at such a time only proves bad faith on their part.

In various ways, we can see that the document they submitted is a fraud that has the possibility of deceiving the WIPO legal panel.

For starters, the harassment began in 2017. Even the year specified in their evidence is wrong. Therefore, the evidence they are submitting is a deliberate deception that tries to invert the story.

Here is the internal report about the harassment. The date is 12 October 2017 so the misfits are clearly lying to the WIPO legal panel. I have redacted the section that identifies underage victims.

The next internal email from Larissa Shapiro at Mozilla admits that kids are at risk.

Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits this is a serious matter and asks me to speak to Marta, Mozilla's HR investigator.

There you have it. The most senior student representative to have had contact with a member of the choir in the era of Cardinal Pell has subsequently arrived in Albania and correctly and discretely raised the alarm about pimps and pedophiles using funds from Mozilla, IBM Red Hat and other tech companies to bait their child victims and young women.

It is creepy how the complainants deception about the dates and details mirrors the case of the Swiss JuristGate scandal. The Swiss financial regulator, FINMA, has published a summary of their decision to shut the rogue firm. In the summary of the decision, not only does FINMA redact the names of those responsible for ripping off the customers, FINMA even redacts the dates. One of the reasons FINMA is redacting the dates is to hide how long the regulator and the bar association really knew about the scandal. The hidden dates are examined in more detail in my first blog post about Juristgate. Here is a screenshot from the FINMA document showing where the year is obfuscated / redacted:

FINMA, Parreaux Thiébaud & Partners, Justicia SA, Justiva SA, Mathiee Parreaux

The FSFE Fellowship elected me as a community representative in April 2017. Shortly after that, women in Albania confided in me about the incidents of harassment. I traveled there again to help organize a MiniDebConf and Fedora Women's day and in the process, I became a witness to acts of harassment and a serious possibility of underage abuse.

All of this clearly began in 2017 but the defamation created by Debian seeks to obfuscate the year and the source of the harassment. They completely fail to thank me for the effort I made supporting these women. This was an effort above and beyond what had been anticipated when I volunteered to speak at the conference in Albania.

At the time, I had confided in the women that I was watching these matters very carefully because one of my cousins, who is much younger than me, had been in the St Patrick's cathedral choir during the time Cardinal George Pell was Archbishop of Melbourne. The Pell case was one of the most high profile allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church. The Royal Commission notes in their report that of 15,000 victims who contacted them, the Catholic Church was implicated in far more cases than all the other religions combined.

In the meantime, Carla had also written about her eating disorder on her web site. Research estimates that at least thirty percent of women with these conditions have been victims of harassment or abuse in childhood.

Various people appeared to resent the fact that women had given evidence about an (IBM Red Hat) Fedora Ambassador and Mozilla Tech Speaker to an independent, elected community representative who was not under any obligation of confidentially to the companies funding the Albanian groups. In other words, these companies would have prefered to see the women reporting scandals through internal company channels.

Shortly after I received this information from women, the FSFE revised their constitution to remove their annual elections and ensure there would never be any other community representative again. The complete removal of the election and the representative position proves that this wasn't about any failing on my own part, this was about the companies behind FSFE wanting to ensure that complaints about their people wouldn't reach any independent outsider who might be elected next.

At the end of the process, Mozilla produced a report about the harassment. I have never been given a copy of the report and the complainant has not submitted the report either. I don't feel the complaint should be taken seriously at all unless all parties, including the legal panel, are granted access to all these original, contemporaneous documents about the origins of the harassment and my support for the victims.

Evidence: Mozilla confirms a report was produced about the harassment and abuse.

Meanwhile, at the very same time as the Cardinal Pell trial was progressing in Australia, family and friends were shocked to see mysterious references to abuse circulated on social media. I don't even have any social media accounts myself so I only started hearing about these character assassination plots from witnesses who saw the smears. Cardinal Pell was convicted in December 2018 and a few weeks later, in January 2019, Joerg Jaspert of the Debian Account Managers team put mysterious references to abuse in one of our Debian source code repositories.

One of the findings from the Royal Commission states that abuse survivors who came forward took an average of 23.9 years to talk about what happened to them. Having attended a Catholic school in the same neighborhood and having multiple connections with fellow alumni and the diocese, it would not be a surprise for me if any one of the people I know might reveal themselves to be connected with the scandal at some point in the future.

Moreover, two of my cousins passed away far too young.

It is so shocking for me to see how these dirty men are playing these games with the subject of abuse.

At the time that Joerg Jaspert started making these privacy violations, he was on the school council at Dalbergschule in Fulda, Germany. Local magazines published a photo of him in a Debian t-shirt with other parents Claudia Beck and Ina Riechert.

Claudia Beck, Jörg Jaspert, Ina Riechert

How can the other parents and staff trust this dirty man with any sensitive topics when he runs around spreading gossip about abuse in the debian-private world?

Given that background, I find it abhorrent that these silly people claim to be victims of abuse when what really happened is they got caught doing the wrong thing. By claiming to be victims of harassment and abuse, by hijacking and distorting the language of sexual misconduct they are asking us to exhibit the same sympathy for long-distance peeping toms at Google as we would for those 15,000 child victims.

Here is another example of Debianists pretending to be part of the sexual crimes detective unit and circulating gossip as if it was truth. The email is written by Russell Coker, a Debian Developer in Australia, half way around the world from where the rumors started in Berlin. How could he write such forceful words about Dr Appelbaum when it is something he had no way to see? This shows how Debianists use their titles and their trademark to make stuff up and then give weight to defamation. This type of rogue behavior makes it even harder for the community to know when real victims take the difficult step of coming forward with real reports of abuse.

Evidence: Russell Coker fabricating rape stories.

Bad faith: deliberately conflating different types of harassment and abuse

The complainant frequently raises concerns about "harassment" and "abuse" whenever somebody asks a question they don't want to reply to.

Yet it doesn't stop there.

Not only do they claim to be victims of "harassment" and "abuse", they deliberately seek to conflate different meanings of these words. It works a bit like the game of Chinese Whispers.

The classic example was the lynching of Dr Jacob Appelbaum. One person posted messages about "harassment". Somebody else who wasn't actually there extrapolated that into "sexual harassment". Then another person who was all the other way over the other side of the world in Australia forcefully writes that it was a "rape".

Evidence: Chinese Whispers and liars rehearsing stories about Dr Appelbaum.

The word "abuse" is used in much the same way. Somebody asks a question about the bank account. The question is disparaged as an unqualified example of "abuse". Later, somebody adds a prefix, people mention "sexual abuse". But there is nothing sexual about asking why somebody's girlfriend got paid to do work that other volunteers do for free. We saw them using this word game in relation to Prof Eben Moglen recently.

Evidence: Matthew Garrett (Debian) spreading abuse rumors against Prof Moglen

Not only are they trying to defame the person asking a serious question but we also have to remember that when people try to portray themselves as victims of "abuse", they are siphoning off a little bit of credibility from the real victims, like those incredibly young boys and girls who made complaints about institutional abuse. The pretend victims and their antics dilute the credibility of the real victims.

Most healthy people are turned off by discussions like this. Yet there is a subculture around Debian, a subgroup of volunteers who appear to take some voyeuristic interest in making these word games with references to abuse, the type of thing we see in the blog post by Matthew Garrett.

Just how did Garrett become an expert on abuse?

These comments about the phenomena may appear quite strong and defamatory at first glance but the evidence is already public. Have a look at the controversy about the package with the name "weboob". According to reports, the source code is laced with crude references to women. The package was discussed on debian-private. Quite a few Debian men, like Axel Beckert, a system administrator at the ETH Zurich university, defended the package during his working hours.

Subject: Re: weboob package
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:29:58 +0200
From: Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>
Organization: The Debian Project
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

Hi,
Jonathan Dowland wrote: > Yesterday I stumbled across the "weboob" package for the first time, > which includes a slew of binaries with names similar to the following: [...]
So what? I don't see any problem with that. (And I don't see why there's a thread on debian-private about it.)
Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Develoober, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE

Bad faith: using WIPO and an Albanian gangmaster to defame me

I previously documented how I was a witness to acts of harassment and the risks to underage participants by two Albanian men. I attached the emails showing how this was raised through internal channels at Mozilla.

When Chris Lamb decided to attack me on our wedding anniversary, he actually used Elio Qoshi, the Albanian bringing a sixteen year old girlfriend to tech conferences, to distribute the messages about the vendetta.

At the time, I was with one of the victims. Women who had worked with me personally had been surprised to see Lamb colluding with these Albanian gangmasters. I took a photo of the message that the Albanian forwarded from Lamb to the phones of female victims:

Chris Lamb, Debian, doxing

It is an extraordinary example of corruption. When I saw Chris Lamb colluding with Elio Qoshi to denounce me at such a painful time for my family, I couldn't help thinking of men like Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris collaborating in their crimes.

When I challenged Lamb about these messages in December 2018, he publicly denied sending them, a lie to the whole community.

Chris Lamb: You are well-aware that I have been nothing but scrupulous and gentlemanly with regards to your personal privacy and thus ...

The dishonesty of these misfits is as extraordinary as the intrusion into the family lives of volunteers.

As Debian is an operating system, it is relied upon as the foundation for so many other things that people do with their computers both in industry and in private. In other words, people put a lot of trust in the operating system but we can't trust the people making it. Here we have caught the then leader of Debian using a common garden variety Albanian pimp to spread rumors about a long standing volunteer and also publicly lying about the matter.

Now these dirty little men aspire to exploiting a WIPO panel in the same way they used this Albanian gangmaster to denounce my family and I on the anniversary of our wedding. As mentioned earlier, the deadline set by WIPO was Carla's birthday.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

YouTube is a Spamfarm, Slopfarm, and Clickfarm (a Lot of Numbers There Are Fake)
Those who don't fake look unpopular and unimportant
Misinformation is Not Intelligence
It's low-grade plagiarism and it fails to show any signs of intelligence
'Tech' Gimmicks Are for Advertising, Not for Usability
In the case of Microsoft, they latched onto slop
 
They Try to Lecture Us on Ethics
They even removed "master" from Microsoft GitHub
The Future of the Web is One Rendering Engine or 'Flavours' of Chrome
The future of the Web does not look bright at all
Best Sites Are Not Optimised for Any Browser, They Work Equally Well With All of Them
Red Hat (IBM) is making rubbish sites
We Don't Do JavaScript and Pages Are Small
Thankfully Gemini Protocol has nothing like JavaScript
'Tech' is Not Technology
Some people use terms like 'Old Tech'
IBM's Debt Rose by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in the Past 6 Months Alone
The "hey hi" circus is coming to an end
Yes, Master
Gaslighting by actual racists
Microsoft Bribes and Buys Politicians to Tell Europe What to Do About Free Software (Which It's Attacking)
Microsoft: we speak for the thing that we are attacking! Follow the money...
Making Backups Quickly and Reliably
Backups are imperative, more so in an age of uncertainty, unpredictable weather, and worsening standards (quality of products going down while prices go up)
Techrights Investigation: Estimating the Point in Time LinuxIac Turned Into LLM Slop (Part of the Time)
Bobby Borisov got lazy
10th Month, Ten Weeks From Now, at Ten AM
In Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 24, 2025
A Nadella Memo Distracts From Microsoft's Cheapening Of the Workforce
Right now the "MSM" (mainstream media) is flooded/overwhelmed by garbage pieces that relay lies for Nadella
Vanishing Faces of GNU/Linux
Free software projects do not depend on any one person or company to still exist
Microsoft Says It Lost 400 Million Windows Users, Now It's Waiting for GNU/Linux to Stop Booting on 'Old' PCs
When it comes to Windows, Microsoft is fully aware of the issue and statements it made earlier this summer suggest it lost 400 million Windows users
Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, linuxsecurity.com, LinuxIac, and More
Also: The Register's Microsoft agenda (new editor)
Gemini Links 25/07/2025: Gemtext Aware Titan Editor and Gemini Protocol Comeback
Links for the day
Links 24/07/2025: Convicted Felon Quits UNESCO, "Vibe Coding Goes Wrong", and Signalgate Gets Worse
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/07/2025: Forgejo Woes and Smolnet Directory Week
Links for the day
Links 24/07/2025: Storage Tapes Still Kicking, Windows TCO 'on Steroids' (Microsoft-Induced Catastrophes)
Links for the day
Bobby Borisov (LinuxIac) Has Apparently Begun Experimenting With LLM Slop, So We Cannot Trust LinuxIac Anymore
So did LinuxIac become a slopfarm? Maybe not yet, but it's getting there
Informa TechTarget's ITProToday is Becoming a Slopfarm Generated by Microsoft Chatbots
Busted.
BetaNews Sacked Brian Fagioli and Deleted His Comments, But He Still Tries to Use the "BetaNews" Brand for Self-Affirmation
Fagioli takes the work of other people
[Meme] Hard to Be a Better Person?
Sooner or later they'll realise that for each pound I spend they need to spend about 1,000 times more
The LLM Con Artists Are Highly Destructive
Who will ever be held accountable for this scam?
Too Bribed by Microsoft to Move to Free Software?
Microsoft lies and Microsoft bribery (in politics)
New US Editor for The Register is a Microsoft Booster
"Avram Piltch has served as US editor for The Register since July 2025."
Microsoft Hiring European Politicians is Another Form of Bribery; There Should be a European Investigation
When Microsoft bribed people in Europe for OOXML (there's no denying this!) a European government delegate said that Microsoft operated like a cult
Reda Demanded That FSF Removes Its Founder, Now Reda Works Directly for Microsoft
A sellout and a traitor, first working for GAFAM, now Microsoft
PCLinuxOS is Raising Money to Support Development After Fire Incident at the Host
PCLinuxOS has not had announcements lately
Speed of the Site Should be Better Now
The "bot attacks" impact the speed of the sister site too
Getting More From AnalogNowhere
Recently we used many images from AnalogNowhere
Microsoft, Microsofters and 'Secure' Boot Shills Already Storming the LWN Report About Expiring Certificate, Shooting the Messenger
LWN has clearly stuck a nerve
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 23, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Disable "Secure" Boot Today (the Only Better Time to Do So Was Yesterday)
Don't trust anything Red Hat tells you about security
Links 23/07/2025: Windows Killed Company After 150+ Years, US Government Mimics Russia's Attacks on the Media
Links for the day
Freedom Generally Wins at the End, History Shows (But It's Constantly Attacked, Too)
At the moment people realise "Linux" (e.g. Android) isn't enough to guarantee any freedoms
Over 3 Months Later Brett Wilson LLP Still Unable to Recruit a Media Lawyer?
"Immediate start", but not found... still unfilled
“Inhumane” and “Disgusting” Mass Layoff Execution, According to Microsoft Staff
The workers are looking for other places to work
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Slogan for Its 40th Anniversary
The freedoms are what's most important
Microsoft is Trying to "Pull a Nokia" on GNU/Linux as Desktop/Laptop Platform
We all remember that rather well, don't we?
LLM Slopfarms gbhackers.com, "Cyber Press" and CyberSecurityNews Are Drowning Google News (and Shame on Google for Feeding and Facilitating Them)
All are run by the same people
Links 23/07/2025: Droplets GUI Patent Monopoly Challenge, Nokia Leverages Illegal Patent Court Against Rivals
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Community in Geminispace and Challenges With Old Computers
Links for the day
Links 23/07/2025: Slop Patents Tackled, Slop Copyright Misuses Tackled by Politicians
Links for the day
Our Three Lawsuits Against Microsofters Are About to Become a Lot More Relevant to GNU/Linux
The Master will easily understand why Garrett has been attacking me since 2012
Links 23/07/2025: Retreating From Transparency on Jeffrey Epstein, We No Longer Have Press Freedom
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/07/2025: Piano and Food
Links for the day
New and Old
On Ageism in Tech
Slop Is Not Intelligence and It Does Not Enhance Productivity
Like voice dictation, which cannot tell the difference between "sheet" and "shit"
EPO Crimes Are Spreading to the British Court System
Society is now paying the price for failing to tackle crimes at the EPO
It's Time to Dump SharePoint and Here's What to Use Instead
Nextcloud, ownCloud, Bookstack, MediaWiki, and MediaGoblin
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 22, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Brett Wilson LLP Has Gone Silent
Sometimes silence says more than nothing at all
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Planet Ubuntu, and LinuxTechLab
some slopfarms show no remorse and they don't value their reputation at all
Links 23/07/2025: Book Bans, Storms, and Kangaroo Court for Patents Commits More Unlawful Acts of Overreach
Links for the day