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.

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