Harassment / Abuse evidence: Giannis Konstantinidis & Debian's falsified legal documents
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Over the last week, I received more questions from people about how and why rogue elements of Debian are spending vast sums of money to falsify legal documents.
One simple question that needs to be asked every time we see a Debian Developer at an event: if the forged "judgment" is real, why is there no evidence attached to it?.
In fact, there never was any evidence to support a judgment but there is plenty of evidence to contradict it.
Fact 0: Greeks are street-smart and they know how to spot a scam a mile away
Consider the 2003 theft of $150 million from the assets of Australia's Commonwealth superannuation (pension) scheme deposited with JP Morgan Chase Bank in Sydney.
News reports have described it as a real-life Ocean's 11 in Sydney.
According to another report, the stolen money was divided up and routed to banks in three different countries, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Greece.
The employees at the banks in Switzerland and Hong Kong did not notice anything suspicious. In Greece, they smelled a scam and they were right.
Fact 1: in 2014, Elio Qoshi registers his business name URA
The business name was registered before the creation of the non-profit Open Labs group and the hackerspace.
The name in the business register is just "URA" but they appear to be calling themselves "Ura Design" and "Open Source Design".
Fact check: access the Albanian official business registry, click Search, Search in Trade Register, Search for Subject and in the box "Shareholder", put the name "Elio Qoshi".
Download the historical report. It includes the name URA, as in "Ura Design". Here is a copy of the report from August 2024.
Therefore, URA is not a non-profit run by women. It is a for-profit business with a single male shareholder, Elio Qoshi of Albania.
The Fellowship file on Elio Qoshi includes evidence he brought an underage girlfriend to tech conferences.
I refused to work with this guy.
Fact 2: Giannis Konstantinidis mentored the Albanians, Elio Qoshi and others, for the Fedora Project
We can fact check by looking at the change to the Fedora wiki on 31 May 2016 when Konstantinidis added the names of his mentees, Elio Qoshi and Jona Azizaj. Both of these people became Fedora Ambassadors.
Even before that, on 23 March 2016, Charles Profitt published a Fedora Magazine article under the title " Giannis Konstantinidis: How do you Fedora?" where Konstantinidis made the following comments:
“One of the communities I enjoy supporting (in every way possible) is the Albanian community. It might be a recent one, but it is very active, well-connected and organized,” says Konstantinidis. For the past several months he has been leading the bi-weekly EMEA Ambassadors meetings on IRC. Konstantinidis was elected in the December 2015 elections to the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo). He is currently acting as the FAmSCo chair.
Fact 3: Giannis Konstantinidis becomes employee / contractor under Ura Design
Konstantinidis was a member of the Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee (FAmSCo) but at the same time he was commercially / economically dependent upon one of the Fedora Ambassadors he was supposed to be supervising.
Fact check: Access the image of Konstantinidis in the Wayback Machine backup of the URA web site from 2017. The URL suggests it was uploaded in August 2017 (2017/08).
Fact check: Access the snapshot of the URA design home page in the Wayback Machine backup from 2017. There is a heading, "Our team" and a by-line, "The usual suspects". Four team members are pictured, Elio Qoshi (founder), Redon Skikuli (Business Development), Giannis Konstantinidis (Technical Coordinator) and Anxhelo Lushka (Designer).
Fact 4: Anisa Kuci was told not to submit funding requests directly to open source organizations like Debian
I met some of the Albanian women on a visit to the region in July 2017 and they told me that the men were telling them when they can and can't submit funding requests.
Fact check: I was in Montenegro for the Digital Born Media Carnival, the event was from 14-18 July 2017. After Kotor, I went to Kosovo and then I visited Tirana, Albania again. Anisa Kuci was also present in both Kotor and Tirana. This is when I first learnt significant details about the harassment in the Open Labs Hackerspace, enabled by funding from Debian and all the other free software organizations like Fedora, Wikimedia, Mozilla, etc.
Fact 5: I told the Albanian women how to bypass the men and submit funding requests directly to Debian
This is what made the Albanian men go nuts. They had made a huge effort to obfuscate the funding process, putting themselves up on a pedestal and acting as gatekeepers.
I showed the women how they could bypass the gatekeepers and make a tour of super-expensive Switzerland on a really low budget.
If women can conquer Switzerland on this budget, they can go anywhere and they don't need permission from the Fedora Ambassador Elio Qoshi any more.
Subject: Zurich travel budget Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 20:30:39 +0100 From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> To: Kristi Progri <kristi@kristiprogri.com> CC: Anisa Kuci <anisakuci9@gmail.com>
Hi Kristi,
I started looking at potential prices and itineraries. I can't promise that Debian will approve this, the DPL makes the final decision but if we put together a really strong case and keep the cost down then it is possible you will get a positive response.
Are these the dates you want to travel and would you want to take the flight at 04:25 in the morning or a later flight?
https://www.kayak.co.uk/flights/TIA,nearby-ZRH/2017-09-20/2017-09-25
It looks like about EUR 180 per person.
Do you want to do things in Zurich or do you also want to travel to places outside Zurich? If you will go outside Zurich then you will need the Interrail ticket, that is what Anisa used to visit Konstanz:
It is about EUR 90 per person for 3 days:
https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/one-country-pass/switzerland
It is always better to keep the funding request as low as possible - if you want to ask for money for the Interrail ticket, we need to show that you are going to meet people in another city like Bern, Lausanne, Konstanz, Geneva, Basel, etc.
If you are only going to stay in Zurich then there are other tickets we can ask for, this is about EUR 42 per person for 3 days:
http://www.zvv.ch/zvv/en/travelcards-and-tickets/tickets/other-tickets/zuerichcard.html
For example, if you use the Zurich ticket for 20, 21 and 22 September and the Interrail for 23, 24 and 25 September, then this would be the budget:
Flights: EUR 180
ZurichCARD: EUR 44
Interrail: EUR 90
Total: EUR 314 per person = EUR 628
You could also walk and cycle in Zurich, it is a small city like Tirana, it is not big like Berlin and London.
Here are the activities we have discussed so far:
- Open Agriculture meeting (21 September, 18:30)
- meeting students from TheAlternative.ch at ETH (Wednesday or Friday)
- visiting Zurich hackerspace
- visiting Revamp-IT
Is there anybody else you would meet in Zurich? We need to put a list of these things in the request.
Does Anisa want to propose giving a talk for the Seed City community? If so, we should send them an email today to ask if they would like to have a meeting during those days.
Regards,
Daniel
Fact 6: Silva Arapi sent funding request pretended to be asking on behalf of the hackerspace
Silva Arapi was really an employee of Elio Qoshi's private company URA but when she asks for funds, she uses the name of the hackerspace.
The funding request for FOSSCamp was sent on 4 August 2017.
It is important to note that this email was sent after Anisa Kuci and Kristi Progri, the Albanian whistleblowers, had already told me there was corruption in their local hackerspace.
Therefore, when I saw the email below, it confirmed the pattern of behavior that had already been described to me.
Have a close look at the funding request below. Normally the people who make the funding request have to give some evidence of their own abilities and previous work. Here, they puff up the significance of the funding request with the names of other people like me who are not attending their event at all.
Subject: Debian at FOSScamp - funding request Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2017 01:48:06 +0200 From: Silva Arapi <silva.arapi@gmail.com> To: leader@debian.org CC: auditor@debian.org, treasurer@debian.ch, daniel@pocock.pro, Redon Skikuli <redon@skikuli.com>, giannis@konstantinidis.cc
Hello,
Hope you are doing well.
I'm writing to submit a funding request (costs below) to organize some consecutive Debian focused workshops and localization events during FOSScamp <https://fosscamp.cc> which will be held on Syros island, Greece from 30 of August to 6 September 2017. You can also find a detailed information on the event here: https://wiki.openlabs.cc/faqja/FOSScamp_Syros_2017/en
We at Open Labs Hackerspace <https://openlabs.cc have started to actively get more involved with the Debian project as we want it to be one of the main Linux distributions we promote at our hackerspace. We had a considerable presence by the Debian community at the annual conference we organize, Open Source Conference Albania https://oscal.openlabs.cc, with a very good infobooth and some very interesting talks and workshops. More people who attended those talks have been showing so much interest into Debian.
We also had Daniel Pocock https://danielpocock.com/, a very active Debian contributor who joined us at the hackerspace during Debian Meetup nr 1 https://wiki.debian.org/LocalGroups/OpenLabs and showed us many ways in which we can get involved with the Debian project. Some of our members have already started working with Debian packages in order to also apply for the Outreachy program that Daniel introduced during the meetup.
To keep up the momentum from those events and satisfy interest in Debian, Redon Skikuli https://redon.skikuli.com/, Giannis Konstantinidis http://konstantinidis.cc and me http://silva.arapi.tech thought of joining FOSScamp host some events about Debian:
* "Debian GNU/Linux System Administration 101" hosted by Giannis Konstantinidis * "Introduction to the GNU/Linux Command Line and BASH Scripting" hosted by Giannis Konstantinidis * Debian localization (Day 1, 2 and 3) hosted by Redon Skikuli and Silva Arapi
So during 5 days of the camp Debian will be on the spotlight with the ultimate goal of raising collaboration between communities in the region. More specifically, Giannis will show us some technical tips about Debian for those who want to work with more technical stuff. Currently there are no Debian translations into Albanian and there is no communication between the Albanian Debian community and the Greek one. I already filled a bug in order to get a mailing list for the Albanian translation and also other activities as it would help us also coordinate in the future, and these events can be a great way to get more people involved and to make some progress with the translations.
Also developers from Kosovo who also had Daniel visit their hackerspace have been invited to join the event so there might be much more people interested in Debian.
In order to be part of the event we would need some travel and accommodation support. We will definitely try to reduce some of the costs by sharing the accommodation, traveling by bus (not by plane) and cooking in the shared apartments, but we would still need your support in order to be part of the event.
Please find below a breakdown of the costs in order to make it easier for you to evaluate and decide. Kindly keep in mind that the costs are calculated in the minimum possible estimation to keep the cost for Debian as low as possible:
* Costs for Silva Arapi *
* Travel (trip with plane from Berlin to Athens): € 54
* Travel (round trip with ferry from Pireaus to Syros and Syros to Pireaus): € 63
* Travel (trip with bus from Athens to Tirana): € 50
* Accommodation: € 15 per night x 7 nights = € 105
* Food: € 20 per day x 7 day = € 140
* Participation fee: €40 (the official price is €60, but this comes with a €20 from the organizers)
* Costs for Redon Skikuli*
* Travel (trip with plane from Berlin to Athens): € 54
* Travel (round trip with ferry from Pireaus to Syros and Syros to Pireaus): € 63
* Travel (trip with bus from Athens to Tirana): € 50
* Accommodation: € 15 per night x 7 nights = € 105
* Food: € 20 per day x 7 day = € 140
* Participation fee: €40 (the official price is €60, but this comes with a €20 from the organizers)
* Costs for Giannis Konstantinidis*
* Travel (boat trip from Pireaus to Syros and Syros to Samos): 50 EUR (Greek academic discount)
* Accommodation: 45 EUR
* Participation fee: 40 EUR
So there would be a *total of 1039€* for the three of us. We would really appreciate having some support in order to do this.
Best, Silva
Fact 7: Chris Lamb, Debian Project Leader, approved the funding less than one hour later
What we see here is that a woman from Albania made a successful social engineering attack and Debian's leader fell for it.
Subject: Re: Debian at FOSScamp - funding request Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2017 20:26:29 -0400 From: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> To: Silva Arapi <silva.arapi@gmail.com>, leader@debian.org CC: auditor@debian.org, treasurer@debian.ch, daniel@pocock.pro, Redon Skikuli <redon@skikuli.com>, giannis@konstantinidis.cc
Hi Silva et. al,
> I'm writing to submit a funding request (costs below) to organize some > consecutive Debian focused workshops and localization events during FOSScamp Excellent :)
> Currently there are no Debian translations into Albanian and there is no > communication between the Albanian Debian community and the Greek one. I'd love for there to be more communication between the teams and get everybody into the Debian community "proper". Speaking of which, have we met IRL? It would great to involve you more in the Debian family..
> So there would be a *total of 1039€* for the three of us. Approved.. say, upon the condition you report daily (with pictures!) to Planet Debian? :-)
Regards,
Fact 8: men at URA Design (private business) exerted influence over female participation in Open Labs Hackerspace
The email is dated 13 August 2017, during the period when Konstantinidis was a "Technical Coordinator" at URA Design.
He is telling the Debian Project Leader that he wants to give up his own funding approval but at the same time he wants to tell Debian how to use those funds by recommending a specific woman, Anisa Kuci.
Anisa had been told she could not ask for funding directly. When Silva sent the original request on 4 August 2017, she did not include Anisa's name. Why not? Why do women in Albania need permission from men before they ask for something? Was I right about people trafficking in open source?
In another recent blog, I looked at how some jurisdictions have criminalized the coercive control of women. That is what comes to mind when I look at the way URA Design employees acted as gatekeepers for Albanian women between 2016 and 2019.
Subject: Re: Debian at FOSScamp - funding request Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2017 19:01:58 +0300 (EEST) From: Giannis Konstantinidis <giannis@konstantinidis.cc> To: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>, Silva Arapi <silva.arapi@gmail.com> CC: leader@debian.org, treasurer@debian.ch, auditor@debian.org, daniel@pocock.pro, Redon Skikuli <redon@skikuli.com>, ping@anisakuci.com
Hey everyone, just wish to inform you that unfortunately, due to unforeseen external factors, I won't be able to make it. I'd like to thank the Debian community for the generous support. We will stay in touch.
To make sure Debian makes the maximum possible impact at FOSSCamp, I'd like to sugggest Anisa Kuci (cc'ed ) takes my place. Anisa has been a longtime experienced member of Open Labs Hackerspace, co-organized OSCAL and is very much interested in further contributing to Debian.
Thanks once more. I wish the best success to Debian and your participation FOSSCamp.
Kind regards, -Giannis K.
Fact 9: Elio Qoshi resigned as a Fedora Ambassador
Fact check: Elio Qoshi wrote a blog post about his resignation.
If there were any other factors in the resignation, Fedora kept it hidden.
Fact 10: I reported the manipulation of women to Mozilla
In October 2017, I made reports to Mozilla and other organizations.
2017: the FSFE fellowship elected me as their representative on April 24, the anniversary of the Easter Rising. Women began making reports to me about abuse in non-profit organizations receiving funds for the promotion of women in technology.
Here is the internal complaint about the harassment. The date is 12 October 2017 so the misfits publishing alternative statements about harassment are lying. 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.
Fact 11: Arjen Kamphuis identifed Redon Skikuli as a source of harassment
The email is dated 23 October 2017. It has been republished in various places, including my blog post "When I discovered people trafficking in open source software" on International Women's Day, 8 March 2021 and again in my blog post about Julian Assange on 20 May 2024. The blog post from 8 March 2021 was clearly published a long time before I even registered the trademark or domain names and therefore a long time before any legal dispute began. Copies of the people trafficking blog post are archived in various places. Nobody has ever disputed the accuracy of the evidence from Arjen Kamphuis, they are only trying to hide it and replace it with lies.
Subject: Re: Outreachy, Open Labs follow-up Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 23:28:21 +0200 From: Arjen Kamphuis <arjen@pgknowledge.eu> Organization: Pretty Good Knowledge To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
Hi Daniel,
Signed up two mentors for Silva. Did not receive detailed info from others to persue mentor-selection.
Been traveling like crazy (conference season) so did not have time to look into other issues. Also don't want to get caught up in internal politics but have noticed some strange events around the Dutch visit I've organised and co-funded for next month. Will have discusson about that with Openlabs and especially Rendon (sic) who seems to put himself in positions of control in cases he should not.
Best, Arjen
"Rendon" is actually Redon Skikuli from URA. Arjen Kamphuis noticed the exact same behavior that I noticed.
Redon Skikuli and Elio Qoshi were the source of harassment, while Giannis Konstantinidis and others were part of the URA Design "team".
Fact check: the blog post, containing Kamphuis' email, was first registered in the Wayback Machine on 18 March 2021.
Fact check: the Debian trademark in Switzerland was only granted in May 2022.
Therefore the leaked email from Arjen Kamphuis pre-dates all these legal disputes and it seems to confirm that one of the Albanian gangmasters, Redon Skikuli (Kamphuis wrote "Rendon" (sic), was the origin of the problem.
Fact 12: Giannis Konstantinidis traveled to Tirana, Albania for an URA Design "work week" with his boss
Elio Qoshi, Boris Budini, Silva Arapi, Giannis Konstantinidis, Redon Skikuli
At the time of the photo, Boris was 15 or 16 years old. We are told he was a volunteer for the hackerspace. Was a teenager fooled into child labor by this social engineering hack, a non-profit hackerspace called Open Labs used to conceal a for-profit private company?
Fact 13: Anisa Kuci identified Elio Qoshi and Redon Skikuli as the sources of harassment
Journalists allegedly require at least two reliable sources before they can run a story. Arjen Kamphuis was one reliable source and Anisa Kuci is an independent source, unrelated to Kamphuis.
Here is the email from Anisa in March 2018, a few months after the drama above:
Subject: Re: "free travel" Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 23:51:28 +0100 From: Anisa Kuci <anisakuci9@gmail.com> To: Laura Arjon <larjona@debian.org> CC: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org>, Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>, leader@debian.org, antiharassment@debian.org
Hello Chris, Daniel, Laura,
Thank you very much for being so supportive.
I read the comments on the thread and to be honest I am really sad that Elio [Qoshi] said that. It is not true at all.
They (Elio [Qoshi] & Redon [Skikuli]) pretend to support women but on the other hand their behavior towards many of us shows the opposite.
Daniel I feel bad because you have encouraged and helped not only me, but so many other people, no matter if they are Open Labs members or not, and also all the attendees from Kosova to learn new things, to work and improve their skills and knowledge. They are doubting your good intentions just to remove the attention from the shady things that they are doing.
The free travel comment is really offensive to me and i feel it should be offensive to every woman who is part of the community. I have been contributing and supporting Open Labs since its early days, and I have put a lot of effort and time, I do this because I believe in what it is meant to stand for and without waiting something in exchange, but the situation lately has been not very positive. Daniel has been present by chance in few cases where situations have been very hard to go through.
I would definitely like to talk to any of you and tell you more about everything that is happening here, its fine to me whether it is a video call, call or just emails. Please tell me what would be more convenient to you.
King greetings, Anisa
Fact 14: Giannis Konstantinidis is recuited by Deloitte in Belgium
From his LinkedIn profile, Giannis Konstantinidis tells us:
Giannis Konstantinidis works as a Senior Cyber Security Consultant at Deloitte Belgium.
He has led the delivery of projects related to Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cyber Security Strategy, and Privacy and Data Protection for public and private sector organizations in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, the UAE, the UK, and the KSA.
Giannis has an interdisciplinary academic background which – coupled with his extensive project-related experience – allows him to take on complicated Cyber Security-related challenges from a technical, legal, and social perspective.
Giannis has been certified as a Lead Implementer of ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 27701. He is also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/E). In the meantime, Giannis is a part-time academic and a PhD Candidate in Decentralized IAM where he focuses on the revision of the eIDAS Regulation and Digital Wallets.
