Arrested: Albanian Outreachy whistleblowers, Sonny Piers GNOME & Debian connections
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Last year, we calculated that rogue Debianists have spent over $120,000 trying to censor web sites. Why are they giving so much money to the lawyerists? It comes down to the Debian suicide cluster. We can see that in the demand below, where they ask for the police to use all methods at their disposal to hunt down whisteblowers talking about the suicide cluster and abuse.
As it turns out, everybody already knows who the whistleblowers are. In fact, for some time now, they have been openly paying money to the whistleblowers, in the form of internships and jobs.
Even more fascinating, the Swiss police had already arrested the Albanian Outreachies when they arrived at Zurich airport on 19 September 2017. I was waiting at the airport to meet them and they were detained for a couple of hours in a cell. I took a photo of them when they were leaving captivity:
While they were in captivity, the Swiss police called me and spoke to me to ask questions about their itinerary in Switzerland and who was paying for these women to travel.
Looking at the other lawyerist documents, we can see that rogue Debianists are frequently claiming that these women were young female developers:
If the discussions about the risk of trafficking are baseless, why did the Kanton Zurich police want to ask the same questions about the frequent movements of these women between Albania and the Schengen zone?
Why did the rogue Debianists pay $120,000 to lawyerists to insist that these women are developers? Looking at their profiles on the GNOME web site, they are employed to do administrative work. They were never trained or employed as developers anywhere.
The original Outreach Program for Women (OPW) started in the GNOME Foundation so it is interesting that both of these women have subsequently been employed there. OPW was renamed to Outreachy but it is the same program.
One of the women was an Outreachy intern for Mozilla.
The other woman was given a ticket from Albania to Brazil for DebConf19. She sat beside the former leader Chris Lamb at the DebConf dinner and a few weeks later an Outreachy internship was created for her. After Outreachy, she went to work for Wikimedia Italia for a while.
In an earlier blog, I explained that these women are two of the whistleblowers who revealed evidence about abuse in an Albanian organization funded by larger free software organizations.
In April 2024, during the process that censored the debian.news web site on World Press Freedom Day, I revealed that I had sent a confidential complaint about the underage issues to the Mozilla staff.
In May 2024, immediately after my disclosure, the GNOME Foundation Board frantically held a series of meetings about "personnel" issues:
In the last meeting, on 27 May 2024, the membership issue is mentioned. They removed Sonny Piers with the nasty "for cause" ramblings about a secret expulsion. This is total nonsense, you can't expel somebody "for cause" without being able to say what the "cause" actually is. There is a real possibility that Sonny Piers simply asked questions about the personnel matters noted in the previous board meetings.
The Executive Director, Holly Millions, resigned at much the same time. Maybe she learned the truth about the GNOME / Albania connection and didn't want anything to do with it.
In the first week of June, the entire Albanian web site was taken down and the staff profile of Kristi Progri on the GNOME site was changed to delete her links to the Albanian group.
These things are not coincidences. It looks like the employment of the Albanian women at GNOME and the elimination of evidence on the Albanian web site are all connected. These things happened at exactly the same time.
In October 2024, GNOME Foundation published a news report telling us they have to let go of Caroline Henriksen (Creative Director) and Melissa Wu (Director of Community Development) due to a budget shortfall.
The same news report promises transparency.
Yet at the same time, GNOME secretly added a second Albanian woman to their employee list.
Looking at the staff list from 21 June 2024 in the Wayback Machine we can only see one Albanian woman, Kristi Progri.
Looking at the staff list from 19 July 2024 we can see both Albanian women. Kristi Progri is still there as Director of Program Management and they added Anisa Kuci as an Administrative Assistant.
Both of these women started their careers on the same path at the same time. Both of them were in a police cell together in September 2017. Why is one of them given such a senior title and the other has a very junior title? Is this equality?
There are various hints that GNOME may have been paying Anisa Kuci for some time before they publicly added her name on the public web site. Why would GNOME be secretly paying money to an Albanian woman? We can see that Anisa was present in the photos from GUADEC 2022 in Mexico.
Then we can see the Conduct team mafia page. A snapshot from 27 March 2023 does not include the Albanian woman.
A later snapshot on 8 September 2023 includes the name Anisa Kuci. Does that mean that GNOME added the second Albanian woman to the payroll in secret a year before putting her name on their team list?
Did Sonny Piers discover this secret and ask questions about it?
Sonny's own blog report tells us:
The process and decision shocked me. I know people are looking for answers, but I want to protect people involved and the project/foundation. It was never an interpersonal conflict for me.
Reading between the lines, it looks like he asked questions about the personnel issues and somebody got really scared and decided to bundle him out the back door as quickly as possible.
They bamboozled him into silence with the false promise of mediation, which is noted in the GNOME forum post. But this is nonsense. After they have defamed him publicly, there is no real opportunity for mediation, he needs compensation and the community needs answers.
While Sonny and his supporters were hoping for this mediation, the toffs in the open source mafia used every face-to-face meeting in the last six months to further reinforce the persecution and turn people against Sonny Piers. They avoid leaving any written evidence of these tactics because they want to give Sonny false hope of a solution. They are afraid that Sonny or somebody else might start leaking the secret minutes of board meetings and gnome-private discussions.
There is a huge ethical problem when they pretend that the Conduct team members are volunteers but they are really staff members on a secret payroll. Staff members are an extension of the executive director so they are not really independent and they will have a tendency to make decisions to please their boss.
Being more specific, staff members on the Conduct team will generally try to cover up mistakes by fellow staff and censor anybody who asks questions about the staff expenditures. Yet with the critical state of the budget, those questions are vital to the survival of the GNOME Foundation.
Ironically, this is just how things worked under the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.
In every building, at least one neighbor was a member of the secret police or an informer for the police. These people would get cash bonuses and other privileges in exchange for reports about neighbors asking political questions.
The thing to remember is that both of these women were in the Albanian group from the beginning. They were responsible for managing other volunteers so they know the name and age of every girl who came to the OSCAL conferences and hackerspace. They know the names of developers from various companies who came to visit. As long as they are on the payroll somewhere those details will not be mentioned. █
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.