Back when I was a tech journalist, I always felt uncomfortable speaking with representatives of the Tor project. Their approach to communicating always seemed needlessly accusatory and combative. It left me with the strong impression that they are more interested in shouting down criticism and downplaying the extent to which Tor is abused rather than educating the public and engaging with the broader tech community in good faith.<p>The poor way that the organization and its members have dealt with the allegations made against Applebaum over the years seems emblematic of the broader problems with their culture and the inept way that they handle criticism and internal failures.<p>I think a lot of us, particularly open source enthusiasts and civil libertarians, are inclined to give them a free pass because we value the underlying ideas that the Tor project ostensibly represents. But it's increasingly clear that not holding the organization to higher standards of accountability was a disservice to the ecosystem.
It took many thousands of years for humans to create a judicial process with rights for the accused. It's sad to see how quickly we can all fall back to mobs with pitch forks, with justice decided on platforms like Twitter.
related (flagged) thread of the zeit.de article <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12303927" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12303927</a>