https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr-nickf4rr-35c32f13da4d
Hi. Iâm Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr)
I used to be a pretty effective organizer working behind the scenes at
Hacker Events in Europe and on various projects back in the USA. After
a deliberate campaign of abuse orchestrated by Jake Appelbaum at the
30c3, I donât feel safe or welcome in the community anymore. In fact,
I physically shut down every time I get close to going back.
Iâm both relieved to talk about it and ashamed that it took me this
long.
Jake has targeted, abused and silenced many close friends of mine,
many of whom are researchers you probably know and respect. Whether
itâs ripping off research or just harassing someone into submission,
somehow we all felt powerless to do anything about it. Heâs the
perfect bully.
Every criticism of him is met with suspicion, every accusation is some
government-conspiracy-takedown.
Those that tried to stand up to him were destroyed, one even took his
own life after Jake stole his research. But thatâs not my story to
tell. In the scope of people Jake has targeted, of the number of
stories that have emerged in the wake of his departure from Tor, my
story is fairly benign. I suppose thatâs why I have the luxury of
attaching my name and face to my story.
My first Chaos Communications Congress was the 23c3 in Berlin. The
annual C3s and biennial European Hacker Camps are the finest gathering
of folks working in all kinds of technology all around the world. From
the crew that first jailbroke the iPhone to Julian Assangeâs first
Wikileaks speech and in literally thousands of other ways itâs hard to
overestimate the impact the C3s and Camps have had on our world today.
These events are probably the worldâs last true âHackerâ gatherings,
not having been co-opted by the Network Security or Startup
industries.
I was invited to the 23c3 on account of my work in the US. Being
there, being in that open, inclusive, chaotic, intensely creative and
amazingly enthusiastic environment with thousands of passionate
hackers renewed my faith in the community to do good work on a global
scale. I encourage everyone to go to experience it. Complete newbies
and the most accomplished Hackers in the world talk about their first
Camp or Congress with the same level of enthusiasm and hope, a feeling
hard to describe and unique to those events and that culture in
particular.
Only a few months after attending the 23c3, Iâd be dragging 40
Americans from DEFCON to the 2007 CCC Camp on the first Hackers on a
Plane. I wanted everyone I knew and then some to experience what was
happening in Europe.
Jake was on that trip and pretty much every person on that trip can
tell you what an epic asshole he was. Where everyone else contributed
something to making the trip a better event, Jake destroyed whatever
he needed to in order to gain more fame for himself.
At that time, Jake couldnât overshadow the awesomeness of the Camp and
the burgeoning Hackerspace scene I started working on back at home.
Over the years of doing that (HacDC, Unallocated Space, NYCResistor,
etc.) I enjoyed coming back to Europe to help organize whatever needed
organizing. It was a way of recharging, taking in the amazing energy
at those events in Germany and the Netherlands.
One of the many things I used to help out with were the Lightning
Talks. From the 27c3 onward, I coordinated and emceed these sessions
where anyone could speak pretty much about whatever they wanted in 5
minutes or less. The format that I developed over the years is
basically what they use today. If you could follow basic directions, I
did whatever I could to get you on stage to say what you had to say.
Part of this open policy meant dealing with folks who may not be
entirely stable. Often, these folks would end up not following basic
directions and theyâd fall off the schedule for that reason.
Generally, they accepted that and trusted I was not trying to silence
them, I was just being fair.
One person following this pattern submitted an LT proposal alleging
that Jake was a US Intelligence Operative. I LOLed. After a few rounds
of encrypted e-mail pestering and a few texts, they insisted on being
put on the schedule. I did so to appease, as was my strategy at the
time, with every intention of pulling them off after they inevitably
failed to follow directions. You can go look at the wiki histories for
any LT I organized to show this was what I often did with dubious
presentations. Organizing the LTs, answering e-mails, checking slides
and confirming with each presenter took nearly 3 hours for every hour
of LTs and a lot of that work happened while I was still in NYC, weeks
before the event. I often went to bed well after 2 AM the nights
leading up to my flight out to Europe and I wanted to be done with
this fool and get some sleep.
The next day I wake up to an e-mail from Jake, followed by e-mails
from very important people in the CCC chastising me for what I had
done to Jakeâs reputation. Jake demanded all the records I had
received from this person. Jake also had the CCC edit the 30c3 wiki
database to eliminate any trace of the offending talk.
Because the last thing anyone needs is to be targeted by Jake, I
purged everything this person and sent and refused to hand over
anything on privacy grounds. I explained what my reasoning was for
doing what I did, was chastised further, let it go and considered the
matter over.
But really, I thought, why would Jake be so defensive about some
random LT that might have otherwise gone completely unnoticed? If I
were a government operative hell-bent on destroying the global hacker
community, what would I do differently from what Jake is doing now?
Once I arrived at the 30c3, not more than 10 minutes went by before
Jake himself comes and accosts me, warning âthere will be severe
consequencesâ unless I hand over everything this person sent. I told
him that I no longer had the records he sought, but that simply wasnât
good enough. Without warning, several times each day throughout the
30c3, Jake or one of his proxies would find me say the same thing.
Each time, no matter who I was with or how long they had known me, I
was made out to be the one âcausing dramaâ, bringing down the good
feelings whatever group I happened to be around.
Every night, I came back to my hotel room, a typewritten note on my
pillow stating, âDonât make us use extreme measures. Hand it all
over.â
I tried to reach out to people I thought I could trust. I tried to
tell them what was going on. I tried showing them. I told Jake very
calmly when he approached that he needed to stop harassing me.
Everyone I talked to told me to just give him what he wanted, to
âdialogueâ with him to âfind a solutionâ and to âstop creating dramaâ.
You canât dialogue with a sociopath. Whatâs worse is when people you
consider your trusted friends take the sociopathâs side.
At that point, I was rather well known, I had earned a pretty good
deal of social capital, thousands of Twitter followers from Europe and
the confidence that people knew me and trusted me. But none of that
mattered, Jake was a rockstar whose followers went to great lengths to
make me feel unsafe and unwelcome in the very place I felt most at
home in the entire world.
By the last night of the 30c3, after one last ditch effort to get Jake
and his cronies off my back was rebuffed, it got to be too much. I
physically could not take it anymore, handed in my badges and phone
and left with no intention of returning. It was only with a lot of
support from 3 friends, one of whom was another victim of his abuse
that I was able to fulfill my commitment to show up for the last day
of the LTs.
After breaking my back the following August, my doctors had cleared me
to travel internationally by the time the 31c3 was coming around. When
it came time to actually figure out the logistics, my body shut down.
While there was a lot physically wrong with me, the doctors told me
that what ailed me was very likely stress-related. I had long since
repressed why this was happening, chalked it up to my pain medication,
really anything other than what I had experienced on account of Jake.
But in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense why I physically couldnât
bring myself to go. One measure of the support I enjoyed and
recognition of my work was the hundreds of postcards I received from
well-wishers at the 31c3, cards I still cherish today.
But even with the encouragement of hundreds in my hands, I couldnât
physically bring myself to go to the 2015 Camp. I tweeted about a
âdiagnosisâ to avoid âcreating dramaâ but the truth of the matter was
by that point, the damage was done. Jake destroyed those events for
me, and I didnât even consciously realize it until I started writing
out this story. Ironically, I feel safe thinking and writing about
this only after seeing others come forward with their stories of what
Jake did to them.
While I am truly humbled and honored by all of you who have asked me
to come back, I want to be part of a community where this kind of
behavior isnât tolerated from the inception. I want to be part of a
community where incidents like this are addressed promptly and fairly
and not dismissed as âdramaâ. Admittedly, I could have done more to
make this happen when I was part of the community and I did not. There
were victims whose accusations I treated much like the folks then
treated mine, ones I swept under the rug in the name of what I thought
to be the greater good.
Had I stood up for them, maybe someone would have stood up for me.