Deconstructing an Institutional Slander operation: @ioerror et al...

[Rayzer]

A pretty good rundown of how social disruption works.

 I have 'on the ground' experience from a lifetime of hardcore activism
from the lifelong POV of heretic outsider. I've seen this before. A lot.
It's basically what "Vanguard orgs" do to un-pc offenders. You could say
it's a vicious form of henpecking and it happens in EVERY organization.

But believe me... it's the same tactic that scared the living shit out
of the LAPD/SD when Chris Dorner did it. If you want Snowden, and you
can't get Snowden, and you want Greenwald but... Go after their friends.

Dorner wasn't killing cops. He was killing friends and relatives. It's
COIN Strategic Hamlet tactic. Worst case, they think, Snowden grow old
and sick and dies early worried and feeling guilty because he comes to
belive he endangered friends.

Like cults ... Like Voodoo... Scientology EXCELS at it. Bohemian
Grove... Majick. They "Abandon care", but do different unto others. Get
the picture?

The people who do this shit are pure evil... I've seen that evil 'on the
ground'. The "Red Squads" of the 60s did this shit. I was there...
Nothing's changed except the medium and the rapidity with which rumors
and innuendo spread... But the tactic? Timeless...

Lots of links and embedded images of tweets etc in-post...
Read online:
http://theindicter.com/the-weaponising-of-social-part-1-the-crucifixion-of-ioerror/

theindicter.com

The Weaponising Of Social Part 1: The Crucifixion of IOError

by The Indicter

Thanks to a small group of supposed anonymity-protecting privacy
activists thousands of people now know the name of Jacob Appelbaum’s
fiancée`. Even those that didn’t want to.

We found it out by reading an extremely controversial website launched a
week ago, that had a few sparse accounts of some nasty sounding
happenings allegedly involving Jacob, with promises of more to come.

No one truly concerned with privacy issues should care if Jacob has a
fiancée let alone who she is, out of respect for his right to a private
life and because it is patently obvious that attacks on him shouldn’t
extend to her.

Her name was later removed after the bulk of the damage had been done,
without any editorial admission that it had ever been there in the first
place.

Unfortunately, that simple yet far-reaching invasion of privacy, is only
the tip of the iceberg.

[Update 12/06/16: Detractors are claiming the above is factually
incorrect as they say Appelbaum is no longer engaged. The source was the
smear website itself, which named Appelbaum’s ‘partner’, then removed
her name and called her his ‘fiancée’, and now implies past tense. IMO,
who he is or isn’t engaged to is frankly his own business. The point
stands.]

Preamble

In a strange paradox, Jacob Appelbaum’s accusers both want to deny any
relevance between their accusations and him being a known target of the
US government as a result of the nature of his work, while having the
clearly stated aim of wanting to prevent him from being able to continue it.

Even as they are being dwarfed, swept aside and forgotten in the
controversy, the topics on which Jacob Appelbaum and WikiLeaks work are
much larger and more important than any individual.  Those who
concertedly dedicate themselves to such causes are unjustly forced to
quite literally risk our safety, our families, our livelihoods, our
citizenships, our liberty and everything we own, in our fight to
preserve our ideals and our planet.

The high stakes in a situation like this demand more than knee-jerk
reactions, hearsay, and because-all-my-friends-say, when one of us is
attacked or discredited. They deserve the investment of time; of
serious, weighty yet measured consideration; analysis; and
investigation. All of the elements that should be prerequisite to
forming any intellectual opinon, let alone one where reputations and
potentially lives are at stake.

But we are yet to see any of that, at least anything more in-depth than
a series of personal statements via “Twitlonger”. Just a whole lot of
uproar; a whole lot more silence; and a bunch of axe-grinding. With very
little actual analysis, because the topic of rape is so taboo that most
people are shit scared of approaching it objectively.

As such, this post should be subtitled “We Owe IO More Than 600 Words”.
Because we do. We owe him much, much more than that.

We owe it to him and to our causes, to find out the truth.

Preamble dispensed with, I’m going to give some historical context to
what made me write this article and analyse the claims made on and by
the anti-IO website. In Part 2 of this article, we will look into the
main personalities that appear to be driving this, discuss some of the
environmental factors affecting the response and get into the wider
context, which is all but being ignored

Lessons Long-Since Learned

The website now being widely sourced as justification for dismantling
Appelbaum’s career and reputation does as much to discredit itself as it
does to discredit Jacob.

That the name of the female closest to him was disclosed in a forum that
claims to exist to protect women was not the first red flag.

Several years ago, a situation unfolded where a prominent activist
(Activist A)  was privately accused of rape by another activist
(Activist B). This was then broadcast far and wide through the creation
of a Twitter account that purported to be Activist B talking directly
and openly about her first hand experience of being raped by Activist A.

Many fell for it, and instantaneously an online frenzy was being whisked
up against Activist A. For all the same – on the surface – seemingly
valid reasons that we see people turning on Jacob Appelbaum for now.

However, when I read the tweets of the account calling for the
persecution of Activist A, I innately knew that what I was reading was
not the words of a rape survivor. It came across to me as someone trying
to posture themselves as one, out of empathy and/or indignation, rather
than legitimately recounting an actual firsthand memory of a personal
experience.

So I did the socially unacceptable but morally right thing and spoke
out. While people were aghast that I dared to question a “victim” – the
facade soon crumbled and it turned out that my instincts were absolutely
correct.

The account claiming to be a rape victim was not Activist B at all. It
was Activist C, her boyfriend, who had (according to Activist B, without
her knowledge) taken it upon himself to impersonate her and attack
Activist A in public after she had raised issues in confidence. There
had been some question of infidelity, she had privately claimed lack of
consent, Activist C had decided that Activist A’s life should be ruined
as a result, and gone public.

Whether or not Activist A ever did in fact rape Activist B got lost in
the controversy of Activist C’s foolish meddling in the entire
situation. Activist A claimed no. Activist B claimed yes. Activist C
permanently obscured the situation by his actions.

So how was I able to immediately identify, on gut feeling, that this
anonymous account claiming to be a rape victim was not a rape victim?
And why did I risk my “social capital” to speak out on such a highly
contentious topic?

Because people who are not survivors of rape cannot competently
impersonate survivors of rape. They think the act itself is the whole
story but it is just a tiny fraction of it. So when they attempt to
concoct the scenario, they always limit it to the specific event rather
than the holistic experience, the emotional journey.

Rape Testimony

Real rape testimony is 20% what physically happened and 80% how it
affected us. It is visceral. It is memories and shapes and impressions
and images. It is sights and smells and feelings, a twisted nostalgia we
would desperately like to free ourselves from but cannot ever. It is
asymmetrical and it evolves. It unfolds. The expression of it is a
cathartic, painful release but a necessary step in the healing.

It is not a telegram. It is not a thematical construct with set form or
submission rules.

They are not a fixed length. Nor fixed sentence structures. They do not
have a statistical linguistic pattern. They are not uniform. They ebb
and flow in proportion to the victim’s telling. They sway and move,
mobile in the outpouring of emotion, of grief.

When multiple examples of rape testimonies are compared side by side,
they don’t conform in any way save in their effective translation of
trauma, of a raw and primal pain.

So when I realised the extent to which the accounts on the anti-Jacob
website do conform and began to note other anomalies, huge alarm bells
started ringing.

Speaking From Experience

As someone intimately acquainted with the plight of survivors, you can
feel inside you when something is just not right with a situation like
this. As a survivor, my personal obligation to other victims and to the
truth has led me to speak up several times in the past – even when it is
utterly humiliating, damaging to my reputation or even outright
dangerous to do so. This is not an expectation I have of others – I have
the benefit of the passage of time, maturity, experience and healing –
water under the bridge – that many others don’t. Thus I spoke out in an
article addressing statements made by the Minister of Police and the
grotesquely poor conduct of NZ cops in handling sexual assault including
my own historical abduction and gang rape. I likewise spoke the
difficult and humiliating truth against the notorious ‘FBI’ snitch Sabu
when he assumed the identity of one of my friends in order to target me
sexually, in an attempt to entrap me. I spoke out about my favourite
publication in the world when a new staffer there published a ridiculous
pile of rape apologist bullshit. I spoke out against the self-admitted
serial pack rapists known as The RoastBusters who weren’t even so much
as arrested after bragging about stupefying and pack-raping dozens of
13-16 year old girls. Then I spoke out against media’s irresponsible
reporting on the issue. And again, when the Minister of Justice used the
plight of the many Roastbusters victims who had received no justice
whatsoever, in order to falsely justify the passage of anti-trolling
legislation.

Even though it triggered the hell out of me to do so, I attended protest
events, supported movements, and covered live actions in support of
survivors, and in defiance of the repressive tactics wielded by New
Zealand’s blatantly corrupt and incompetent police forces, who so
profoundly fail survivors, and the public.

As faithfully as I spoke out in all those cases, so must I speak out too
when I believe that rape testimony may be being falsely manufactured, or
manipulated, or misrepresented, or used to serve the ulterior motives
and agenda of someone(s) who may not be rape survivors at all.

“Believe victims“, some people say. The key word is not believe. The key
word is victims. Not “believe any two-bit twat(s) who impersonate
survivors and/or edit rape testimony because they have something to gain
by smearing someone all over the net, in the name of other victims.”

Especially when in doing so, knowingly or not, those someone(s) are also
serving the interests of The Empire and damaging movements that people
pay dearly to create, build and sustain. (If you are in any doubt about
this take note that among the first people gloating about Jacob
Appelbaum’s perceived downfall was in fact, Sabu.)

For The Empire, I can assure you, does not give the slightest flying
shit about rape victims, unless they can be used to its advantage. On a
daily basis, it perpetuates and facilitates mass rape all over the
world, while expending tax dollars to cement and maintain all of the
societal and environmental conditions that create rape culture.

The double-edged sword of the taboo of rape was constantly wielded
against Julian Assange and his supporters over the last five years,
albeit with ever-dwindling effectiveness. Allegations of rape against
information activists are a lose-lose situation for us but a ‘win’ for
our enemies, and that is again apparent in Appelbaum’s case. The end
result is a real-life example of why these types of accusations are such
an efficient tool for those wishing to utterly devastate and
incapacitate a perceived rival. It emboldens the targets enemies and
silences their friends. It isolates them and eclipses all their prior
undertakings.

For all these reasons I cannot merely sit silent, or put out an
ambiguous 600-word opinion piece sitting on a fence.

Instead I did what I do best. I read, read, read, read and read more.
Dug, investigated and analysed.

The following, is my findings.

More:
http://theindicter.com/the-weaponising-of-social-part-1-the-crucifixion-of-ioerror/


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