Re: Specific incident in relationship to the proposed Code of Conduct

Hi Scott, On 24 January 2016 at 03:25, Scott Arciszewski <scott@paragonie.com> wrote: > I think focusing on the extreme behaviors is harmful towards a mature and > progressive discussion on these matters. My opinion is based on two > premises: > > 1. Good opsec, which career criminals and dedicated harassers would be > incentivized to adopt, can completely thwart any CoC we could come up with. > A good example would be DOXBIN, which hosted peoples' personal information > (their "dox") on a Tor hidden service and thumbed its nose to law > enforcement for years. The operator, Nachash, is still free. At no point in > time has an arrest been made. All true, however other forms of harassment do occur in public by identifiable people. > 2. If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you create a > tool meant for dealing with the most extreme harassers, and you will never > CATCH them, all that happens is you create a system for potentially > inflicting damage on less extreme transgressors. But we can address those instances that are visible and identifiable and actionable. Should we dispense with 99% coverage just because we can't cover the last 1%? > Focusing on the existence/nonexistence/frequency of extreme harassment is a > non-starter. Yes, you might think you only need it once every 10 years now. > Maybe it turns out we need it once per week and we were blind to the abuses > that were occurring. Or maybe it turns out we don't ever need it at all, but > we've created a process for harassment by proxy. I think it's a misrepresentation to claim that a Code of Conduct is a (new) process for harassment. That the PHP project can act as a potential vehicle for harassment is a pre-existing state that a Code of Conduct does not alter (except to message that it's bad and will be handled). Rather than reporting false information (if that's what you mean) to a limited team, the process right now is essentially report it to the mailing list publicly or reach out to individuals on the list to bring it to the project's attention. > Extreme harassment needs to be dealt with by specialized professionals, i..e. > law enforcement, clinical therapists, and mental health professionals. We > shouldn't even consider them in scope. We absolutely should consider them in scope unless there's a very good reason not to. > That's all I have to say at the moment. I'm going to go back to addressing > technical problems; human problems are beyond me to solve adequately. They are beyond most of us, but we can all chip away at those problems one tiny piece at a time. Who knows, eventually we may one day solve most of them. I like to think so, at least :). Paddy -- Pádraic Brady http://blog.astrumfutura.com