Bad faith: blackmailing people to disclose personal and private information


Whenever people come across the Debian smearing campaign through social media and they ask me about the rumors of harassment and abuse, the first things that come to mind are those cases that arose at the time. The poor behavior I witnessed towards women from Albania, Carla's eating disorder and the prosecution of Cardinal George Pell.

Other volunteers have made similar complaints about being blackmailed to make public statements and disclose things about themselves.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy has recently complained that he was blackmailed to publicly disclose things about his romantic life and partner preferences.

Kuhn: As such, I'm outing myself here first (primarily) to disarm his ability to use what he knows about my sexual orientation against me.

In 2019, we saw that Dr Norbert Preining was blackmailed to write a self-deprecating forced confession on a public mailing list. When I saw that Dr Preining and I had been subject to similar blackmail tactics, I felt that I was being expected to make a similar public statement about matters that belong in private.

In the case of Bradley Kuhn, his disclosures relate to himself. In my own case, in all cases of harassment and abuse where I have been a witness, it is unthinkable that I should be forced by these rumors to make disclosures about other people.

Therefore, when I published the Mozilla examples above, I partially redacted them to avoid revealing the names of underage open source software victims.

Nonetheless, I didn't voluntarily choose to publish responses to gossip about abuse. They are using the WIPO UDRP to blackmail me to publish comments about abuse cases. Therefore, they are violating UDRP rule 15(e).