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On the recent revelations of more creeps in the cybersecurity community, and “cancellation”, a thread. (TL;DR: cancel away, and let’s do more).
Over the past few days we have seen several people in the security industry called out for sexually harassing women at security conferences. They travel on their company dime and act somewhere between deeply inappropriate and committing sexual assault.
The community’s immediate laudable response has been to name, shame, and push to remove them from the industry. This practice has become known as “cancellation”.
A minority of the community decries this, claiming lack of due process. I am not sure what due process people want, but what I am sure of is cancellation works. It is a norm amongst small, insular communities looking for self-protection.
There is certainly room for more advanced techniques than “cancellation”, such as restorative justice, and for less transgressive inappropriateness people should be spoken to directly like the adults we are supposed to be.
I invite those of us with backgrounds in sociology to comment.
We would all benefit if the community evolves to normalize effective non-banishment justice. However, restorative justice doesn’t work with sociopaths, and the overlap between sociopaths and people who think nothing of violating personal and sexual boundaries is pretty high.
If you don’t want “cancellation” culture to become normative for fear of false accusations, there is an easy solution - stop letting abuse be normative.
If you want to be less public in your response, you can go to their employer’s HR department and inform them that their employee has been sexually harassing others on their company’s dime.
There are many people I wish we banished sooner. I would like to say that we were better about self-protection when the community was tighter-knit, but it isn’t true. Two decades ago we all watched John Draper’s actions, and even had a little rhyme about it.
We would warn young men... boys really, to stay the hell away from him, but that was and is a half-hearted intervention at best. I wish we were better than that back then.
In the @cDc_Pulpit we had to deal with a similar situation with one of our own. The pattern in the stories we heard was too consistent, and we peripherally knew at least one of the people who had the courage to speak out publicly.
We wish we had known sooner the kind of person he was, and the harm he was doing, and regret elevating the individual to a level of prominence that let him abuse more people.
When the @cDc_Pulpit cancelled a member, we asked victims of his behavior to consider going to the police. Many of us in the security community have a complicated relationship with law enforcement, for a boatload of personal and political reasons...
...both endogenous and exogenous to the subculture. Aaron Swartz was hounded by law enforcement until he took his own life.
Women rarely receive the benefit of the doubt, and when believed, they are asked what they were wearing, how many times they said “no” during the course of an assault, and why they didn’t speak up sooner.
Removal from a subculture does not protect the full society. People bounce from one subculture to another, using the same charisma that ingratiated themselves with one group to do so with another while keeping their rape-y tendencies.
I know of one person who behaved badly in a far away place in one subculture and repeated the behavior in ours after being shunned from the previous one.
We can’t expect members of other subcultures to dig through google records of ours in order to decide whether or not this person is trustworthy, and the only broader remediation we have is the authorities.
I personally know one person who pressed charges and it sounds so miserable. I am sorry for anyone who is a victim and has to endure the separate bullshit process of our legal system. I know it sucks, and I so wish the world was a different place.
If there is any tiny silver lining in this repeated nightmare it should be that if you are successful you may be preventing the same act happening to someone just like you.
To everyone I would say please treat others as you wish to be treated, or you hope that those you love dearly are treated. To those saying “cancellation” culture is inappropriate, I say work harder to make sure people don’t have to be cancelled in the first place.
In the meantime, keep the call-outs coming until sexual assault in the workplace and the conference space ends.
Finally, the prima donna behavior exhibited by so many in the security community has to stop. We aren’t that special. You are at a conference to see old friends, certainly, but you’re primarily there to do a job.
If sexual assault was all going on at a convention for traveling salespeople hawking shower curtain rings, we would all be screaming to have that person fired by their employer and thrown in jail instead of laughing at their antics.
Why we think it is more acceptable to turn a blind eye to the same behavior in our own backyard is beyond me.
PS: Many of the ideas here were formed after talking to a few friends who have been on the receiving end of mistreatment. I want you to know you are seen and heard, and I am not naming you for obvious reasons.
PPS: Knock it off with the little edgy meme groups ripping into women in the industry. You aren’t being funny - you are pushing the window of acceptable behavior towards assault.
