Bad faith: concealing risks to children

When IBM Red Hat submitted their case in the UDRP, they included as evidence an example of content from the WeMakeFedora.org web site. The example included five blog posts and one of those was a blog that had originally been published by me and then automatically syndicated by WeMakeFedora.org.

The blog that IBM Red Hat complained about and therefore wanted to censor was the blog post Google, FSFE & Child labor.

FSFE is a non-profit puppet organization jointly funded by Google, IBM Red Hat and other large corporations.

There are a subset of Debian co-authors who are also associated with FSFE.

As the community had elected me as the FSFE Fellowship representative and as I had concurrently been a mentor and administrator in programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy, I had an important role to play documenting the risks to children.

At the same time these risks to children began appearing in the world of open source software, the criminal procedure against Cardinal George Pell had been unfolding in Australia. As it turns out, a family member, some years younger than me, had been in the choir at the time that the late Cardinal Pell was Archbishop of Melbourne.

I had personally been an officer of the National Union of Students (Victorian state branch) in 1999. As far as I can tell, I was the most senior student representative having contact with somebody in the choir at the very time that the late Cardinal was in charge. When I saw risks to children around the open source software world, how could I not express concerns?

I had started doing voluntary work as a GSoC mentor in 2013. Therefore, I had five years experience of these programs when I came across the problems in Albania in the latter part of 2017. I used internal channels to raise concerns about the risk to minors.

Complainants knew my concerns were based on long standing experience and on personal exposure to these situations. While credible organizations would have found a way to deal with these matters diplomatically, the complainants are simultaneously trying to both censor me and discredit anything I have to say about these risks.

The fact that IBM Red Hat cited the child labor blog in their UDRP submission shows that is what they were trying to cover up. Their UDRP complaint was ruled an act of bad faith.

This is the evidence that IBM Red Hat submitted. It is clear that people around FSFE want to prevent discussion about child safety.

The fact that I had both privately and publicly expressed concerns about the risk to children and the timing of Debian's UDRP action coincides so closely with IBM Red Hat makes me feel they are seeking to censor and undermine exactly the same concerns about risks to children.

Looking at the way the FSFE's child labor program progressed, we can see that when the program finished, FSFE obfuscated the full names of the children who did the work. These children clearly have a copyright interest in the work they created. In other fields of endeavour we can see children receiving credit for their work under their full name. For example, look at the Jackson Five, where Michael Jackson began performing under his real name from age five.

The French pop singer Marina Kaye (a stage name) appeared under her real name Marina Dalmas on France's Got Talent when she was thirteen years old. Yet the children who wrote code for FSFE are not given credit under their full names. Only their first names were published.

The trial of Cardinal Pell never proved whether abuse took place. What has been confirmed by medical evidence is that one member of the choir began substance abuse at approximately fourteen years of age. There are multiple possible explanations for the substance abuse. For some of the boys, participation is a burden and they never sing again after graduating from the school.

The choir was associated with the pressure of maintaining a scholarship at one of Australia's most expensive schools. The FSFE YH4F program involved the pressure of competing for a financial prize. When somebody like me with exposure to both of these situations expresses concerns, why are these organizations so desperate to cover it up?

The internal reports I submitted about harassment of women and risks to minors in 2017 are contemporaneous evidence of what really went on in proximity to the Outreachy funding in high risk countries like Albania. I was often the only mentor to personally witness the behavior of local men and women in these groups.

In 2013, when the Australian government sought to humiliate Iranian women and migrants with a video, I loudly resigned my membership of the party. This was nine years before the rest of the world took a serious interest in the plight of Iranian women protesting against a headscarf Code of Conduct. Even more telling, my written concerns put the mistreatment of these women in the same category as the alleged abuse in the Catholic church. The concerns were captured by Crikey.

Given my personal involvement as a witness over many years, my track record of being right about these things, sometimes well ahead of time and the track record of organizations trying to silence people who raise concerns about abuse, the attempts to discredit my testimony about these matters in proximity to GSoC and Outreachy is itself the act of bad faith, a violation of UDRP rule 15(e).