It’s a moral dilemma – what should a defender of online anonymity do when trolled? For Andrea Shepard of the Tor project, the answer was simple

What happens when you troll Tor developers hard? You get unmasked.



Towards the end of last week, a troll who had sent various aggressive tweets to a host of security experts and privacy advocates associated with the Tor project and browser, which enables online anonymity, had his identity exposed. To some, that may seem hypocritical. To others, it seems like justice.



Andrea Shepard, the Tor developer who uncovered the real identity of her troll, says she was being harassed on and off for a year by a range of tweeters, all believed to be the sockpuppets of one man. The main source of abuse came from a Twitter account @JbJabroni10, but others included @JbGelasius, @SnowdenNoffect, @LimitYoHangout, @HaileSelassieYo, @thxsnowman and @PsyOpSnowden.

Other pro-Tor activists, including Runa Sandvik, Jacob Appelbaum and Jillian York of the EFF were also targeted, according to Shepard’s rundown of the events.

Shepard believes much of the recent targeting has come about as a result of a Pando Daily feature that painted the Tor network, which encrypts users web traffic and masks their true IP address, as a “honeypot” for the US government.



The Tor Project does receive government-funding through a number of intermediary organisations, including SRI international, a non-profit research and development centre bridging the gap between abstract research and industry, and Internews Network, a non-profit that funds programmes supporting democracy and human rights.



In 2013, the Tor Project received $1,822,907 from government departments, but as the Edward Snowden leaks indicated, even the National Security Agency has had a hard time deanonymising those on the network.



Security experts decried Pando’s attempts to paint Tor – an open source software project verifiable by third-parties – as the technical centre of a vast internet conspiracy as laughable.

The troll’s targets were 59% female despite men being substantially overrepresented in the communities he targeted. “Most of his most vitriolic or sexualized remarks were directed at women,” wrote Shepard.



Things came to a head when some lighter mockery was aimed at Shepard last week, using information the troll had gleaned from her LinkedIn profile and personal website.



Unfortunately for the troll, this gave Shepard an IP address belonging to an iPhone that used a work network at atlantichealth.org to access her site. She also had some job information through LinkedIn’s “profiles that viewed yours” feature.

After searching LinkedIn for anyone with the role at Atlantic Health, she came across two profiles: one which didn’t have a name connected to it, another for a man named Jeremy Becker. She then used the Spokeo service to search for Jeremy Beckers in New Jersey, and a search for pharmacist licensees, and found only one, which gave her the middle initial ‘T’ and a hometown of Princeton, New Jersey.

She also had his father’s name, Edward Becker, and was able to find a Twitter account @ebecker which followed @JbJabroni10 and an inactive one for @JoyBecker52, apparently matching his mother Joyce Becker. Shepard had her man.

And then on 28 November, seven of the Twitter accounts linked to Becker seemed to go dark. He’d been scared off the face of the internet, to the cheers of the pro-Tor and anti-troll crowds.

But some have distanced themselves from supporting Shepard’s actions, even one of the apparent victims, Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive and whistleblower. Drake said he was a First Amendment and free speech “absolutist” when it was suggested that he’d backed the “doxing” (a hacker term for de-anonmyising) of the troll.

And there is that nagging question: is it right that a privacy advocate exposed the identity of an online antagonist?

Shepard sees no conflict between her role as a Tor developer and her unmasking of a troll – though she’d prefer it if there were better solutions to dealing with aggressive online characters.



“I’m pro everyone having tools to defend privacy – yeah, that means a world where tactics like [those] I just used wouldn’t work if they were used ubiquitously, so it’s not a general solution to the problem of that sort of harassment,” she tells me.

“I think a real solution to that sort of thing would be partly technical, in terms of better, decentralised social platforms with smarter filtering, and partly cultural, in terms of smarter norms about mobbing that make some fool like [Pando] spreading smears less dangerous – they’re threatening not because they say dumb shit but because they say dumb shit people buy into.”

The language has been occasionally vitriolic on both sides, and the Tor developer’s critics say she wasn’t right to post personal details on Becker, regardless of what was said online.

Others, including Jillian York, have distanced themselves from the exposure of Becker, whom the Guardian has been unable to contact after repeated calls to his office.

Paul Carr, Pando’s editorial director, said: “[No-one] at Pando had anything whatsoever to do with any harassment towards members of the Tor community, either directly or indirectly. In fact, we have frequently reported on, and condemned, exactly the kind of gender-based harassment reportedly being experienced by Tor activists. We welcome any and all factual debate around our reporting on Tor — but cyberbullying any kind, whether by Tor’s defenders or critics, doesn’t help anyone.”

But for now, if she’s threatened, Shepard won’t just sit there and take it. “I’d unconditionally like a world with less violence too, but if someone punched me in the face I’d fight back.”



Whatever the moral dilemmas at play here, the ultimate irony remains: Becker would have most likely kept his identity secret if he’d used Tor.

• This article has been amended to remove the claim that Pando journalists were directly involved in a campaign of harassment, which Pando refutes. A comment from Pando has been added.