Alright. Finally got to a computer.
So here's my thing, Rationalizer. I don't think you did anything actually wrong, and I said so earlier. But you're also not giving off the impression of someone who was looking out for Hamza, and yet you're saying that you were.
I wasn't, and I am not saying I was. I looked out of curiosity to see if anyone calling for death for adulterers was in fact a secret adulterer. Didn't expect to find anyone, but when I did my actions from that point on were constrained by what I felt was common decency rather than my desire to out him as a hypocrite.
I can understand why some people find that a stretch. And I think stuff like this makes us look bad, along with most of the behavior I see when ex-Muslims/atheists try to engage Tzortzis (constantly commenting on their pages trying to lure them into debates, trying to force them to debate with us by employing, say, passages of the Quran about concealing the truth and other just off-color tactics). But that's my opinion. And I and others have gone into this in more detail previously in the thread. That's not on your shoulders, more of a general commentary that this thread started leaning towards, but nevertheless a real concern of mine.
I've pestered him because he has misled people about me to make me look like a coward and then chickened out. I wanted to make sure people didn't forget it. I see nothing wrong with it, he has a block button that he chose not to use.
So back to you specifically. First of all, one of our mods asked you why you care about this so much. I think that was a fair question, and your response to him was pretty rude.
Yeah, but it clearly wasn't a polite and genuine query, it was a question loaded with judgement. Why am I so interested that someone publicly inviting people to implement a law system that punishes adulterers with death and is on a website for adulterers? Come on, do I really need to answer such a stupid question?
You also didn't answer my question, which is why you're searching for these figures in the first place. Is it to help them out? It must be, because apparently you were going to take finding them on the database to the grave, or so you seem to be saying. And you just posted on twitter today that you did it to help Tzortzis out. And you're still continuing to help these people out, because you're asking around for a full database that is hard for you to find so that you can presumably perform more searches on them and warn them.
Again for personal curiosity. If he was on there I would tell him. I wouldn't take it to my grave, I'd discuss it privately with a few close friends (as I did).
I'll be honest: I have a hard time imagining that that's the case. Considering the really crappy way you say he's treated you, I can't imagine that you did this research to help Tzortzis out. Perhaps you searched for him the first time out of curiosity and you genuinely thought that you should warn him and do the right thing.
Indeed, that is exactly the case, which is why H knew immediately what I had found, close friends the next day, and everyone else read only specific information from me *after* that information had already been made public knowledge by H himself or, in the case of the news article, where I corrected the article because the author refused to change his article to stop it from making assumptions that were logically inconsistent. If there is one thing people should know about me by now is that I am strongly driven by correcting misinformation, if it hadn't been for that article I wouldn't have written anything else on the matter.
That I could've seen. Until you started asking around about the adultfriendfinder leak. You're going through all this trouble for someone who treated you like shit? That makes you a better man than I. In fact, that makes you a better man than pretty much all of them. And that, I hope you can understand, is part of what's hard for me and people who doubt your stated motivations to wrap our heads around.
Someone asked if H was on AFF too. I was just curious. If he was then yes, I would have emailed him and said nothing about it in public, just to a select few friends. What they did with the information was up to them, but we discussed it and were in agreement that it wasn't the kind of thing we do. But don't take my word for it, please feel free to contact Peter Thurston (who has already made a video about this), StopSpamming, and DPRJones.
Okay, so now there's other little things. You tweet as soon as it's out that it's Hamza you'd caught. You write a comment on Hamza's facebook statement prompting him to thank you for giving him the opportunity to make the statement.
Yes, I wanted him to thank me. Considering how nice I'd been to him when he didn't deserve it I wanted him to publicly thank me for being decent to him, so that he could at least put the record somewhat straighter than he had left it. Yes, I did want the guy who dishonestly portrayed me as a lying coward to publicly acknowledge that I am in fact a decent person. So what?
You say you want to dispel misinformation published by this god-awful trainwreck of a blog by writing your own article, which again, I could've believed was totally noble if you'd just pointed out that no, it wasn't email verified, and left it at that, instead of taking the opportunity to tell the tale of you catching Tzortzis.
That was the purpose of the blog, but I tend to get carried away with the details. Same response as above really.
I'm thinking about this from the perspective of Tzortzis for a second. So if someone that I totally fucking hated, who I thought was obsessed with me, who I called a troll and whatever else he's called you, heard about this Ashley Madison leak and decided to go search for me there (was he an easy find or did you have to use more than one of his emails?)
30 second search for the name Tzortzis. It really wasn't difficult, it was very basic data searching.
and finds me, and decides to reach out and tell me to make a public statement,
Correction. I told him privately. I suggested he might want to make a public statement to pre-empt other people finding the information and portraying it in a biased way. I didn't tell him to do anything. I didn't even know he had done it. All I did was sit in front of my laptop importing data and running queries for him whenever he emailed me with a question. Evil wicked me. Tell you what, try emailing H and ask him for his position on what I did. His opinion is the complete opposite of the crap I am getting in here.
and then he makes a passive-aggressive comment publicly prompting me to reluctantly thank him for doing me this huge favor, and then he makes a blog post detailing how he caught me and giving his commentary on the issue,
Oh, you mean the one where I analyse the same information as in a news article and point out the flaw in their claim that the account holder had access to H's email account? Again, I am so evil.
I also wouldn't be the most grateful person in the world. I know how it looks to Tzortzis and his supporters that you did this and then claimed to be helping him. I don't think it was necessarily wrong, but I'm also having a hard time believing that you were just being a nice guy here.
No, I looked for a laugh expecting to find nobody at all. When I found him I just did what I felt was right. I have morals, sorry if it disappoints you if I acted in a way opposite to what my irrational emotions were telling me to.
If I were a betting man, what you said in your last paragraph up there is probably closer to the truth. Tzortzis is a pain in the ass, glorifies some terrible shit, you catch him red-handed, it's fair game. I'd agree. And to give him the opportunity to make a statement first is very good of you and more than you'd owe him by far. I'd agree with that, too. But anything beyond that is where you lose me.
Frankly, I don't care.
Anyway, you're the one who knows what's going on in your head, and I don't. If you truly do just have this dude's back and you're that nice of a guy, I do sincerely apologize. Like I said, I do like you and I usually like your work. But hopefully you can understand why it's hard for some people to believe. Saying, “Yes, I found him, and I consider it fair game. I did give him time to make a statement first, though,” would have changed how I'm looking at this situation completely.
That was my initial intention, but then I just decided he could be someone else's fair game. I sat back and wondered who would be the first person to find him on there and how long it would take. Would I have kept quiet forever? I have no idea, but I know that at the time I didn't want to be the person who aired his dirty washing in public, the idea made me feel unclean somehow.
In any case, this is just my opinion. Don't let it get you disappointed. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and you know best.
In closing, I really wish I could share my private emails with H during these events. I am confident you'd read through them and see what judgemental shits some of you are being. As for "bringing the forum into disrepute". Although he didn't go and consult law books first, DPR (a barrister who recently passed the bar with distinction) agreed that only the hack itself was illegal, there is nothing illegal about downloading it, the hack itself was illegal because it was a breach of the data protection act, but the information is not "copyrighted". Add this to the fact that my actions so far with the AM data have been pretty damned decent it seems that "bringing the forum into disrepute" means nothing more than doing something someone else doesn't like the sound of because I am being judged by the intentions of their standards rather than the evidence of my own.
Anyone who doesn't like it can, as Hitchens once said, "Take a ticket, get in line, and kiss my ass". I don't care about your imagined moral superiority.
Topic: Ashley Madison FUN PIT!