LMAO. Cedars on the other AAWA thread:
"decisions are not made by me, but by the board. AAWA is a group effort. I have one vote on the board like every other board member."
Cedars on this thread:
"I won't post on this subject anymore. I've investigated people's concerns and found that no faders are at risk."
Well, I know *I* feel so much better that Cedars has investigated and decided that nobody is at risk.
Of course, he's decided this despite the fact that Juan Viejo admitted that WT apologists and people with no history of JW activism were part of those 1,000 force-added. So now, we know that whether the group is "secret" or not, a bunch of faders are in there with a bunch of WT apologists and JW elder moles who all got rolled up in it together, who now have access to all of their names and info. The kind of people who post on witnesswatchdog.blogspot.com and "out" apostates. We know this, it's not in dispute, Juan admitted it right here on page 2 of this thread. J_ _ _ _ B_ _ _ _ _ _ D_ _ _ _ _ _ had her name posted on Witness Watchdog and she was not happy about it, so she should be sensitive to privacy worries. And she chose to join JW activist groups which likely had moles; she wasn't even force-added.
What about faders who were force-added who are married to believing JWs? I know of at least one person who was force-added who is married to a JW wife. What if your JW spouse has access to your Facebook account? Many spouses do share access to social media accounts. You could just be some poor schmuck who got rolled up in the 1,000 auto-added people, and don't realize it, and then your JW husband/wife logs on and figures it out. In a group of 1,000 strangers, is AAWA really prepared to say that's not a possibility or even a probability? All of this "prove to me that damage is done" crap is besides the point. The point is that as a nonprofit human rights organization, you are supposed to prevent risk and damage in the first place.
People are still coming out of the woodwork who were force-added and haven't realized it yet, because Facebook doesn't send you an email notification. Noni is the latest; she didn't realize until yesterday, and only when she read about the snafu on JWN and went to go check. A post buried in your timeline telling people they are free to leave if they want to is simply not sufficient.
A friend of mine who was force-added contacted AAWA and received an email back from Juan Viejo yesterday which basically told her she should be just happy with leaving the group. He said that removing the 1,000 force-added people would be like "burning down a perfectly good house just because there was initially a flaw in the security alarm. We're not going to burn down our house." A very Watchtower analogy, actually. Oversimplified, false premise, and ignoring glaring flaws.
They just don't get it. Nobody's asking AAWA to "burn down their house"...they never bought that house to begin with! They're putting out this persecution narrative that is just false. You can have your group, but ethics require that you do it the right way. You don't get to keep those 1,000 force-added people and put even a few of them at risk, or even just inconvenience them by claiming them as "members" on a group they never agreed to sign up to. (They keep saying "we have over 1300 members!!!" to establish credibility, but that's not true. Whether their names can be seen publicly or not, 1,000 people never agreed to sign up to that group; they are not "members". It seems abundantly clear to almost everybody here that this is the point. AAWA didn't earn those members, they didn't do it the ethical (read: hard) way that the rest of us with groups did. But for them to do the right thing, they know that they'll lose bragging rights over the "viral phenomenon" they previously claimed they had started. Turned out that wasn't the case, and we all know it now.
One last thing...the issue of liability. Heading a nonprofit, legally incorporated organization means that you can be held liable, of course, for damage or potential damage. Interestingly, though he is so cavalier with the privacy of 1,000 people, Cedars has a death-grip on his own privacy and is fiercely protective of it. He has said multiple places that "John Cedars" is a pseudonym. So he's deep undercover (which is his own business), but the trouble comes in when he wants to head a nonprofit organization. If people are damaged by this fiasco and want to know who to hold accountable, how can they do that?
When others pointed out that Cedars uses his pseudonym on AAWA's official articles of incorporation paperwork, and an address which is not his own, but Richard Kelly's (scroll to the "articles of incorporation" box and click the button labeled "document number 04184930"...it's on page 2 of that document), that seemed to me like it couldn't possibly be legal. So I dropped a line to the Arizona Corporations Commission to see if corporate officers are allowed to use a pseudonym on the incorporation paperwork, which requests the real names and addresses of all officers/directors. The answer landed in my inbox this morning:
"It is a felony to misrepresent information on documents submitted to us. If you go to the first link below, click on the statute link on the left, click on the corporate statues and do a search under misrepresentation, you will find some matches. This includes ARS 10-202 (i) and I copied that part below.
I. Any person who executes or contributes information for a certificate of disclosure and who intentionally makes any untrue statement of material fact or withholds any material fact with regard to the information required in subsection D, paragraph 1 of this section is guilty of a class 6 felony."
Hm. Very, very interesting.
Is it clear yet that AAWA has no freaking clue what they are doing? This simply wasn't thought out at all, and they are not only putting people at risk and being heels about it, but they're also hurting themselves as an organization and destroying all credibility by cutting corners.
...OUTLAW