The infosec community has undergone a post-Weinstein cultural shift, as evidenced by the soul-searching following allegations against Morgan Marquis-Boire
of women using the tools that they're accused of not being competent to handle to share information about harassers— is beautiful. https://www.theverge.com/... pic.twitter.com/lSkRc3Vdt5 Sarah Jeong / @sarahjeong : Women keep asking me if anything will actually change after Weinstein. I always say yes, if only because infosec, of all f**king things, has changed. https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Sarah Jeong's argument lands two months after the moment that triggered it: when the sexual assault allegations surfaced, Morgan Marquis-Boire was dropped by EFF, First Look Media, and Citizen Lab within days — an unusually fast institutional severing in a field built on personal reputation. Her piece reframes that fallout as evidence of a broader post-Weinstein shift, noting that women in infosec are turning the community's own security tooling against harassers to share information about them.
What keeps this from being a closed chapter is the longer arc: eight years on, Marquis-Boire resurfaced as an undisclosed co-founder of crypto intelligence firm Unciphered, which raises the question of whether the 2017 reckoning changed hiring norms or just displaced them.
First-order effects
- Organizations like EFF, First Look, and Citizen Lab that severed ties set an immediate template other security employers and conference organizers now face pressure to follow when accusations surface against prominent researchers.
- Women in infosec are directly operationalizing the field's own tools — encryption and anonymous sharing — to document and circulate information about alleged harassers, bypassing official channels entirely.
Second-order effects
- Employers and funders in security now carry diligence risk around 'celebrated' researchers whose reputations were the credential, forcing formal vetting where informal trust once sufficed.
- A firm like Unciphered faces the reputational cost of an undisclosed co-founder with this record, making founder-background transparency a market differentiator in crypto intelligence and adjacent security startups.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, accountability in technical communities becomes enforced through the infrastructure itself — distributed documentation rather than HR process — while the Unciphered episode suggests enforcement stays uneven when figures re-enter under new corporate vehicles.
The trend: Security communities are shifting harassment accountability from institutional gatekeeping toward tool-enabled collective documentation, even as accused figures test those norms by quietly re-entering the industry.