In 2013, Appelbaum was one of a small group of journalists who had direct access to the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, he was then part of publication of the stories in Der Spiegel on U.S. spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on United Nations diplomats, and other stories. In 2014, Appelbaum was awarded the Henri Nannen Prize, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in Germany, for his work on the U.S-Merkel-spying story. Later that year, he accepted awards on-behalf of Snowden, who was marooned in Russia as an asylee.
In 2016 he was the object of allegations of sexual misconduct, and alleged assault.[10][6][11] No formal charges were filed. Within a short-period around June 2016, Appelbaum withdrew or was asked to step down from many of the organizations for which he was well-known as a key member, as well as his employer Tor.[12][7][13][14][15][16][17] Tor performed an external investigation the results of which supported the accusers.[18][19] Appelbaum denied the allegations.[20] German press outlet Die Zeit defended Appelbaum (who is a resident of Germany), citing the lack of formal charges by accusers, also inconsistencies and contradictions in the allegations.[21] Appelbaum was defended by a group of female lawyers, activists and journalists with whom he had worked closely.[22] These women launched an online appeal for support to contest the allegations, voicing concerns about due process, trial by social media, and questioning the claims[23][24]
Appelbaum says that he tested out of high school and attended junior college briefly before he "stopped college and continued [his] education".[26] In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, Appelbaum stated that he comes from "a family of lunatics... [a]ctual, raving lunatics". He stated that his mother "is a paranoid schizophrenic" who "insisted that Jake had somehow been molested by his father while he was still in the womb". He was taken away from his mother by his aunt when he was 6. Two years later, he was placed in a children's home in Sonoma County. At age 10, his indigent father was awarded custody of him. According to him, having been introduced to computer programming by a friend's father saved his life: "The Internet is the only reason I'm alive today."[2] Appelbaum says that he developed OCD at a young age. He has also stated that his father, who struggled with heroin addiction,[2] has been murdered by poisoning.[26][27]
On 23 October 2013, Appelbaum and other writers and editors at Der Spiegel reported that their investigations had led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to confront the U.S. government over evidence that it was monitoring her personal cell phone.[31] US President Barack Obama denied the report.[32] The Der Spiegel team reported on the resulting controversy and detailed a further claim that the Embassy of the United States, Berlin, was being used as a base of operations for electronic surveillance of its German ally.[33] The BBC's Damien McGuinness commented that "The scandal has caused one of the biggest diplomatic rifts between Germany and the U.S."[34] At the scandal's peak, Merkel compared the National Security Agency with the East German Stasisecret police during an angry conversation with Obama.[35]
The Der Spiegel team's reporting about Merkel earned the 2014 Henri Nannen prize[36] for investigative journalism. Appelbaum shared the prize with Der Spiegel writers and editors Marcel Rosenbach, Jörg Schindler[de], and Holger Stark[de]. A few days later he provoked a furor by condemning Nannen, the prize's namesake, for his Nazi collaboration,[37] declaring that he would have his bronze bust of Nannen melted down and recast, and donate his prize money to anti-fascist groups.[38][39]
On 28 December 2013, at the Chaos Communication Congress,[40][41] he presented documents showing that the NSA can turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and has developed devices to harvest electronic information from a computer even if the computer is not online. An investigative team at Der Spiegel, including Appelbaum, simultaneously published their findings,[42] along with a descriptive list of the surveillance devices making up the NSA ANT catalog.[43]
On 3 July 2014, German broadcaster NDR/ARD carried disclosures by Appelbaum and others about the operation of NSA's top-secret XKeyscore surveillance software, including source code proving that a computer of Appelbaum's had been targeted.[44][45]
On 28 December 2014, Der Spiegel again drew from the Snowden documents to assess the NSA's ability to crack encrypted Internet communications.[46] In a separate article, they described how British and American intelligence used covert surveillance to target, often inaccurately, suspected Taliban fighters and drug smugglers for killing.[47]
Appelbaum has appeared several times on Democracy Now! as a security researcher, privacy activist, and target of government surveillance.[48][49][50] He appeared with Julian Assange on Episode 8 & 9 of World Tomorrow, "Cypherpunks".[51]
In 2005, Appelbaum gave two talks at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress,[53]Personal Experiences: Bringing Technology and New Media to Disaster Areas, and A Discussion About Modern Disk Encryption Systems. At the 2006 23rd Chaos Communication Congress, he gave a talk with Ralf-Philipp Weinmann titled Unlocking FileVault: An Analysis of Apple's Encrypted Disk Storage System.[54][55]
Appelbaum has collaborated on several other high-profile research projects.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI),[65][66] founded in collaboration with Arturo Filastò to collect "data which will show an accurate topology of network surveillance, interference and outright censorship".[67]
Appelbaum is also a photographer who has contributed still photographs to film and game projects.[72] He exhibited his work in a solo show at NOME in 2016.[73]
Appelbaum appeared in Laura Poitras's Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour (2014),[74] which documents the public emergence of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the political circumstances leading to his actions. Appelbaum stars in Poitras's portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Risk (2016).[75] Appelbaum worked with Canadian film-maker Jamie Kastner for his documentary, "Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum." The film was screened for buyers in September 2023.[76]
Surveillance, airport detention, and WikiLeaks investigation
Appelbaum says he believes he has been under government surveillance since 2009, to the detriment of himself, his friends, and his close relations.[80] In interviews he has stated that living in Germany has given him a sense of relief from U.S. surveillance.[81] Appelbaum has described various aggressive surveillance events, and implies they are related to his work with WikiLeaks, to his privacy activism, and to relationships with other privacy activists, notably reporters linked to Edward Snowden.[80] In December 2013, Appelbaum said he suspected the U.S. government of breaking into his Berlin apartment and using his computer.[30]
While traveling, Appelbaum has been detained at airports and had his electronic equipment seized several times.[82][83][84][85]
In 2010, the US Department of Justice obtained a court order compelling Twitter to provide data associated with the user accounts of Appelbaum, as well as several other individuals associated with WikiLeaks. While the order was originally sealed, Twitter successfully petitioned the court to unseal it, permitting the company to inform its users that their account information had been requested.[49][86]
In 2015, it was revealed that Google had been forced to turn over information from his Gmail account.[88]
In 2019, he told reporters that he had been contacted by Alexandria prosecutors about cooperating with the WikiLeaks grand jury for immunity, but had refused.[89]
Allegations of sexual misconduct
In March 2015, Appelbaum was suspended from his position at the Tor Project for ten days due to alleged incidents of harassment.[90][91][92]
On 25 May 2016, Appelbaum stepped down from his position at Tor;[93][94][95] this was announced on 2 June by the non-profit in a short statement.[96] On 4 June, Shari Steele, the former executive director of the Tor Project, published a much longer statement, noting that although prior allegations of sexual abuse regarding Appelbaum were consistent with "rumors some of us had been hearing for some time" that "the most recent allegations are much more serious and concrete than anything we had heard previously."[6][97]
Also on 4 June, a website appeared with anonymous accounts of mistreatment by Appelbaum.[98] On 6 June, Appelbaum issued a statement denouncing the allegations as part of a concerted strategy to damage his reputation.[20][99][100] Security engineer Leigh Honeywell came forward on 7 June to publicly relate the website's stories with her relationship with Appelbaum, in which she described Appelbaum ignoring a safeword and becoming violent.[101] An anonymously leaked letter that the Tor Project's human resources manager had written to Appelbaum in conjunction with his March 2015 suspension for unprofessional conduct was published on 7 June.[91][92][102] On 15 June, Alison Macrina (the director of the Library Freedom Project) and Isis Lovecruft (a Tor developer) publicly announced that the website's anonymous accounts of sexual abuse, under the pseudonyms of "Sam" and "Forest", respectively, were their own.[14]
In response to the allegations, the Cult of the Dead Cow ejected Appelbaum on 7 June,[103][104] and the Freedom of the Press Foundation removed him from their volunteer technical advisory board on 8 June.[13][105]Noisebridge announced on 10 June that co-founder Appelbaum had triggered their Anti-Harassment policy and is "no longer welcome in our community, either in its physical or online spaces",[14][15] and on 17 June the Chaos Computer Club announced that he was not welcome.[16] On 18 June his status as a Debian project developer was revoked. On 1 July Linux Australia barred Appelbaum from future events.[106]
On 10 June, a woman whom three witnesses claimed to have seen being abused,[98] denied the abuse allegations.[107] In a statement released by Gizmodo journalist William Turton, she wrote that her experience was distorted and reported without her consent.[108] On 17 June 2016, activists, journalists and legal professionals supporting Appelbaum signed a document defending his right to due process, and deploring the story's treatment by social media.[24][23][22] In June 2016, the façade of the building in which Appelbaum's Berlin apartment is located was defaced in English and German with graffiti directly referencing the allegations.[109]
In July 2016, the Tor Project announced it had completed a seven-week investigation led by a hired investigator. According to Shari Steele, Tor Project "did everything in our power" to treat Mr. Appelbaum fairly, and "we determined that the allegations against him appear to be true."[18][19] "[19]
In July 2016, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that allegations against Appelbaum had been known in Berlin hacker circles for years. A hacker from Berlin told the newspaper that "I can feel a huge sense of relief that the silence has at last been broke."[110][111] On 11 August 2016, the German weekly Die Zeit published a lengthy investigation into the rape charges, including interviews with three people present at the scene of the alleged rape. None of these witnesses corroborated the claims made by the anonymous victim. The article also reports that a second falsely identified victim had demanded that her story be removed from the anonymous website.[21] A change in attitude in the information security community towards calling out known abusers and believing reports of sexual misconduct was partially credited to Appelbaum's precedent.[28]
In 2024, Jamie Kastner directed and produced the documentary "Nobody Wants to Talk about Jacob Appelbaum".[112] The documentary partly addresses the sexual misconduct allegations against Appelbaum. The documentary was presented at film festivals in the U.S.[113] and Canada.[114][115]
In 2012, he moved to Berlin.[80] He has stated that he does not want to go back to the United States because he doesn't feel safe there[117] and in interviews he has provided specific examples of experiences that left him feeling unsafe.[80]
The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
Andy Müller-Maguhn is a member of the German hacker association Chaos Computer Club (CCC). Having been a member since 1986, he was appointed as a spokesman for the club in 1990, and later served on its board until 2012. He runs a company that develops cryptophones.
Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Tails, or "The Amnesic Incognito Live System", is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity against surveillance. It connects to the Internet exclusively through the anonymity network Tor. The system is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB and never writes to the hard drive or SSD, leaving no digital footprint on the machine unless explicitly told to do so. It can also be run as a virtual machine, with some additional security risks.
The Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), now Computer Network Operations, and structured as S32, is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has been active since at least 1998, possibly 1997, but was not named or structured as TAO until "the last days of 2000," according to General Michael Hayden.
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
Tempora is the codeword for a formerly-secret computer system that is used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). This system is used to buffer most Internet communications that are extracted from fibre-optic cables, so these can be processed and searched at a later time. It was tested from 2008 and became operational in late 2011.
Sarah Harrison is a British former WikiLeaks section editor. She worked with the WikiLeaks' legal defence and has been described as Julian Assange's closest adviser. Harrison accompanied National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden on a high-profile flight from Hong Kong to Moscow while he was sought by the United States government.
XKeyscore is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.
During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
Global mass surveillance can be defined as the mass surveillance of entire populations across national borders.
The ANT catalog is a classified product catalog by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of which the version written in 2008–2009 was published by German news magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013. Forty-nine catalog pages with pictures, diagrams and descriptions of espionage devices and spying software were published. The items are available to the Tailored Access Operations unit and are mostly targeted at products from US companies such as Apple, Cisco and Dell. The source is believed to be someone different than Edward Snowden, who is largely responsible for the global surveillance disclosures during the 2010s. Companies whose products could be compromised have denied any collaboration with the NSA in developing these capabilities. In 2014, a project was started to implement the capabilities from the ANT catalog as open-source hardware and software.
Commentary on Edward Snowden's disclosure is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden.
This timeline of global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to the present day is a chronological list of the global surveillance disclosures that began in 2013. The disclosures have been largely instigated by revelations from the former American National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, Massachusetts. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.
Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its US premiere on October 10, 2014, at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014, at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour received critical acclaim upon release, and was the recipient of numerous accolades, including Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. This film is the third part to a 9/11 trilogy following My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010).
Angela Richter is a German-Croatian theatre director and author.
Risk is a 2016 American documentary film written and directed by Laura Poitras about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and received generally favorable reviews.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rich, Nathaniel (1 December 2010). "The American Wikileaks Hacker". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on 17 March 2015. Retrieved 3 July 2014. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way.
1 2 Fuchs, Christian; Weisbrod, Lars; Mondial, Sebastian (13 August 2016). "Jacob Appelbaum: What Has This Man Done?". Die Zeit. zeit.de. Number 34. Archived from the original on 13 August 2016. Retrieved 13 August 2016.
1 2 Riegel, Tobias (13 June 2016). "Die Presse und der Pranger"[The press and the pillory]. neues deutschland (in German). Archived from the original on 14 June 2016. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
↑ Appelbaum, Jacob; Horchert, Judith; Reissmann, Ole; Rosenbach, Marcel; Schindler, Jörg; Stöcker, Christian (30 December 2013). "NSA Secret Toolbox: ANT Unit Offers Spy Gadgets for Every Need". spiegel.de. Additional reporting my Andy Müller-Maguhn. Archived from the original on 5 September 2015. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
↑ Appelbaum, J.; Gibson, A.; Goetz, J.; Kabisch, V.; Kampf, L.; Ryge, L. (3 July 2014). "NSA targets the privacy-conscious". daserste.ndr.de. Archived from the original on 23 May 2016. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
↑ Appelbaum, Jacob; Gibson, Aaron; Grothoff, Christian; Müller-Maguhn, Andy; Poitras, Laura; Sontheimer, Michael; Stöcker, Christian (28 December 2014). "Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA's War on Internet Security". spiegel.de. Archived from the original on 24 January 2015. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
↑ Trevor, Timm (8 June 2016). "Statement on Jacob Appelbaum". Freedom of the Press Foundation. Archived from the original on 8 June 2016. Retrieved 8 June 2016.
↑ Sotirov, Alexander; Stevens, Marc; Appelbaum, Jacob; Lenstra, Arjen; Molnar, David; Osvik, Dag Arne; de Weger, Benne (30 December 2008). MD5 considered harmful today. Archived from the original on 20 September 2017. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
↑ "Jacob Appelbaum (Part 1/2) Digital Anti-Repression Workshop - April 26, 2012". YouTube. 27 April 2012. Archived from the original on 17 October 2013. Retrieved 28 June 2013. Like, for me, as an atheist, bisexual, Jew, I'm gonna go on, uh - oh and Emma Goldman is one of my great heroes and I really think that anarchism is a fantastic principle by which to fashion a utopian society even if we can't get there.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
