Jacob Appelbaum

Early life and education

Appelbaum says that he tested out of high school and attended junior college briefly before he "stopped college and continued my education." In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, Appelbaum revealed that "I come from a family of lunatics... [a]ctual, raving lunatics." He stated that his mother "is a paranoid schizophrenic. She 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. Having been introduced to computer programming by a friend's father, Appelbaum said, saved his life. "The Internet is the only reason I'm alive today."

As of 1 September 2015, Appelbaum is a Ph.D. student studying under Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Journalism

Appelbaum was among several people to gain access to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013. He has contributed extensively as a journalist to the publication of those documents.

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. US President Barack Obama issued an ambiguously worded denial and apology. 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. The BBC commented that "This scandal has caused one of the biggest diplomatic rifts between Germany and the U.S. in recent years." At the scandal's peak, Merkel compared the National Security Agency with the East German Stasi secret police during an angry conversation with Obama.

The Der Spiegel team's reporting about Merkel earned the 2014 Henri Nannen prize for investigative journalism. Appelbaum shared the prize with Der Spiegel writers and editors Marcel Rosenbach, Jörg Schindler, and Holger Stark. A few days later he provoked a furor by condemning Nannen, the prize's namesake, for his Nazi collaboration, declaring that he would have his bronze bust of Nannen melted down and recast, and donate his prize money to anti-fascist groups.

On 28 December 2013, at the Chaos Communication Congress, 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, along with a descriptive list of the surveillance devices making up the NSA ANT catalog.

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.

On 28 December 2014, Der Spiegel again drew from the Snowden documents to assess the NSA's ability to crack encrypted Internet communications. 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.

Appelbaum has appeared several times on Democracy Now! as a security researcher, privacy activist, and target of government surveillance. He appeared with Julian Assange on Episode 8 & 9 of World Tomorrow, "Cypherpunks".

He is a contributor to Julian Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet along with Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.

Appelbaum was a member of the outside volunteer technical advisory board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation until 8 June 2016.

Technology

In 2005, Appelbaum gave two talks at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, Personal Experiences: Bringing Technology and New Media to Disaster Areas, and A Discussion About Modern Disk Encryption Systems. The former covered his travels to Iraq—crossing the border by foot, the installing of Internet satellites in Kurdistan, and his visit of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. The latter talk discussed the legal and technical aspects of full disk encryption. 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. The duo subsequently released the VileFault free software program which broke Apple's FileVault security.

Appelbaum has collaborated on several other high-profile research projects.

Appelbaum regards Tor as a "part of an ecosystem of software that helps people regain and reclaim their autonomy. It helps to enable people to have agency of all kinds; it helps others to help each other and it helps you to help yourself. It runs, it is open and it is supported by a large community spread across all walks of life."

Appelbaum was a Debian developer from 16 September 2013 to 18 June 2016.

Applebaum was also a keynote speaker at Consilience 2013, organised by National Law School of India University, Bengaluru on Data Protection and Cyber-Security in India.

Art

Appelbaum has taken part in a number of art projects with dissident artists including Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, Ai Weiwei, and Angela Richter. His art often straddles the borders of art, politics, and technology and has given rise to projects such as Panda to Panda (P2P) and the Autonomy Cube.

Appelbaum is also a photographer who has contributed still photographs to film and game projects. He exhibited his work in a solo show at NOME in 2016.

Appelbaum appeared in Laura Poitras's Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour (2014), 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).

He was an artist in residence for the art group monochrom in 2006.

Activism

Appelbaum represented Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a keynote address at the 2010 HOPE conference. FBI agents were planning to detain him after his talk, but organizers slipped him out through an alternative exit in disguise.

In August 2013, Appelbaum delivered Edward Snowden's acceptance speech after he was awarded the biannual Whistleblower Prize by a group of NGOs at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Surveillance, airport detention, and Wikileaks investigation

Appelbaum believes he has been under government surveillance since 2009, to the detriment of himself, his friends, and his close relations. In interviews he has stated that living in Germany has given him a sense of relief from U.S. surveillance. 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. In December 2013, Appelbaum said he suspected the U.S. government of breaking into his Berlin apartment.

While traveling, Appelbaum has been detained at airports and had his electronic equipment seized several times.

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.

In September 2013, he testified before the European Parliament, mentioning that his partner had been spied on by men in night-vision goggles as she slept.

In December 2013, Appelbaum told Berliner Zeitung that he believes he was under surveillance and that somebody broke into his Berlin apartment and used his computer.

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.

On 25 May 2016, Appelbaum stepped down from his position at Tor; this was announced on 2 June by the non-profit in a terse statement. On 4 June, Shari Steele, the 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."

Also on 4 June, a website appeared with anonymous accounts of mistreatment by Appelbaum. 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. On 15 June, Alison Macrina (the director of the Library Freedom Project) and Isis Agora Lovecruft publicly announced that the website's anonymous accounts of sexual abuse, under the pseudonyms of "Sam" and "Forest," respectively, were their own.

On 6 June, Appelbaum issued a statement denouncing the allegations as part of a concerted strategy to damage his reputation.

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.

In response to the allegations, the Cult of the Dead Cow ended their association with Appelbaum on 7 June, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation removed him from their volunteer technical advisory board on 8 June. 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," and on 17 June the Chaos Computer Club announced that he was not welcome. On 18 June his status as a Debian GNU/Linux project developer was revoked. On 1 July Linux Australia barred Appelbaum from future events.

On 10 June, Jill Bähring, a woman whom three witnesses claimed to have seen being abused, flatly denied the abuse allegations. In a statement released by Gizmodo journalist William Turton, Bähring wrote: "Reading this highly distorted version of my experience, which is being used as one of the 'bulletproof examples' of Jacob's alleged misbehavior, I can’t help but wonder. Wonder about all the stories that have been published the last days. Wonder not only about mob justice on twitter, caused by rumors and speculation, but also about the accounts repeated by those who call themselves journalists. Wonder about how many other stories have been willingly misinterpreted. Wonder about the witnesses in all these stories, who coincidentally always seem to consist of the same set of people. Wonder about their motive to speak on my behalf without my consent."

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.

In June 2016, Appelbaum's Berlin apartment was defaced in English and German with graffiti directly referencing the allegations.

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, but "we determined that the allegations against him appear to be true." According to her summary of the investigation, which was not released, "many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied, and frightened" by Jacob Appelbaum, and that "several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him." Steele made no mention of rape claims published on the anonymous website. Steele alleged that two other unnamed individuals had also been involved in inappropriate behavior are no longer part of the project. Among other changes, Steele stated that an anti-harassment policy has been drafted.

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.

As of August 2016 the affair remains the cause of considerable dissent within the Tor community, with calls for a one-day Tor strike being issued via GitHub (and later on Twitter with the hashtag #TorStrike). Appelbaum has not endorsed this action.

Personal life

Appelbaum is an atheist of Jewish background and identifies himself as queer. Politically, he is an anarchist.

In 2012 he moved to Berlin, where he works under a freelance visa; he has stated that he doesn't want to go back to the U.S. because he doesn't feel safe there and in interviews he has provided specific examples of experiences that left him feeling unsafe. Appelbaum also notes strong German privacy protections as reasons for preferring to live in Germany, as opposed to the United States.