Jacob Appelbaum Biography
Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He was born on April 1, 1983, U.S.A. He was put into the custody of his aunt at the age of six before being put into a children’s home in California. Jacob Appelbaum remained in there until his father (a heroin addict) was awarded custody of him. Jacob Appelbaum was introduced to electronics, computers, and the internet by a friend of his father. He says that introduction saved his life.
He started and then abandoned college so as to, according to him, “continue his education”. At 20 years of age, he moved to Oakland to work with the Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace as a technologist and activist.
Jacob Appelbaum Age
Born on April 1, 1983, U.S.A, Jacob Appelbaum is 35 years old as of 2018.
Jacob Appelbaum Citizenfour
Jacob Appelbaum appeared in the Academy Award-winning film, Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour of 2014. The film is about the the NSA spying scandal and Edward Snowden. The documentary begins in Hong Kong where Snowden leaks thousands of highly classified documents from the NSA. Edward Snowden worked for a contractor contracted by the NSA after leaving the CIA. Citizenfour won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Oscars.
Jacob Appelbaum Egypt
Jacob Appelbaum addressed a workshop for Arab bloggers in Beirut in 2009. The American programmer spent 2008 in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia and Hong Kong training communities and activists how to evade government efforts to track their movements online by use of computer program, Tor.
Activists, journalists and revolutionaries have been under fire particularly in the Arab countries, Middle East and China as a result of Government crackdowns. Committee to Protect Journalists reported that authorities in this region imprisoned at least 100 bloggers in 2010 making anonymity a matter of personal safety. “Tor allows people to do things on the internet without leaving a trace,” Jacob Appelbaum said at the workshop.
Jacob Appelbaum GitHub | Rape Allegations
Rape allegations and investigations into Jacob Appelbaum’s sexual conduct occasioned unrest within the Tor community with calls for a one-day Tor strike being issued via GitHub in August 2016. GitHub is an electronic facilitating administration for adaptation control utilizing Git. It is for the most part utilized for PC code. It offers the majority of the conveyed rendition control and source code the executives (SCM) usefulness of Git just as including its own highlights.
GitHub offers several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project While providing access control.
Jacob Appelbaum Interview
(www.exberliner.com)
Last year, you decided to move to Berlin after years of harassment by the US government. Why then?
I had enough. For years I had terrible interactions with the police, with border control, with the FBI. All sorts of different encounters that my family had experienced, that my partner had experienced, who is no longer my partner now partially due to this stress. Unbelievable things really.
Can you tell me about one of these unbelievable things?
Sure. A couple of years ago my mother was arrested in a small town in California. This is not necessarily out of the ordinary for her, she is a troubled person. But the police kicked down the door and arrested her on the toilet and dragged her out of the apartment while recording the entire happening on an audio recorder. I flew to California to try and bail her out of jail. I thought that this is just what would happen to any person’s mother in these sort of circumstances.
But it became increasingly clear to me that there was something else happening by the way that they treated her. She was handcuffed and tied down; her wrists and ankles and waist were all chained together. At one point she was interrogated about my role in WikiLeaks. I had never told my mother about Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. She doesn’t use the internet.
So they transferred her to a mental hospital eventually. I met her there and she told me that they were drugging her against her will. They had been given an order by the judge to forcibly drug her. They interrogated her again about my role in WikiLeaks. She spent 18 months in jail without a trial. She has been on probation for three years and because I have left the US, I haven’t seen her in this period of time. It is a very sad situation.
You were also followed, harassed…
When I was in Iceland, I received a panicked message. My now ex-fiancée had woken up with men wearing night vision goggles watching her sleep in her home. When we travelled together, I would go through customs with her and they would literally take me away in front of her and deny to her that I existed. I experienced this for years.
When did it start?
It really started in 2009, but I had been very quiet about it. It really started to heat up in 2010 and 2011 and got gradually worse. In May 2013 I had dinner with my aforementioned ex-girlfriend, and at this dinner we were physically followed by at least two agents we think were with the FBI. We negotiated over the internet to have dinner at a specific restaurant at a specific time and she picked me up and we drove there. The email was encrypted and we used all sorts of stuff, but it’s clear that both of our computers were probably compromised and they knew everything. What is weird is that we didn’t go to the restaurant that we planned on.
At the last second I had a nervous twitch and I said, let’s take a left right here and go to this restaurant. And not 10 minutes later a guy with a buzz cut sits down right next to us, puts his cell on the table, the microphone of his phone directly pointed at me. Twenty minutes later a woman comes and sits down next to him. And she also puts her cell phone on the table. They pretended to be on a first date but they never said anything about what they do, why she was late… At some point my fiancée really broke down crying from the pressure. The day before, Laura Poitras had come to visit us in Seattle. So it’s quite clear that this surveillance had been linked, they wanted to know what had happened with Laura. And of course that wasn’t the topic of our dinner conversation.
Was it during the Snowden revelations?
No, Laura was just visiting me. Laura and I have been dear friends for a long time. That kind of harassment started much before Snowden. And this led me to realise that when these leaks started coming out, something big was happening. When we learned about Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, I was actually in Munich – on my way to Seattle from a trip to India. A friend from the Chaos Computer Club walked up to me while I was having dinner and he said to me, “Did you hear the source of the leaks?” I was travelling with Laura’s producer Caity, and we were filming together… I think she even filmed me loading the page of The Guardian, learning the name of Edward Snowden and learning why we couldn’t reach Laura all that time. I put everything together and realised that if I were to go back now, these years of harassment about WikiLeaks would be nothing compared to what was coming next. So I cancelled my return flight and I never went home again. That was in early June of 2013.
All those years of harassment – it was because of your involvement with WikiLeaks?
The data trail you leave behind tells a story about you, but not necessarily one that is true. Even if it’s made up of facts. For years the US government harassed me because they thought Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, had given me documents. But that is not true.
How do you know they thought that?
Because they dragged friends of mine into a grand jury in Virginia and threatened them with indefinite detention if they did not testify against me, waive their constitutional liberties and talk about me specifically. When I realised that they had a completely incorrect theory and that they tried to destroy my life for years, I thought to myself that there will be no end to what they do to harass and to destroy. So, I felt I shouldn’t return.
So why Berlin?
I feel safer in East Berlin as an immigrant than I ever have as a citizen in the United States. Berlin has an incredible culture of resistance. I have been coming to Berlin for many years because of the Chaos Computer Club, and I’ve worked with Der Spiegel in the context of WikiLeaks. I have a lot of close friends here in the art world and in the computer hacker world and in the journalistic world. I exist at the intersection of those three worlds, and Berlin makes me very happy.
Jacob Appelbaum Tattoo
Applebaum has a Tor tattoo on his upper left arm.
Jacob Appelbaum Twitter
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