Jacob Applebaum is a journalist, privacy advocate, co-developer of the Tor Project and an active contributor to WikiLeaks. A person personally acquainted with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. The actor who played himself in the documentary Citizenfour. Snowden's Truth."
Biography
Jacob was born on April 1, 1983 in the northern United States of America. The family of the famous hacker can hardly be called prosperous; later he himself described it as a family of "real lunatic ravers" and had good reasons for that. The father suffered from alcohol and drug addiction, and the mother was sick with paranoid schizophrenia. In such conditions, the future human rights defender lived up to 6 years, after which two years of life with his aunt followed. But in 1991, a woman placed the child in an orphanage in California, it was there that an eight-year-old boy carried out his first hacking experience and, having hacked the institution's security system, spent an unforgettable day outside the orphanage.
However, two years later, the father returned his son through the court. Life with his drug-addicted father was far from sweet, and in high school, the guy dropped out of school without even receiving a basic education. One of his friends taught him the basics of programming, and the Internet became the only outlet for the teenager. “Then I felt that the world is not quite a black place. The Internet is the only reason why I am alive,”he later said in one of his interviews.
Publication of Edward Snowden's Papers
Active participation in hacker communities defending freedom on the Internet, helped the journalist in June 2013 to gain access to the full database of documents of former NSA and CIA officer Edward Snowden. On the basis of these materials, Applebaum prepared several articles for one of the most important information and political magazines in Germany "Der Spiegel" (Der Spiegel). Then at the World Congress of Hackers (Chaos Communication Congress), he accused the US National Security Agency of organizing the control of smartphones without the knowledge of their users. In August 2013, Jacob spoke on behalf of Edward Snowden at the biennial Informant Award from a civil society group at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. In September of the same year, he testified in the European Parliament that Snowden was being followed using night vision devices.
Working on the Tor project
For the first time after the launch, due to the active opposition of the governments of different countries, the anonymous Tor network was associated by ordinary people with illegal sites like Silk Road, specializing in the sale of drugs, weapons and even human organs. Largely thanks to the vigorous activity of Jacob Applebaum, ordinary Internet users became interested in the anonymous network as a means of escaping the surveillance of special services.
To transport the system abroad, we had to resort to rather interesting methods. “I borrowed some ideas from drug couriers,” Jake later admitted, showing the journalist a coin with a hidden memory card. The developer also made a significant contribution to the adaptation of the system for devices based on the Linux system, modified many vulnerabilities of the system and ensured its stable operation. The career of an anonymous network developer ended on May 25, 2016, due to numerous accusations of sexual harassment by colleagues, which the project management considered dangerous enough for the reputation of Tor. At the same time, the hacker himself completely denies all the accusations, calling them an information attack by influential people from the American special services.
Collaboration with Julian Assange
Julian Assange and Jacob Applebaum have a long-standing friendship. The first experience of joint activities was participation in the eighth and ninth episodes of the BBC program "World Tomorrow" in 2012. In addition to Assange and Applenbaum, Andy Müller-Magun and Jeremiah Zimmerman took part in the cybersecurity dialogue. In the same year, the journalist co-authored Julian Assange on Cypherpunks: freedom and the Future of the Internet.
After accusations by the Swedish authorities against Assange and his forced imprisonment in the London Embassy of Ecuador, Jacob remained loyal to his partner and actively defended him. Another common link in the biographies of Assange and Applebaum is the joint work at WIkiIeaks. Jacob is the only American who openly spoke about his collaboration with the site, he joined the work in 2010 and took the most direct part in the high-profile scandal that erupted after the publication of a video recording made on July 12, 2007. The footage shows how two Apache helicopters participating in the combat operation opened fire from 30mm automatic cannons at a group of Iraqis on a Baghdad street. 12 people were killed, among whom were Reuters correspondent 22-year-old Namir Nur-Eldin and his driver 40-year-old Said Khma. When a minibus approached the wounded, the helicopter pilots shot him too. After the shooting, the US infantry arrived at the scene, the footage shows that the soldiers carried the dead children out of the minibus.
Where does Jacob Applebaum live today?
After US law enforcement made several attempts to arrest the journalist and in 2011 secured the right to receive his data from Twitter, the hacker decided to change his place of residence and moved to Germany.
