Appelbaum, Sandvik, and Snowden’s Links to WikiLeaks, TOR, and NSA Surveillance

73 Appelbaum was also well connected in this culture. He was the North American representative for Wikileaks before he moved to Berlin in 2013. He also managed Wikileaks’ cyber security when it released classified documents in Iceland in 2010. He was so well-regarded among hacktavists that Assange chose him as his keynote speaker replacement at the “Hackers of the Planet Earth” (HOPE) convention in New York City. Assange also sung his praises, telling Rolling Stone “Jake [Appelbaum] has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause.” For its part, Ro//ing Stone entitled its profile of Appelbaum, “Meet the most dangerous man on the Internet.” The reason that Assange needed a replacement for this particular event was that he feared he would be arrested if he came to New York because he had released the Manning files on Wikileaks. In Berlin, Appelbaum went to extreme lengths to protect himself from American surveillance. For example, when George Packer interviewed him for the New Yorker, in 2014, he insisted on meeting with Packer naked in a sauna so he could be sure Packer did not have a recording device (other than his notebook.) Appelbaum stated repeatedly in other interviews that he was being spied upon by America. While his claims may have sounded paranoid to his interviewers, as a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 famously said, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that you are not being followed.” In any event, Appelbaum acted to defeat the perceived surveillance. Runa Sandvik was another principal core developers in the TOR project in 2012. A Norwegian national in her mid-twenties, she wrote in 2012 a well-followed blog for Forbes on Internet privacy in which she identified herself as a privacy and security researcher working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. As a close associate of Appelbaum’s, she worked tirelessly to extend TOR’s cloak of anonymity against the surveillance of the NSA and other would-be intruders of privacy. Appelbaum and Sandvik shared another distinction. They both came in contact with Snowden before he went public and while he was still working for the NSA in Hawaii. Snowden was in 2012 a major advocate of TOR software. He made no secret of his concerns about it electronic interceptions. He even wore to work a jacket with a parody of the NSA insignia, which, instead of merely depicting the NSA eagle, show the eagle clutching AT&T phone lines. He had also become a member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the digital rights organization that was helping finance TOR. His efforts on behalf of TOR were not limited to symbolic gestures. Through his work as a system administrator for Dell, he had found documents revealing NSA efforts to defeat TOR’s ability to camouflage its user’s identity on the Internet. Though not yet successful, he found that the NSA was attempting to build back-door entry ways into TOR software. He also knew that the NSA was becoming increasingly hostile to the spread of TOR software. One of the NSA documents that he illicitly downloaded was entitled “TOR Stinks.” It described the NSA’s enormous but not fully successful efforts to penetrate TOR servers. In addition, he downloaded NSA documents describing programs begun in 2012 that aimed at searching the Internet for the cyber-signatures of foreign parties suspected of hacking into US government systems. So he knew that the NSA considered the TOR movement an enemy. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020225