Re: [tor-talk] Decoding Jake Appelbaum

[ja.talk <ja.talk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/tor-developer-jacob-appelbaum-resigns-amid-sex-abuse-claims/

Andy Greenberg

Tor Developer Jacob Appelbaum Resigns Amid Sex Abuse Claims

Jacob Appelbaum has courted controversy throughout his career as a privacy and transparency activist, picking fights with several of the worldâs most powerful government agencies over surveillance and state secrecy. Now heâs at the center of an entirely different sort of controversy: accused of rampant sexual and emotional abuse.

On Saturday, the privacy-focused non-profit Tor Project where Appelbaum held a position as a developer and activist released a statement explaining that Appelbaum had resigned from his position with the group as a result of a series of âserious, public allegations of sexual mistreatmentâ made by unnamed victims against 33-year-old Appelbaum. An anonymous website collecting testimonials from those alleged victims published the same day, with five victims detailing claims that range from uninvited groping and kissing to rape.

On Monday morning, Appelbaum responded to the accusations in a statement, calling them âa calculated and targeted attack [that] has been launched to spread vicious and spurious allegations against me.â He added, âI want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false.â His publicist Claudia Tomassini responded to WIREDâs request for comment from Appelbaum to say that his âlegal team is working on an injunction against these monstrous and factually incorrect accusations.â

WIRED couldnât independently verify the stories on the website created by Appelbaumâs accusers, who used pseudonyms, nor determine the creator of the site itself. But Andrea Shepard, a Berlin-based developer co-worker of Appelbaumâs at the Tor Project, says the site was created by a âlongtime member of the Tor communityâ whom she knows and trusts. Shepard also says sheâs spoken directly with one of Appelbaumâs alleged victims, who told Shepard in February of this year that Appelbaum had raped him or her. âSadlyâI think itâs the damn truth. Heâs a charismatic, socially dominant manipulator,â Shepard writes to WIRED. âI absolutely believe the accusers.â

Shepard says that Torâs management had suspected Appelbaum of sexual misconduct for months. And the revelation of another alleged victim in recent weeks had accelerated calls to force his resignation from the organization, a push led by Torâs executive Director Shari Steele. The Tor Projectâs statement, written by Steele herself, echoed that timeline. âThese types of allegations were not entirely new to everybody at Tor; they were consistent with rumors some of us had been hearing for some time. That said, the most recent allegations are much more serious and concrete than anything we had heard previously,â Steele writes. âWe are deeply troubled by these accounts.â

Hacker Elite

For years, Appelbaum has held near-rockstar status within the hacker community. In 2010 he keynoted the HOPE hacker conference, outing himself as a collaborator with WikiLeaksâits only publicly known American stafferâjust as it was ramping up its record-breaking Pentagon and State Department leaks. (A Rolling Stone magazine profile a couple of months later called him âthe most dangerous man in cyberspace.â)

Likely as a result of his WikiLeaks work, Google and his internet service provider Sonic.net received court orders demanding Appelbaumâs communications as part of a grand jury investigation in 2011. Appelbaum wasnât indicted, but has said that he was repeatedly harassed and detained at U.S. border crossings by agents of the Department of Homeland Securityâs Customs and Border Protection. To avoid run-ins with the American government, he moved to Berlin. As a hacker exile heâs continued to work for Tor and also contributed to the analysis and publication of NSA leaker Edward Snowdenâs classified documents, as well as other surveillance investigations in the German newspaper Der Spiegel.1

But Shepard, who also lives in Berlin, says she could see a pattern of troubling behavior that led her to distance herself from Appelbaum. In 2013, she recalls, Appelbaum told Shepard in a bar in front of another colleague that he was going to have sex with her, using a misogynistic phrase. In late 2014, she says he aggressively snatched a phone out of her hands at a hacker conference. And in the spring of last year she says he was suspended from his position at Tor for two weeks without pay due to a harassment incident.

A Familiar Pattern

The scandalâs implications could go well beyond the Tor Project, which maintains the highly-regarded Tor anonymity software. It also highlights the broader hacker communityâs long-running problem with sexism and sexual harassment. The notion, as Torâs executive director Steele wrote, that rumors about Appelbaum werenât new but had been ignored, portrays a community that turns a blind eye to the inequality or even mistreatment of women. As University of Pennsylvaniaâs well-known computer security professor Matt Blaze wrote on Twitter, âour community (larger than Tor) failed badly here.â

Torâs executive director Steele, meanwhile, urged in her note about Appelbaum that anyone who thinks they may be a victim of criminal behavior should talk to law enforcement. âGoing forward, we want the Tor community to be a place where all participants can feel safe and supported in their work,â she added. âWe are committed to doing better in the future.â

1Correction 6/6/2016 9:55am EST: An earlier version of the story said that Google and Sonic.net were subpoenaed for Appelbaumâs data in 2011, when in fact they received a 2703(d) court order.
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