Jacob Appelbaum

Early life and education

Appelbaum says he tested out of high school and attended junior college briefly before stopping college and continuing his education. In a 2010 Rolling Stone interview, he stated he comes from "a family of lunatics" and that his mother "is a paranoid schizophrenic" who insisted he had been molested by his father while still in the womb. He was taken away from his mother by his aunt when he was 6, placed in a children's home in Sonoma County at age 8, and his indigent father was awarded custody when he was 10.

According to Appelbaum, being introduced to computer programming by a friend's father saved his life: "The Internet is the only reason I'm alive today." He says he developed OCD at a young age and has stated his father, who struggled with heroin addiction, was murdered by poisoning. Starting in 2015, Appelbaum was a Ph.D. student at the Eindhoven University of Technology and received his Ph.D. in March 2022, with his dissertation titled "Communication in a world of pervasive surveillance."

Career

Appelbaum was among several people to gain access to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013. On 23 October 2013, he and other writers and editors at Der Spiegel reported that their investigations led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to confront the U.S. government over evidence it was monitoring her personal cell phone. The Der Spiegel team's reporting about Merkel earned the 2014 Henri Nannen prize for investigative journalism, which Appelbaum shared with Marcel Rosenbach, Jörg Schindler, and Holger Stark.

A few days later he provoked a furor by condemning Nannen for his Nazi collaboration, declaring 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 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.

On 3 July 2014, German broadcaster NDR/ARD carried disclosures by Appelbaum and others about the 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 and described how British and American intelligence used covert surveillance to target suspected Taliban fighters and drug smugglers for killing.

Surveillance, airport detention, and WikiLeaks investigation

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," and is a contributor to Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. In 2016, he was the object of allegations of sexual misconduct and alleged assault, with no formal charges filed. Within a short period around June 2016, Appelbaum withdrew or was asked to step down from many organizations for which he was well-known as a key member, as well as his employer Tor.

Tor performed an external investigation whose results supported the accusers, while Appelbaum denied the allegations. German press outlet Die Zeit defended Appelbaum, citing the lack of formal charges as well as inconsistencies and contradictions in the allegations. Appelbaum was defended by a group of female lawyers, activists and journalists with whom he had worked closely, who launched an online appeal for support to contest the allegations, voicing concerns about due process and trial by social media.

In 2024, a documentary about Appelbaum, Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum, directed and produced by Jamie Kastner, became available on Apple TV, showing his life in Berlin and challenges faced due to pressure from the United States Department of Justice to testify against Julian Assange.