Refusing to stop crimes against humanity connotes complicity in crimes against humanity

Jacob Appelbaum and his words

“I believe we are complicit in crimes against humanity when we know about them and when we don’t stop them. … It is quite clear that every single person in this room has in some way contributed to the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan

“…I wonder how you all feel about knowing that you were the ones, I am the one who has funded every bullet that has shot a child and every woman who has to come home to a family that has been decimated by troops…

“Where there is no justice

“Where people don’t have recourse of any kind whatsoever where the standard operating procedure is for someone to take a 50 caliber machine gun and shoot across the engine block and kill the driver.” 

“… When you are talking about how some information might be worth hiding and maybe there are some times when some secrets should be kept—

Remember, what you’re saying is that someone else is more qualified to make a decision than you are—

This is an extremely anti-democratic thought process and

You should reject it.” 

B

io briefly

American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker, Jacob Appelbaum “has displayed his art in a number of institutions across the world and has collaborated with artists such as Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, and Ai Weiwei.”

He is “known for representing WikiLeaks”; has been “employed by the University of Washington”; “was a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity”; and has had his “journalistic work published in many news sources including Der Spiegel, its online sibling “Spiegel Online, “known in German-speaking countries mostly for its investigative journalism.”

S

alient events

2005: Appelbaum speaks “at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress” on “Bringing Technology and New Media to Disaster Areas” and “Modern Disk Encryption Systems”

2010: Appelbaum represents “Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a keynote address at the HOPE conference. FBI agents were planning to detain him after his talk, but organizers disguised him and slipped him out through an alternative exit.”

2012: Appelbaum is a contributor (with Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann) to Julian Assange’s published work Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

2013: Applebaum gives keynote speech on “Data Protection and Cyber-Security in India at ‘Consilience 2013’ organized by National Law School of India University, Bengaluru,” capital city of the Indian state of Karnataka.

2013: Appelbaum is among several people to gain access to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s top secret documents released in 2013”; and, as a journalist, Appelbaum “has contributed extensively to the publication of those documents.”

August 2013: Appelbaum delivers “Edward Snowden’s acceptance speech after he (Snowden) was awarded the biannual Whistleblower Prize by a group of NGOs at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.”

October 23, 2013: Appelbaum and other writers and editors at Der Spiegel report that “their investigations had led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to confront the U.S. government over evidence that it was monitoring her personal cell phone.” US President Barack Obama issues “an ambiguously worded denial and apology.”

December 28 2013: at the Chaos Communication Congress, Appelbaum presents documents showing that the NSA can turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and (NSA) has developed devices to harvest electronic information from a computer even if the computer is not online.” A Der Spiegel investigative team, including Appelbaum, publishes simultaneously “findings (and) a descriptive list of the surveillance devices making up the NSA ANT catalog.”

[NSA ANT catalog: “a 50-page classified document listing technology available to the United States National Security Agency (NSA) Tailored Access Operations (TAO) by the Advanced Network Technology (ANT) Division to aid in cyber surveillance.”]

July 3, 2014: German broadcaster NDR/ARD carries disclosures by Appelbaum and others about the operation of NSA’s top-secret XKeyscore surveillance software, including source code proving that one of Appelbaum’s computers had been targeted.[

U.S. law enforcement agencies have repeatedly targeted Appelbaum.

C

hange of Domicile

2012:  Appelbaum changes his residency and works under a freelance visa in Berlin, Germany, because he “does not feel safe” in the United States, preferring Germany’s “strong German privacy protections.”

September 2015: Appelbaum since this date reportedly has been studying in a doctoral program “under Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein at the Eindhoven University of Technology,” a technical university in the Netherlands, operating in English; regarded “a leading European university in engineering and technology and a world’s top university in terms of research cooperation with industry.”

Sources

Appelbaum 2010 speech excerpt aired in a segment of The KPFA Evening News (Weekend) The KPFA Evening News (Weekend) – April 27, 2019 https://kpfa.org/program/the-kpfa-evening-news-weekend/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eindhoven_University_of_Technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations#NSA_ANT_catalog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Spiegel

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